Transforming Business Strategy Execution with Kerry-Ann Powell

Are you ready to supercharge your small or medium-sized business strategy?  Kerry-Ann Powell, a business strategy maven with two decades of experience, joins Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society to share her wealth of knowledge. Armed with a background in fundraising, law, lobbying, and more, Powell casts a spotlight on the strategic process for small and medium-sized businesses.

In this interview, she digs deep into the necessity of having an operating system in place and breaking down your strategy into achievable goals. Powell's expertise shows how to secure approval at lower levels to ensure correct implementation and the importance of daily progress tracking.

As an example of the importance of the role of leadership and tracking metrics in bringing a strategic plan to life, Powell describes the crisis faced by Boeing. She also divulges the tools and software systems that can help you track progress and hold everyone accountable. Powell dives into the significance of fostering a sense of ownership among employees and lighting the fire within them to achieve success. 

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Peugeot. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, advertek Printing and IP Labs.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Kerry- Ann Powell of Trafalgar Strategies, based in Stanford, Connecticut, but she's coming to us from New York today. Hi, Kerry- Ann, how are you?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 0:34

Yeah, how are you so good to be here.

Gary Pageau: 0:36

I feel like we've bonded. We had so much pre-talk before this. Yes, we could just like go for another hour, but we won't do that.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 0:43

Exactly.

Gary Pageau: 0:44

Didn't listen to the preamble to this podcast. Tell me a little bit about Trafalgar Strategies.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 0:52

Well, you know how running a business can sometimes feel like you're managing a chaotic tornado.

Gary Pageau: 0:58

Yes, absolutely.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 1:00

Well, what we do at Trafalgar Strategies we help business odors run their businesses smoothly so they can thrive in business and in life.

Gary Pageau: 1:10

And so what's your background? How did you get into that? Because you didn't start out saying I'm going. You know, when most people who are in you know consulting business or an advisory business don't start out that way, they usually have an experience where they realize I could be a help in that.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 1:24

Yeah, well, you know I have 20 years of experience doing strategy in various different aspects. I started out cutting my teeth and fundraising strategy and then became an attorney and a lobbyist in Washington DC and it was quite strategic in that aspect. And you know, then I moved into going back to fundraising and I built the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington DC in the National Mall and once I was finished with that it was kind of like, you know, folks were saying, hey, carrie Ann, come over here, help us do this, help our board of directors do this, help our CEO do that.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 1:58

And then I realized wait a minute, there's something here, and so I started my business soon thereafter, and now we do business strategy for companies. You know we have clients all over the world, four different continents various different industries and we love it.

Gary Pageau: 2:15

So you focus on small and medium sized businesses. You could have gone the big, you know global multi-corporation route. What was it about that attracted you to the small and medium sized businesses?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 2:28

Well, I think you know. First, I think people always think of small and medium sized and they only think of, you know, sort of small solepreneurs or mom and pop shops. You know the way that we categorize small and medium sized businesses, particularly within. It's a wide range, to be frank, but most of my clients, if anywhere from 50 employees down right. So the reason why I focused on that one because frankly, I think small and medium sized businesses are the growth entities of an economy.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 3:03

If you think about, you know, increasing your GDP. How do you do that? By bringing in more goods and services being sold and purchases. How does that work? Well, small and medium sized companies have the capacity to grow and have more increase and more impact on the.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 3:21

GDP. The other thing that really gets me excited is because you two-thirds about of employees in the US, and the number increases in other parts of the world, are employed and work for a small and medium-sized company. So you think about if you can go into and help an owner, a founder, a leader in a and and company really begin to be strategic and really execute their strategic priorities. It's impacting a lot more people because you numbers-wise just , not to mention the fact that I have a soft for for medium-sized and companies. I'm a real big champion. I think they're cool and I just love working with them.

