James Mayhew With James Mayhew Consulting

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have James Bayu and he is with James Meiyu Consulting. Before we get too far to things, tell us about your practice. How are you serving, folks?

James Mayhew: [00:00:46] Ali, thanks for having me here. Yes. So one of the things that I love to be able to do is to serve my clients in a way to build culture, to help them improve communication and boost engagement. And so we we do this through a number of different ways. But I wear a coaching hat, a consulting hat or a training hat, and those are different entry points for different types of customers, different sizes of businesses. And that is one of the wonderful ways that we just have that freedom to go in and serve clients where they’re at, at the level that they’re at.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:21] So now what’s your back story? How did you kind of develop this unique strategy? Because most folks kind of pick one of those lanes, and it sounds like that you’re using whatever tool you need to solve the problem you’re working on.

James Mayhew: [00:01:33] Yeah, it’s a great question. And so it’s a trial. It’s a baptism by fire kind of approach. A number of years ago, I was working for a company that in Iowa and my home state where we were an incredibly fast growing business. We weren’t necessarily a great place to work for, and I don’t know that any of us necessarily even realize that. And so when I started with the company, we were about 20 employees. I think I was number twenty one ish. If I remember right in September, November of 2009 and then we were always very, very fast growing. And so we learned that we knew how to make money. We learned that we knew how to grow, but we learned also that we weren’t very good necessarily at developing people and preparing them for the next steps. And I actually experienced that myself. It was, you know, Hey, just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be great. And we know from a leadership perspective that that’s not going to keep you in a leadership role. And so when when we would move people or person into a new role, we didn’t set them up necessarily for success. And so things that that we took for granted that people would know would be how to set expectations, how to cast a vision either for a project or for what our team was working on or for the company. How how do you communicate that? How do you get people engaged with what they do on a personal level that’s meaningful to the company’s vision, strategy and goals? And so through that process, I made a lot of mistakes and those mistakes were everything that I’ve named and many things that I haven’t named.

James Mayhew: [00:03:19] And quite honestly, it was it was a great experience. It was a humbling experience and it was over those six years. One of the greatest growth stages, probably the greatest growth stage in my life. Up to this point. And as a result of going through those things, we learned that we didn’t necessarily understand what our culture was. In fact, when I first started, you know, I had an entry level job in marketing. I moved up to a lead role. From there, I threw my hat in the ring, which is a longer story for maybe for a different time where I said, I want to do this. I don’t know if I’m the right guy, and that got me into a VP of mission and culture role. It was an experimental role. And from there, within about 18 months or so, we restructured again to support growth and all the initiatives that we were doing. And I ended up as chief culture officer. So we went from. We’d always been fast growing. We’re one of the fastest growing companies, actually, you know, privately held in the United States. But if we go back, it wasn’t a great place to work, and there was a number of factors that went into that, and when I took that VP role, we started to take an immersion into what our values were, what is our culture, what is culture? And we were always about performance, but we weren’t necessarily, like I said, great at prepping people and developing people, and that’s where we took it.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:52] Now what was happening internally, because to even have the self-awareness and introspection required to make that change or even see the need for the change, were there symptoms that were like, Hey, you know what? I’m not kind of really loving our culture here, and maybe there wasn’t a lot of thought until culture. But to me, culture and branding are two things where they’re happening. Whether you’re putting an effort to do them well or not, you know, things are happening and you have a culture, whether you decided to have one or not, it’s it’s forming. And the same with your brand. Your brand is forming. Whether you can, you know, do some work to kind of shape it. But if you’re not, it’s going to form anyway. So you might as well be a little proactive. What was happening where folks were like, Hey, you know what? Why don’t we try to fix the culture part of our organization, like where their symptoms were, their kind of telltale signs that maybe it looks good? Maybe in some ways. But we’re really, you know, heading into some danger if we don’t really get down and dirty when it comes to culture.

James Mayhew: [00:06:01] Yeah, this is such a great question. And, you know, symptoms. Let me just start there for a second. You’re so right in the way that you said if you’re not paying attention to it, it still exists. And we actually had a really great marketing team. We had a great branding team. But but we didn’t understand the connection from like the internal impact, the employee experience and how that would impact the customer experience. And so we were at times we were again, let me put this in a performance based area because that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about culture is in our sales team. We were a very transactional type of business. It was based in e-commerce, but we were selling some commodities. We were in a space where AECOM was was still kind of emerging. So we just were in the right place at the right time. But we were measuring and giving feedback to people on the sales team that was about volume and it was about transactions and the quantities. And so we were great at measuring metrics. But I think at times we were measuring the wrong metrics. The reason I bring that up is because that began to reveal why there were stresses that were happening on the team. So we had a company vision that was kind of going in one direction. But what we’re having internally was people not intentionally fighting against that, but not understanding what we were trying to achieve. So here’s some of the things that we would see people get frustrated. You go to lunch. We were in a rural area in Iowa, so we were we were right off the interstate, which is great location.

