Matthew Lis With Crestcom International

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Columbus, Ohio. It’s time for Columbus Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:18] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Columbus Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Matt Lis with Crestcom International. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Lis: [00:00:29] Well, thank you, Lee. I appreciate you having me on today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Crestcom, how you serving folks.

Matt Lis: [00:00:37] Crestcom is a leadership development company. We have developed a great program that’s 12 month training program that’s all live facilitated that helps develop your managers into better leaders.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:53] So what’s your backstory? Have you always been involved in kind of leadership development?

Matt Lis: [00:00:58] Well, I’ve been involved in all kinds of operations manufacturing, distribution, engineering. I had a quite a broad variety of background. So I have a lot of experience in managing and working with others. And prior to this, I was leading companies and running companies, and I actually took this training and figured it was so impactful that it would make sense for me to allow to lend my, you know, experience and background to help develop our next generation of leaders.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:33] Now, do you feel that leaders are born or are they can they be taught some of these things? Is this something that just comes naturally to certain folks, or is it something that anybody can be taught if the training is right?

Matt Lis: [00:01:46] Well, leadership is a lot like becoming a parent. You know, you aren’t, you know, trained for leadership. You are, you know, brought into it by, okay, hey, you’re going to be a you’re the best accountant. So now we’re going to make you our manager. And you have to really want to become a leader and you have to work at it and you have to apply some skills and some practice and some education to it. And that’s what our program does, because most companies are very good at, you know, developing their employees, let’s say, from day to day, functional group, right. Their job duties. But they don’t give them training to help them develop their management skills and become the leaders that we really need. And our program addresses that. And that that is, you know, we have about 12 fundamental skills that we use in our training to help you craft your leadership talents.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:41] Now, is there any kind of symptoms my organization might be having where leadership training is the solution? Like what are some of the clues that I might not be noticing or connecting the dots that I need leadership development training for my team?

Matt Lis: [00:02:56] Well, one big red flag to me is silos, because when you have silos, that means your team isn’t working together and they aren’t on the same page. So they might not know your strategic direction as a whole. So that that is a big lack of communication. You know, you don’t have productive teams. You might need to look at your generations, you know, the different generations you have at your work. You know, if you have problems with your groups not really knowing what direction they’re working on or what they should be working on, that’s a big sign that the leadership needs some support and some, you know, training to help them develop that.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:38] Now, when you were earlier in your career, did you have a coach or did you have any type of mentor that helped kind of guide you or lead you?

Matt Lis: [00:03:48] Well, when I was younger, I had quite a few different managers that I’ve worked with, but I went back and got my MBA and that’s a very theoretical training program you go through. So if you like to write papers, the MBA is perfect, but if you really want to be a, let’s say on the ground, learning and developing yourself, a leadership program like this is is much more, you know, tailored to the person that really wants to craft their skills because this is hands on. We do case studies, we do exercises. We do a lot of group discussions and we learn from our video faculty. So it’s a really well-rounded program that, you know, allows you to move forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:40] So can you walk us through what it would be like? Say, I raised my hand and I say, Matt, this is perfect. I would love to do this. So what kind of does it feel like for me now that once I’ve agreed to do this, what does that kind of the onboarding and the launching of a program look like?

Matt Lis: [00:04:56] Sure. Well, the first thing I’m going to do with you is I’m going to pump the. Breaks a minute and say, hey, before you actually sign on the dotted line, let’s do our test drive because you’re going to be investing a lot of time and money in it. And we offer a free 2.5 hour test drive. We call our Leadership Skills workshop, and that allows me to come to your facility. You bring in your management staff. We go through a 2.5 hour program that simulates on one of our training sessions and that allows you to test drive a lot of things. It allows you to test drive the program, and the material allows you to test drive myself as your facilitator, because if we don’t have a good connection, your staff will not have good, you know, results and out of the training. And then you also get to see if your staff is engaged and what kind of returns you can expect from the training program. And if all that looks good, then let’s move forward, because I wouldn’t want you to buy a car just with a brochure. Right? You want to go test drive it and see how you like it. And it’s same with leadership development. You should really understand the material, the facilitator and your team’s engagement, and then we can get you signed up. And it’s a 12 month program. You get two classes per month and each class is two hours. And we broke it up that way. So it allows you to really stay engaged and not get overwhelmed. So you get 48 hours of training. And as well as each month we do a one hour coaching session to help you get your participants engaged, where they actually create their own personal action plans to put our training to use. Because if you don’t change your behavior, i.e. use the training, you’re just wasting your money because it’s really entertainment at that point. So we’re very different from that standpoint that we require our our participants to hold themselves accountable, to use our training.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:07] Well, you bring up a good point. A lot of folks maybe have training fatigue that they’ve gone through a lot of these classes or they’ve taken these one off things. A consultant comes in and sells them something and, you know, they got a manual and it’s just sitting on a desk, you know, in a in a closet somewhere. And it’s never kind of cracked open. What let’s talk about that accountability part of it, because it sounds like a really important point of differentiation. How do you kind of help your clients help themselves by holding them accountable?