Gary Pageau: 4:08

So that's an interesting point because I think, if you look at the business media these days, I read the Wall Street Journal and it's almost always about a publicly traded company or some giant company, but most of the economy is driven by private companies. Family owned companies that are, just, you know, in this industry are the vast majority of the people who are growing this economy. What are some of the things that when you talk to, let's say, a company? Let's say, for example, you're talking to a production facility, you know, like in our industry, and they've got 40 employees right and they're looking for growth, they have production down, but you know where would they start? Like, where does the strategic process even start? Do you have to even be aware you need a strategic plan?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 5:02

Well, you know again, I'm a business strategist. You know, they often say you know, everyone knows, if you have a hammer, everything's a nail kind of.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 5:10

Thing but I really do believe, I truly believe everything is about strategy. It's core. And so if you think about anything, any big thing that you are trying to achieve, once you, once you know, say, a manufacturing company decides that they want to change, they want a thing, they want to get to a certain point, then one needs to sit down and decide what's the strategy. And so it's not really. And I and I, gary, when I say that, I think it's important for me to be clear. When people talk about strategic planning and developing strategy, there's this myth out there, in this feeling that somehow it's way up in the air, all the way up in the heavens, and so it's not very attainable, it's not touchable. When I talk about strategy, particularly as it relates to SMBs or SMBs, depending upon what part of the world you are you really do I bring it down to the ground. It's not just about this ethereal thing that one is doing out in the air.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 6:16

It's bringing it down to the ground. If you want to do a thing, change a thing in your business, move into a different direction, then the most important thing is understanding what the what is being clear about what the vision is and then developing a strategy to give people to get there.

Gary Pageau: 6:36

So again, there's a lot of talk about strategy in the sense that everyone feels they need one. But there's a lot of folks who, like you said, the solopreneurs, the retail shops and whatnot who don't feel they have the time or the need for one. They just go in, turn the key in the morning, fire up the catch register, turn on the computer and maybe turn on the printing equipment and they're ready for the day, and then they turn it off at the end of the day and that's their strategy is to get home by eight o'clock that night. So why is it beneficial for that type of operator to have a strategy?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 7:13

Truth be told, that strategy is more important for that type of operator than for the big dogs, because if you aren't really clear about what the peak is for you, what's the goal? What's the true north for?

Erin Manning: 7:30

you.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 7:31

You end up building a business that you don't even like and you're stuck in it because you invested all this time and money and so you don't really feel comfortable Leaving it. But then it impacts the quality of your life as the owner and it impacts the quality of your family, the quality of life of your employees and, frankly, you're not serving your customers that well either. No true direction. So I think if you are, the smaller you are, the more you need a strategy, to be honest with you, and it's connected to your why. Why are you even? Why are you doing the thing?

Gary Pageau: 8:10

Well, it's interesting is that because a lot of the people in this business, right when I'm saying the photo industry, the printing output business, they got into it for perhaps technical reasons, or there was a big opportunity right when, when film Was the primary capture medium, it was like printing money. If you ran a good operation you could make a lot of money because they were on every corner. I know if you can not gonna guess your age, but no, no, no, I was.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 8:37

I look up. You remember the 80s and 90s there every.

Gary Pageau: 8:41

And every mall, every corner there was, you know, every Walgreens, every drugstore, there was one hour processing and they go with that change. So so you know. So maybe they're why changed because of technology. How do you, what do you talk to somebody who, like that, like right now, no matter what industry you're in, there's, there's a change that's happening, whether it's a technology change, a demographic change, a cultural change. That may have changed the reason why you got into this to begin with. What do you, how do you? What is your advice of those people?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 9:14

I have a really good question, gary. One of the things that I always focused on when, when, when a founder, owner, leader comes to me straight and be like okay, you know, here's what we're trying to do. If the owner, the founder, is still working in the business Even if they're working in a leadership level, you know, trimming the board or if they're working, meaning like they're in the shop day to day, whatever role, if you're still, if you still have your hands on the business, I always first start with what's your life plan.