James Mayhew: [00:07:38] But the little town that was near us, there was a convenience store and outside of that, there really wasn’t. There was a bar. And so to go and get lunch was a time when people would complain, you know? You can just imagine some of those conversations that are happening in the car, you drive 10 minutes to go grab a lunch with somebody and there’s three or four people in the car and that’s when conversations start to emerge. All right. And that’s the toxic behavior that we would see happen at times. You would also see people that were saying one thing and doing another. There was hidden agendas. There was all sorts of things that that we all, you know, we’ve had enough work experience or leadership experience that make you go, Yeah, this isn’t right. And for me personally, I was in a really low spot at one point putting a resume out, and this is before taking that VP role. And coming back home are to the work. The office, I mean, we had a pretty nice facility, actually. And coming back with that, I was sitting in the back seat of a car with two other people and it dawned on me as we’re driving down the lane to go back after lunch that I don’t. I am not helping myself. I’m not helping my team, I’m not helping the company, the owners. I am contributing to the negativity. I am that person and I decided right then and there I wasn’t going to be.

James Mayhew: [00:09:04] It was an epiphany moment. The the flipping of of the switch, if you will. And I just I stopped going to lunch with certain people and we remained good work, you know, good working relationships, good work friendships. But I had to sever some of those ties because it wasn’t helpful. And so I guess one of those results is as we did our core values and we began to really define them and communicate them. There was a pruning that began to happen. Some of it was people just checked out and said, I don’t want to do this anymore, and they went to, you know, different opportunities on. Sometimes we helped them understand this is the wrong place for them and they were let go. And that was one of the biggest revelations when we revealed our core values. I revealed them to the to the owner. My team had been working on it. We as a leadership team had been working on it. We extended that into the management team. We had pulled a lot of people and we’re about 50 employees at the time. So we had we had grown fast. But I remember very distinctly the owner saying as he kind of stood with his hand on his chin. We’re going to lose people over these. And that was a very revealing moment for me, and I think I understood it. But when he spoke those words and it was kind of coming to me. It was, it was very obvious. And then those things happened.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:31] Now when you’re now helping your clients currently and having gone through that and having the scar tissue of that and seeing the impact that when a leader does step up and say, You know what, we’re building something amazing and on some levels, it’s we’re just killing it. And if an outsider looking in would see if I can show them this part of our business, they’d think that, you know, we hung the moon. But if I show them this other part, it would be kind of I don’t want to say embarrassing, but it wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t be as proud of that belief in the culture over kind of the numbers and really focusing on metrics that matter, not just metrics that you can count in there that are obvious and maybe easy, but maybe working on these other metrics that are at the heart or the mission or the true values of the company that true north. That takes courage and that takes true leadership. And what are some of the ways that you help your current clients understand the difference?

James Mayhew: [00:11:39] Hmm. Well, this is a great question, and I’ll take it back for a second because one of the advantages and I think one of the the biggest learning opportunities with this was that the CEO of the company that we did this with was the driver behind it. He was fully committed. He in fact, he was the one leading discussions leading up to this, driving this new position forward. And and it was when he said, I want this to be a leadership role that it really made me perk up. At that time, I had never volunteered for that. So now when I’m working with my clients, whether they’re a smaller business or a medium sized business, we’re talking about developing or shifting culture and harnessing it. What we’re talking about is it can start anywhere in the company, but one requirement is is that we have to have senior level buy in and senior levels all the way to the CEO or president. Whatever your structure is, has to be behind it because if they’re not, it’s not going to stick and other priorities will take over that priority. And so going through that, the scar tissue and remembering those things that we had to go through has made it so much more valuable because it’s not theory that I read in a textbook.

James Mayhew: [00:13:02] It was life experience that I went through, and that life experience gives you so much more well, like perspective in depth because when there’s tears involved, when they’re shouting involved at times, when there’s when there’s some, you know, somebody that you’ve recruited to come to the company and they’re being let go. I mean, it becomes very, very real. And so the what we’re working to now is to make sure that I’m setting up that scenario, that situation well with the people that I’m serving to say, Listen, you need to understand if you’re truly committed and serious to this about this, this is what you should be expecting. This is probably going to happen. And I want you to understand it’s maybe going to be a little painful in the short term, but from the long term is a massive benefit. It’s going to help you accelerate and it’s going to help you go further and faster than you would if we don’t do this. But but being able to set that up and be very real and honest to say this is a potential outcome. Here’s how we’re going to do it. And be prepared for that.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:08] And that’s why I like working with people who have that kind of experience, that kind of skin in the game. Because your examples aren’t some hypothetical case study that you read about you. You’ve seen the tears, you’ve heard the shouting, you’ve kind of lived through this so you understand viscerally what could happen and what may happen. And that means you can communicate that with somebody to say, Look, you know, you can read a case study of how to do something and then theoretically understand what may happen. I’m telling you, I saw with my eyes what happens. It’s a different level of belief. I think that you can convey and share. And because of that, I think it becomes that much more powerful. And I’m sure that that’s what spurred you to create this culture mastery system of yours, that this framework that’s built on, you know, actual blood, sweat and tears, not on a whiteboard somewhere and theoretically constructing it.