Matt Lis: [00:07:41] Well, at at and at the end and that during our module trainings, we point out some potential areas that could be action items because in each session we have about 4 or 5 different points that we’re kind of learning and training the students on. And during the the final, you know, end of the conclusion, we talk about getting prep for your personal action plans. And what we do is we have a online learning portal where they can go in and then they can identify the most important or most impactful subject to the training session they did and write that down and then they can decide how they want to use it. Now, that’s a big point because if we were to say, Here’s your homework, go do this and put this into place at your work, they don’t own it, right? So we allow them to make their own project, you know, what do they want to do? It might be as simple as having a meeting with someone and using the skills we learned and apply that in the meeting. Sometimes it’s working with their teams, with it to save some money and be more effective or gain productivity. But we let them make the pick because then they own it and then they have, you know, the responsibility to actually put it in place and close their own action items and submit for success and when they submit their.

Matt Lis: [00:09:09] Their findings are there. The final project of it, they gets wrapped up into our learning portal and their managers get to approve the results. So, for instance, if someone said they made a change and it’s saving them $8,000 on that change, the manager can look at that and, you know, have a question and say, let’s talk about this. And maybe they agree it’s a $4,000 improvement, right? Then the manager can approve it and then it gets like locked into the the year end results and we can give them a great spreadsheet that shows all the areas that their people have improved in and the changes that have been made and the results. So it’s a very impactful report for the CEOs of the managers to know they are getting something back for their money that they’re spending. We know our typical customers get a return on investment 6 to $8 for every dollar they invest in our program. So they get a great return on investment.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:17] Now, is your typical client just one of these mega enterprise level organizations or is this some some of the training can benefit a small to mid sized company as well?

Matt Lis: [00:10:28] Yeah, that’s a great question, Lee, because yes, have we worked with the big mega companies? Yes, we’ve worked with Coca Cola and Sony and Toyota and companies like that. But that’s a very small portion of our client list. Our our true clients are that small to mid sized company, you know, from 20 people to 250. That’s the majority, probably 90% of all of our business because we know they don’t have the resources to create a leadership program, nor do they have the ability to, you know, spend a lot of time trying to find one that would be a fit for them. So we we specifically target that market because we know they need the most support. And the best part about it is the small to mid size managers. They’re used to doing a lot of different things, so they’re very receptive to the training and they get a lot out of it, more so than if you’re pigeonholed in a very large company and you don’t see the big picture of your organization.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:34] Now, do you have a niche that you serve that’s a sweet spot for you based on your previous experience experience, or is this something that’s kind of industry agnostic?

Matt Lis: [00:11:44] Well, it’s it’s very much for anyone that either leads, manages or supervises people. We aren’t tied to any specific industry because like I said before, we don’t get into your specific trainings, right? We are teaching leadership skills and it translates to any industry, not only industry, but it translates into your personal life. And a lot of these leadership skills, boy, when you become a parent, they can be very beneficial, especially when you get into negotiations with your little ones because you know, you don’t realize it. But leadership is not just a 9 to 5 job. Leadership is what you do your whole life and 24 over seven.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:36] Now, if somebody wants to learn more about your practice, is it is there a website? Is there a place they can go? Can they hire you as a speaker? Maybe as just a way to kind of get to know you a little bit first? Or is it something they have to commit to a, you know, an engagement before you come in?

Matt Lis: [00:12:56] No, certainly I’m open to speaking to groups because it’s a great way to help people understand the benefits of leadership development. We have a great website at ww.com.com and you can also reach me by email at matlis at cruise.com dot com. So it’s M82 dot Ellis at cruise.com dot com. That’s crs2. Com.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:29] Well, Matt, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you greatly.

Matt Lis: [00:13:36] I really enjoyed this and I’m looking forward to, you know, hearing back from some of your listeners and seeing how we can help them and make their lives and their employees lives much more beneficial.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:49] Amen to that. Well, thank you again. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Columbus Business Radio.