Gary Pageau: 9:44

Right what?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 9:45

what do you want in your life? Right? And then we look at the business vision and tweak the. If there's misalignment between the life plan meaning what you want in life and it's misalignment between that and the business vision, what do we tweak, gary? Not the life plan, business vision. So I I think that a part of this is the why it comes from the innards, it comes from the within, and that is why, if you can come from the within as to what you want, then you feel more comfortable looking at your business vision and saying this business vision Mm-hmm worked for me 20 years ago but, it no longer is serving me today.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 10:32

Right, I can have the courage to decide to change the business vision right, and you know many of them have.

Gary Pageau: 10:40

I mean, that's that's. The great thing about this industry is, yeah, as many of them have said, you know I need to change my staffing. I need to change how you know. I need to bring on younger people. I need to. I'm not gonna offer as many services in my shop as I used to because, frankly, I don't want to be here till midnight. You know, canvas and Together structure bars. You know I don't want to be doing that, so, so I think that's that's. That's a great piece.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 11:05

You know, gary, I'll stick a pin there. This concept too, of you know. Well, you know I'm not gonna. I'm gonna, I don't want to be here. You know it's 11 o'clock at night. We're gonna shift some of the staffing. Um, those are the tactics that you're gonna use to be able to get to the business vision, and when I talk about the business vision, though, I'm really talking. There's sort of three components that I often talk about.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 11:32

They are that's what caught, that's what is a part of your business vision one of which obviously is your purpose for existing and when I say I don't want you know. You think about. You know, you know as long vision mission statements that nobody ever reads Down inside.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 11:50

Once you know that, once you have your life plan all structured and you're clear about what that is, the business vision includes three components your purpose, meaning the business purpose right the business values and the core strategic goal, the business purpose, is just a short, pithy statement that has the kind of fire that speaks truth to what you're truly in the business of doing. So for instance, in my business we say we're in the business of helping businesses thrive. That is our purpose. Now, of course I could go through this long thing about. We help strategically Blood, little blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood. But you know, helps. It's important. We have in the background and we we go, we visit that.

Gary Pageau: 12:36

But on a day to day which the guard rails on the road.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 12:39

Right, what are we doing? That pithy short statement. So that's one component of your business vision. The second is your values, and those and sometimes people just feel like they should just throw out values, because that's what you know, the values. That makes sense. But you want to do the values that are core to you and your team. And so, for instance, you know, I was just speaking at a, at a conference for the home, the home service industry, and so these are your folks who do pools and Interior design, landscaping, that, those kinds of folks, and I was leading a workshop because I did a talk, a big talk of the stage, and then I did a workshop, and one of the folks you know I was sort of saying okay, tell me what your values are, and one of them is a gardening company, and they were like we. One of our values is we're on time every time, never late. What to myself? Goodness gracious, I love that value because haven't you ever sat at home waiting for?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 13:39

the guy to come and do the thing, and but so they're like we don't care how much we scale the business. But, we're on time all the time, never late.

Gary Pageau: 13:48

And that's a great way to phrase that. You can tell he said that you know you drill that yeah.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 13:53

And that's a value that he and his team about. Because what, as you scale as a company, your values? You will want to violate your values until you decide we're never going to violate these values. But this is how we do it. And then the third thing is your core strategic goal, and the core strategic goal is your forever goal. It gets you 15 years into the future. What is 15 years into the future? Look like for you, and so that's that. That goal there doesn't change until 15 years. Right now you have a vision, purpose.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 14:25

Right values, core strategic goal. So then you can then break down into what your one year goal would look like and your tactics. Then say, in order for me to get to that 15 year goal, I'm gonna have to change the way we're doing business. I'm going to get a younger staff. I'm going to be able to, you know, do more optimization. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Then that's where those tactical behaviors Come into play, because they're looking through north. That's your business vision.

Gary Pageau: 14:52

Okay, that's very interesting. So you mentioned before About strategy, right coming up with a strategy. But there's one thing to have a strategy. It's another thing to actually implement the strategy.