James Mayhew: [00:15:12] Absolutely. So, so the culture mastery system. Got it start in the company that we talked about, that’s the origin for it, and it’s it’s taken on multiple iterations since then or phases. I don’t really track it, but I would say it’s like fourth or fifth iteration now. And each time we get smarter about how to do it, we find new ways to do it. And and not only are we getting more efficient, but we’re getting more like better, more powerful results. I’m not a cookie cutter playbook kind of guy. We just don’t pull it out. Here’s what we did with Company A and and automatically just try to apply Company A to Company B. What we do is we have a system that has a framework, and so I love the concept of a system or or framework that says, here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what what we should expect to happen. These are some of the goals and milestones we’ll know along the way. But this is going to be tailored to you. It’s based on where you’re at, what your competitive advantage is, how you’ve gotten this far.

James Mayhew: [00:16:15] What’s your aspirational values are all of these elements need to come out and the beautiful thing. And this is the part that that you it’s hard to understand until you go through it. We just did this with a with a local nonprofit, and the revelation for them was what I’m going to tell you. And I tried to paint that picture ahead of time, which is this is going to be transformational for people because the entire time that we’re doing it, we’re starting conversations that need to happen, that don’t happen on their own. We don’t make time for them. And as a result, it’s going to create little pockets of coaching opportunities and mentoring. And somebody’s going to say, I don’t get it, I don’t like it, and we’re going to have to bring it back and we’re going to need to show them what we’re actually trying to do to pull them back in. That happened time and time again with this nonprofit that I did it with recently. Now go ahead. It was just a really, really powerful exercise for them to be part of, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:14] And that’s where I think that by using all of the tools in your toolkit, the coaching, the training, the consulting, you can really accelerate the learning and the transformation.

James Mayhew: [00:17:27] Absolutely, yeah, it is. I mean, that’s a great point that you make, because sometimes we enter into this where maybe I come in to do a training on feedback and I have a program called Feedback Mastery, how to receive it, how to give it. And and it can be a a one hour keynote through a day long training. But inevitably, what’s going to happen then is somebody is going to say, OK, I’ve got some new leaders or I have a seasoned leader. We’ll say an experienced leader that struggling mightily in this area. How do we help them? And so I can either work with them directly that person or I can work with the team to help them get there? And that’s that’s just the advantage of being able to do that. Each one has its own little nuance to it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:10] Now do you have a sweet spot in terms of an ideal client? Is there a certain group that this really resonates with or this is the right kind of solution that they need?

James Mayhew: [00:18:19] Yeah. So if we’re talking about the culture mastery system, I have learned to stay in my lane and my lane is small to medium sized businesses. So I just kind of qualify it as like in that four million to 40 million range in revenue. When we get above a certain number of employees, you know, when we get into, say, the 200 count and and above, I don’t have the experience working there. I don’t know that I’m the right person to help them initiate culture change at that level. I can coach and train there. I can offer some consulting there. But the culture mastery is really great with a smaller to medium sized business because first of all, there’s not as much red tape, there’s not as much bureaucracy involved. And I don’t I don’t. I don’t really work well in that kind of environment because I’m a little bit faster paced. We want to see the change and that’s where where if a, you know, a large company was to say, Hey, we want you to do this, I would really want to sit with them and understand where they’re at and what those layers look like. Because if we’re just going to bump into layers, you know where people aren’t behind it or they’re doing something that’s counter to what we’re trying to do at the ground floor, then I mean, we have to call that out. And so sometimes that’s going to work and sometimes it’s not. So again, that sweet spot for me is that small to medium sized business in that four to four, $40 million range.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:47] Yeah, where it’s less time spent planning to plan and more time, you know, doing the

James Mayhew: [00:19:53] Work well said yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:56] Well, James, congratulations on all the success. I mean, it’s just a great story and a great testament to you and being kind of a lifelong learner and just keeping serving folks, I mean, just great job.

James Mayhew: [00:20:08] Well, thank you. And this is listen, I just try to live by essentially for personal values that we need to lead with confidence that’s covered by humility. We need to leave lead with courage that’s covered by empathy. And if we can do those four things, well, we’re serving others pretty well.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:29] Now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s the website?

James Mayhew: [00:20:36] The website’s James Mayhew. I’m very active on LinkedIn at James R. Mayhew. And then if somebody wants to contact, I love to use the phone. I’m a little old school that way, so I’m just going to give you my number here. It’s three one nine nine two nine two six zero four that’s going to go directly to me. So there’s not going to be somebody that you have to go through. I may not be able to take your calls. I may be working on some, you know, a project with someone, but those are the three best ways to to contact me.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:08] And that website is James Mayhew. Jm M A Y H e W. James. Thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

James Mayhew: [00:21:19] Thank you so much. This has been great. I appreciate the opportunity to share it.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:24] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll sail next time on Coach the Coach radio.