Erin Manning: 15:07

Okay, Gary.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 15:09

Go ahead and repeat that one for the people in the back.

Gary Pageau: 15:13

Because I've been in organizations where we have the weekend retreat and you come over with a nice binder at the end and then you don't do any of the things in the binder they put it on the shelf right, Exactly. So talk to me a little bit about that very common happening in a business.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 15:33

And it's funny, that's how I you know again, I've been doing strategy since I was very early days. First of it was me being a part of strategic planning processes in the organizations when I was doing your staff, and then, as I was beginning to sort of lead them myself, and one of the things that I realized early it was like wait, we put these, we do these like full three day off sites and it's fancy schmancy, and we got the whole thing and then it's all in nice, leather bound binder because back in the days right, and then it's sitting on the shelf of the CEO's office and then in all the VP's, and then we never see how we're really implementing it and in a day to day, the people on the team don't know how their behaviors are actually impacting this grand vision that everybody went to some off site to do.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 16:21

And that is why I often say you know, there's a big thing called the strategy execution gap. It's a part of the lingo in business and everyone knows it exists. And guess how much? How many strategic plans don't actually get executed? 67%.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 16:41

Wow, that's crazy 67% fail and it's because of poor execution. As a result, you know, there's a lots of conversation in strategic business world and conversation that I've been a part of, where people are often like oh well, you know strategy and then there's execution. They're two separate sort of I don't know business ways of existing and so you need to have the people that are strategic and the people that are executing. I believe that there is one coin, ok, and the one coin is one side of it is strategy and the other part is execution, but it's the same thing, or the other way I like to sort of describe it is developing. Strategy is like a funnel. The top is, like you know, upside down, whatever pyramid, whatever. The top part, which is a big base, that's where it sort of talks about understanding your course, which is a goal, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Gary Pageau: 17:40

The blah blah, the blah blah level.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 17:42

Right as you move down the funnel. Imagine that it's like really dark blue on the top. And then at the bottom, the tip of the funnel, it's white, almost OK, or gray, and think about strategy and execution beginning to merge. But you really don't know when it kind of you guys are color people, you don't know. When it's like a good shade, you don't really see where the difference is, but you know at some point it's no longer dark blue, it's now like white. When did that happen? It's the strategy.

Gary Pageau: 18:19

It's a continuum, but you're not exactly sure where.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 18:21

You're not exactly sure. And so the execution part, which I spend a great deal of time working with clients, and it has to work based on how your organization operates. So if you don't have an operating system in your organization meaning how you do the thing, not how you fulfill your customer's needs, but how you guys operate within the business it's very difficult to get execution well. So the goal here is that the more you move down, it becomes more granular. We talked about Coors Street's goal being 15 years. Then we started talking about what a year, one, year two, year, three goal would look like. Once you get to year one, then you start moving into what are your focus areas and objectives. Then you switch a little bit because then you're adding some tactics to that. Then you're including in the tactics what will be the key performance indicators.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 19:19

You're looking at what the metrics are. You're moving further down what would be your quarter legals, which really, in the truth, to be honest, a Gary quarter legals the only thing that really matter in the world and then what are the monthly things that you're tracking, what are the weekly things you're tracking and, to the point where you're gradually in people resists this, but it is important. What would be your day to day activities? How would you measure it? How do you know that it's there? So if you are saying, hey look, our goal is to hit 500,000 in revenue, or a million this particular year, it's to the point where you're bringing it all the way down to what would a daily behavior look like that would get you to a million this year?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 20:08

And you're measuring it to the point where it's anal retentive, because that is where execution happens. It happens in the mundane, it happens in the boring.

Gary Pageau: 20:20

How do you get buy-in then at counter level? Because you've got the owners of the business I'm just a typical situation the owners of the business, then they do the offsite, they come up with the binder. Maybe they had a team meeting with everybody and everyone kind of threw in their three cents and it would be really easy if we had this type of tape in the shipping room and those kind of like the tissue issue kind of things. Oh, this will make me run better. But, like you said, you can set the strategy up here at blue level, but as it filters down to white level, you may have some turnover at white level, you may have some promotions that take people from white into gray or whatever. And so how do you continue? How do you convey that strategy? Because it's a continuous process.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 21:10

It is. There's two things that support that and I'm really glad you asked that question. There is the leadership side of things how you're leading and then there is the practical operating system part of things. We're going to talk about the leadership part of things first. If anybody is telling me they're just going to go off site, be them, and they and all leaders and they're going to go golfing that particular weekend and then you come back and do a debrief. I'm sorry, but that never works. You must include every single person in the business in this process period and, done down to the person who cleans the floor of the stock room, everyone needs to be a part of this.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 21:58

Now, I recognize there are some things that are private and you want to. I often do what we call a shadow strategic plan with the CEO, the founder, the leaders, and we do a thing where it's like let's look at the numbers, whatever. There are some things that you don't share with your team and I get it. I'm not living in La La Land, but you come up with a framework of what this looks like, what you're trying to get to, and then we bring the team all to the off site and we do it based on what Some already existing parameters. But if you are, I heard I don't know if you're a big fan of I was a big fan of Stephen Covey before he died.

Gary Pageau: 22:36

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 22:39

And I heard him do an interview with Tony Robbins once and he said something like he goes you want to start first with the plan and you know, I don't know if you've ever listened to him interview. That's really great, soothing.

Gary Pageau: 22:52

Yeah, yeah, I've had the audio book on seven.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 22:55

Yeah, right, so he's like you want to first start with the plan and if you start with the plan.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 23:02

Oh no, I love his voice. He's like and then you just throw it away, Throw it to the trash, and then you start again from the innards, from the. He called it the belly of the beast. That was his definition of getting the plan starting from bomb to top. And of course, you know I have a hybrid.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 23:24

I'm a bit of a pragmatist, I used to be quite a bit an idealist and then I went to cynicism and now I'm in the middle. So I recognize I love Stephen because he's you know, he was an idealist in many ways. However, the goal here is, yes, you do need to have some framework from the top, particularly if your team, if your team's a bit flat, if you don't have a very high hierarchy. However, what you do want to do, then, is keep that in mind and then let it come from the beginning. Maybe not throw it away, as Stephen Covey would have recommend, but start from the beginning, because then the buy-in is there. The buy-in is there. Let me tell you, if people buy into the plan, if they follow, if they created it, you don't have to perpetually remind them of the thing, because they were the one who created the plan.

Gary Pageau: 24:11

Now they definitely have input into the what's in it for me sort of thing.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 24:38

Because they're all motivated by something. And, by the way, I'm just going to put a little pin stick there. Look here, there is some myth out there in the world that people know this generation doesn't want to work and they're lazy and they don't. That is hogwash and it's a lie from the pit of hell. People, human nature, does not change. People want to work and people want to work for something bigger than themselves, a vision bigger than themselves. So if your folks aren't motivated first, you may not be hiring. Well, okay, hire self-motivated people, hire people that are pulling you along and you're like, hey, hold on, hold on. And also, you are not inspiring. You are not inspiring people, you are a bad leader. Learn to be a better leader. You know, no one come out of the womb being a good leader, okay, so just don't be like, oh, I have a shame of. Look, no one grew out of the womb, but you can learn to be a good leader. A part of that is being inspired, so I'm just going to put that little stick in the pen. Okay, now back to the leading part.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 25:45

So the other thing you need to be able to do is remind people every like. There has to be touch points as to what it is what we are doing, and people receive information, are reminded of information, differently. So what does that mean? You might need to put something on the wall, okay, because some people are visual and it's someplace close by Maybe their computers are completely to pops up. You might need to have some cool little Chotsky things made up. You know where they're always reading it on their key ring. You might have to have it on the T-shirts, whatever the thing is. You may need to have image stuff like graphics to people. You may need to verbally say it every meeting about the things that we're going.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 26:38

One I listened to a fan of Donald Miller. He's the one who wrote the Story Brands or the Story Brands concept of marketing, and he was talking about literally. He had a client that would walk around his office and stop people and say I'll give you a hundred bucks If you recite what our values are, what our purpose is and what our core strategic goal is. And if someone couldn't get it, then of course they didn't get the hundred bucks. And then the next.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 27:05

Whatever motivates your team, you, even though they created it. Life is distracting and business is distracting. You wanna perpetually bring it to the forefront every single time you exist, every speech you make. And when Kennedy was trying to get us to the moon, I mean it was perpetual, right? We're going to the moon, we're going to the moon, we're going to the moon. And guess what? We went to the moon. So just because you know that they're excited about it off the offsite and they were part of creating it you also have to bring it to the forefront and it has to be connected to something that they're excited about. So that's the leadership part.

Erin Manning: 27:42

Okay.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 27:43

On the other side is Tracking metrics, operating systems. That's vital. So, depending upon your business, you may be able to simply do a spreadsheet and every week, whoever's in charge of that one objective or that one thing has to go in and track and literally enter whether or not it's. And I like the red, yellow, green method because then you can kind of tell is this project, is this objective, is this metric, did you hit the goal? No, then that's not a red, that's not a red.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 28:20

And that way you can track it or there are so many SaaS products out there.

Gary Pageau: 28:25

Right, it's crazy the amount of tools out there.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 28:27

It's crazy, it's now so. Before back, only the big dog used to be able to afford it, but now small and medium-sized businesses can afford these software systems. One of the ones that I work with my clients with is 9EIO. But there's 9EIO, there's rhythm systems, there's cascade, all those three. I recommend you go in, you upload your whole strategic plan in there, and what we do with our clients we actually had 9EIO basically create the R methodology in it and so basically, our clients, once we do the strategic plan, we upload it. We assign the roles and tasks to each person on the team. They're responsible for perpetually updating it on a weekly basis, on a weekly basis, on a weekly basis.

Gary Pageau: 29:12

How often do they do that? I didn't catch that. How often do they?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 29:16

do that, I think the weekly basis. Gary, and then the CEO, who I connect with on a regular basis, goes in on his dashboard and he can be able to just sort of see big picture. Okay, here are the major objectives and here are the products that are driving their objectives. Oh, this is green. Okay, don't you worry about that, that's green, good, good good. Yellow over here, red, what the hell. And then he knows who to go to to say give me a sense like how can I support you and your team to get you to yellow and green?

Gary Pageau: 29:46

So that's a very different way of managing, though, than it used to be. You know the old what I think they used to call it, the managing by walking around sort of method, which has its advantages, right Cause then you can do the $100 quiz, right, you can do that sort of thing but it is very and I think people at one time would have like seen a system like that as almost being intrusive or being like micromanaging and other, but I think you're very able to convey this is a organization wide process. We're not just picking on you as a person that even the CEO has to do these things. I think that'll be the reception is much better. Is that correct?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 30:28

Oh, for sure, for sure. Here's the thing, right Again. I don't know, did you watch the documentary on, like what happened, what you know with Boeing, the Boeing airplane that?

Gary Pageau: 30:44

Oh yeah, I did watch that.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 30:47

Okay, so you know how they were sort of looking historically, how everyone on the Boeing team, when they were all based in Seattle, had the power to basically say this is not right when they're building a plane.

Gary Pageau: 31:02

Right.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 31:03

And so it's the same thing. Everyone in and on the Boeing floor even if they were just, if there were quality control, or if they're one of the engineers or whatever role they had to play everyone believed that that airplane that they're putting out was their product. They owned it. It wasn't just some, it not just belong to the CEO, it belonged to everyone building it, and if there was anything that was not up to par, was not up to their standard, anyone had the right to pull it, to stop the line and say, nope, this needs to be fixed. And that is what got Boeing to be one of the best companies in the world Okay, in the world. And so I'm not dogging Boeing now, but Boeing back then would never have put that plane on the ground I mean in the air and had cut so many corners. The Boeing of yesteryear would never have done that.

Gary Pageau: 31:59

And that just for the listeners at home. Wanna look that up? I just Googled it while she was talking. It's called downfall the case against Boeing, and that is on Netflix and that's about the crash of the Boeing 737 MAX. That crashed a couple of times actually, and 2022, so very recent and worth watching.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 32:22

It's very, very good Cause. The MAX was I mean, if you think about it right the MAX. Again, this goes back to there a couple of elements that are really important. We talked about strategy. The MAX was their version of innovation. The problem was because it was environment, it had less fuel, it was fuel efficient, and the thing was over years of them not doing it right. Airbus, which is the European competitor of Boeing, was getting more market share, and so they started cutting corners and hadn't been doing the innovating part in the business, and so they kind of got caught with their pants down because they were like well, they Airbus had come up with a great energy efficient airplane and so all of their longtime customers were now buying Airbus' airplanes because it was energy efficient. So they said, oh my God, you know, fuel efficient, you're like oh my God, you gotta get this out faster.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 33:15

You gotta get this out fast. And they started cutting corners, they started not allowing the same systems that were in place before that. That I mean, I'm telling you, boeing's never crashed as a plane, as a manufacturer. Everyone knew it was a Boeing plane. They just don't crash. So for them to then have flights, airplanes, falling out the sky, it was like weird. It's like wait what's happening? And a part of it is that the documentary will show you that. A part of it was, of course and everyone has their own reasons blah, blah, blah, but really which with this? Because they moved away from people owning the business internally, all the staff owning it and saying, look, we are making a plane.

Kerry-Ann Powell: 34:04

Now it became a different conversation. So back to you, your audience who has a whatever, a print shop, whatever, and they have, say, 30, 40 people. You need to. If you have lost, if you have somehow lost that feeling where everyone believes that they have ownership in your business, they, even if they're the person cleaning the factory floor, if they don't feel like you know what what happens here, and if they don't feel that way, it's your fault. Don't be trying to talk about, oh well, this generation is a water, if that's hogwash, because human nature hasn't changed. You hire well, you put the right people in the right seats and you inspire them. You have them create a strategic plan that works for your business and let them ride and they'll be happy to go into the software, the SaaS software, for your operating system and say green this week, green next week, green the following week because they're owning it. Nobody wants to be the failure of the organization. Ain't nobody grow them saying well, I'll just be mediocre today, nobody wants that?

Gary Pageau: 35:16

Nobody. Nobody does that. So where does someone go to learn more about not mediocre with Trafalgar as your company?

Kerry-Ann Powell: 35:28

Well, you know what? I'll tell you what. I'm a human being. I love to connect with people. So if you're on LinkedIn, that's where I hang out as LinkedIn, tell me I'm messing with. Like hey, I'm a part of the Dead Pixels Society. Baby, I wanna connect and you know, say hey and let's chit chat. I love to just kind of be with other. You know business owners doing some great things. Now, if you feel as if you're looking like you know what, I don't really have a great strategy in my business and it's beginning to cause chaos in the business a bit, then I've got a gift for you. I've got a PDF that you can use to sort of go through and assess whether or not what part of the business is really kind of going haywire and how do we do this. And you can go to. You can download that by going to www. nobusinesschaos. com because chaos is the enemy of business. That's why you can connect.

Gary Pageau: 36:22

Awesome. Well, thank you, Kerry- Ann, for meeting today. We've had a great time. This has been a lot of fun, and best wishes Hope to see you on your global travel somewhere.

Erin Manning: 36:34

. Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedpixelssocietycom.