Susan Schramm: De-Risking Growth and Moving People Into Action

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. It is my pleasure to introduce my guests today, Susan Schramm, founder of Go to Market Impact, a consultancy dedicated to helping leaders turn bold ideas into reality. After decades of working with global brands like IBM, Siemens and Nokia, as well as small businesses, nonprofits and faith based organizations, Susan noticed a pattern. Even the best strategies often fail not because of poor planning, but because leaders underestimate the people side of execution. That insight led her to create the De-risk system for impact. We’re going to talk about that, a framework that helps leaders surface hidden risks, build alignment, and move from vision to action with confidence. Susan is also the author of Fast Track Your Big Idea, navigate risk, move people into action, and avoid your strategy going off course. She’s passionate about helping organizations de-risk their growth, accelerate impact, and lead with purpose. Fueled by faith, family, and plenty of coffee. Susan, welcome to the show.

Susan Schramm: Well, thank you very much. It’s fun. And I’ll pull up a cup of coffee and and let’s get into it.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes, exactly. I’m so excited to have you on the show today, Susan. So tell us a little bit more about you.

Susan Schramm: So I’m a Houston native, by the way, grew up in Houston and, uh, ended up moving all over the country, um, mostly as a corporate nomad. My, my, my dad was moved us around for his job, and then I ended up with large corporations moving all over the country. So, um, and as you just said, after a years and years of, um, working in large corporations, I saw this need and launched my own consultancy about eight years ago and found that I thought it was small companies that I could help. I found that big companies and small companies have a lot of the same problems, so it was quite exciting to see that there was a need, a real need to address so many great ideas that would get stuck. And I haven’t looked back. I’ve loved being a small business person and being able to work wherever my laptop and I go.

Trisha Stetzel: And we were just talking about that before we started recording today. We should have started recording earlier. Um, Susan, as you know, and thank you for, uh, prefacing that you grew up moving a lot. Um, because many of us don’t, don’t know our military connections or veteran connections that we may have. And as I mentioned before, the vast group of veterans, business owners and entrepreneurs that are listening to this show, and I know that they would love to know what inspired you to start talking about risk in the first place? Because, listen, as a veteran, we don’t accept failure. We will make it work, right? So talk to me or talk to us about this idea of risk and how you see it differently. You, Susan, see risk differently than most.

Susan Schramm: Well thank you. And I you know, I studied in fact, part of my, um, uh, humility when I started noticing this pattern of important launches, important product products and programs and company launches and joint ventures and ecosystem where we try to launch 5G in these different, you know, very big efforts. I started to see this too many times. Great ideas would get stuck. And you’re right, failure is not an option. But sometimes things you know can get bumpy, right? And and what I, what I was struggling with was sometimes in an environment where everyone’s really mission focused, it’s almost, um, considered not loyal to talk about the risk. You see people walking straight into a brick wall and somehow that was considered Debbie Downer or, um, it was considered not loyal to the leader. And I don’t know, I mean, so I started studying military environments and the fact that, you know, risk was top of mind at the very beginning, but there’s a lot of real time decisions about risk. And my I found that risk in a military environment was a little bit more, um, I mean, loss of life is such an extreme that people were more open to the discussion. But when you get into marketplaces, loss of loss of revenue, loss of reputation, loss of of of capacity, um, often aren’t considered quite as severe or extreme. And the result is that as I was launching initiatives, I kept trying to bring these things up and got shut down a lot. And then I started looking at other organizations and realizing some cultures don’t allow for you to talk about the truth, that that risk exists all the time. We all deal with risk. But in some cases, the mission focused mindset doesn’t want to let the possibility of of failure be discussed, and therefore we actually have vulnerabilities as a result.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Which is a scary thing, right? Let’s all just put our blinders on and keep walking into the brick wall, because that’s what somebody said to do, right? Hey, there’s a brick wall. Yeah.

Susan Schramm: Exactly. I mean, we. And when you go back and do all sorts of history. What battles failed and how did how could they have seen it differently? You know, you always have to make real time decisions based on your based on your best information. But what we often underestimate is the leader of an organization is often the one with the strongest vision. But actually, everyone on that team needs to have an understanding of that vision. And personalities are different, right? There’s different risk profiles of people who are more likely to see risk or likely to how to engage with risk. And if we don’t, our brains are wired such that if we don’t have a plan, our brains go into fight or flight. It’s trying to protect us. So what? I think most leaders underestimate what I found. Uh, people with wonderful visions. Underestimate is that you have to to get something done. You need people to come with you. They don’t always take the hill when you point.

Speaker4: Right.

Susan Schramm: It’s frustrating. Right? It’s frustrating. And so that challenge that risk poses is that different folks will start. If you are confused, if you are skeptical or you’re not aligned, a strategy will fail because you won’t take action. And that really is the end of the day is the biggest issue. If you’re the leader of a big idea and you want to have something happen faster, it’s on you to figure out how to help those people take action and in many cases, talking about risk early, although it seems counterintuitive, will actually help their brains calm down and feel like there’s options. And if they see problems, they can bring them up. That’s the that’s the net of the whole point I’m trying to make. It’s okay. Risk.

Speaker4: It’s okay.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, is this what you do in your work?

Susan Schramm: Yeah I mean, this what I’ve been doing for the last Asked. Well, since what I did before was actually lead cross-functional initiatives to launch programs, products, companies, partnerships, what I’ve done as a consultant is I’ve developed a methodology to help proactively, um, get teams on one page when it comes to what the risks are, and then proactively plan for how they’re going to manage and navigate as risks might show up over time.

Speaker4: Okay, so is.

Trisha Stetzel: That a good lead in to de-risk system for impact?

Speaker4: Sure it is.

Susan Schramm: And what I found was that there’s not a very good language for talking about risk. The financial industry has a pretty good. They you know ever ever met with a financial planner. And they go what’s your risk profile. And a lot of times that means how much money are you willing to let go of if.

Speaker4: It’s.

Susan Schramm: Okay. So what if the cost isn’t money? What if it’s. I mean, sure, in a business, The horrible thing that you go out of business. But what if there’s other dimensions of risk that we really didn’t have a good words? And so what I did was, having spent decades in the tech industry, I decided not to use acronyms and to actually systematically lay out key questions that needed to be posed that make up an excellent strategy and realize that if you don’t have answers to those questions, you probably have risk in the making. And that those questions I have six principles of de-risk system for impact of six principles. And they are things like what’s the problem you solve? What’s the why, what’s the problem you solve, and why are you the one to solve it? And who has to take action and the what if scenarios. Let’s look at different scenarios that any of the dependencies you might have. Um, the other one speaks to how? Because a lot of times we end up with, um, a lot of strategies are built. They’re very tightly connected between the problem you solve and how you solve it, meaning the product you have or your process. But a lot of times the problem you solve may be very important, but how you solve it isn’t working. That doesn’t mean your strategy has to fail. That just means you have to rethink the how. Um, and then the last one is just this idea of adapting. How are you creating a business or an organization that can quickly shift gears and pivot? So for each of those, what I do is take people through the thinking process behind it and more than anything, the alignment necessary to accomplish it. Right. So all those questions are powerful, but if you’re all in different pages, you’ll fail too. So so that’s the issue of laying out the key elements of an important strategy. And then evaluate and openly talk about your risks and assumptions at each step.

Speaker4: Yeah, because.

Trisha Stetzel: If it’s just the leader sitting in a cave creating the strategy and they’re not bringing everyone along, or there’s no buy in from the team, then we’re not going to get very far. That Hill’s going to be really high.

Susan Schramm: That’s when I have a program I called the strategy reboot. Strategy reboot. If you go, there’s a half a day where I encourage senior leaders, boards and senior leadership teams to step back and think strategically for 4 or 5 hours. I mean, sometimes they say, oh, that’s too much. Can you do it in one? I’m like, okay, strategy takes thinking. But one of the one thing I do is I go through 12 common mistakes, and one of them is called the bunker. The bunker strategy, which is a one person or a tiny group of people go into a room, come up with a whole strategy, and then surprise the people who have to take action with the strategy and haven’t really sussed out. What would their piece of that be? Sometimes if it’s small business, they tend to think their team is just the people who work for them. But what they’re often surprised at is the number of people who have to do something different for a strategy to actually work. And the bunker is, oh, well, uh, me and the CFO and the, you know, the head of sales, we got this. But there’s an entire sales force, customer service frontline. Or if it’s all that one person, fine. But there’s also the customers themselves. If you shift your offering, they have to change your partners, your suppliers, your community that knows you one way. And now you’re you’re something new. And so that bunker strategy tends to cause it cause a lot of people to get excited, change their website, make a new logo, get all excited about how great this new thing is going to be. And then they’re disappointed six months later when it’s stuck.

Trisha Stetzel: No execution, no action because there was no buy in or not enough buy in. There’s buy in from the people who were excited about it.

Speaker4: Exactly. Oh.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, um, I know people are already curious and want to connect with you. What is the best way to connect with you so they can get more information or even ask more questions?

Susan Schramm: Well, I’d love for your community to email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. So my email address is Susan at go-to-market. Com. I’m sure it’s going to be on the bottom of the well.

Speaker4: Yes.

Susan Schramm: And then the other thing is on LinkedIn, it’s Susan Bailey Schram is my there’s several of us. So that’s the one who I am. And uh, and it says right on there that I’ve got a new book coming out. So that’s when you get to me. Find me on LinkedIn and you’ll see that I’ve got the new book.

Speaker4: Yeah. Which is very.

Trisha Stetzel: Exciting. I know I had a little lead into that. So you guys. Uh, yes. Always. As always. There will be links in the show notes so you can point and click if you’re sitting in front of your computer. If you’re not, when you’re looking for Susan, her last name is spelled s c h r a m m. And remember, on LinkedIn it’s Susan Bailey Schramm on LinkedIn so you can find her or her first name. Last name, uh, at tell us the rest of it. Susan.

Susan Schramm: Go to market impact comm.

Trisha Stetzel: Perfect. Thank you very much. Okay. So I’d like to spend, if it’s okay with you a little more time on this alignment piece. So, um, you’ve you have de-risk system for impact. You’ve also got some other tools that you use with your, uh, with the teams that engage you. Let’s talk more about alignment. This sounds really hard. I’ve been there. We’ve all been on both sides. Well, not all of us. A lot of us have been on both sides of that. I have this great idea. I want to go do this thing. Talk to me more about the actual alignment and what that looks like, Susan, as you take them through your process.

Susan Schramm: Yeah. And I think if you have a military background, this is probably the most frustrating aspect of working in the marketplace because two things. And I’ve worked with plenty. I remember my, um, a nephew who’s in the Air Force and he he was going back and forth between civilian roles and military roles. And he just says, people just don’t. Do they don’t, you know, you say, let’s go do something. And then they all pause and we just don’t get going. Right. And the urgency and oftentimes in the marketplace, people don’t always share the same urgency or they the command control model doesn’t work, and they have a lot more likelihood to not just take the hill because the boss said so. Um, what’s interesting about alignment? Um, I can remember when I was doing my research on on this topic. People always talked about this idea of getting on board. Right? And I had one woman say, I hate that phrase getting on board. I said, why? It’s just it’s it’s an invitation. She said, no, I would. If you think about getting on board, it’s a it’s coming from the old ways of a definition of train or a ship saying all aboard where the leader has a destination preplanned and you’re telling get on board, right. Whereas another way to think about this is getting on one page.

Speaker4: Mhm.

Susan Schramm: The idea like if you’re climbing Mount Everest, there’s lots of different ways to scale that mountain. And you need as a group to have a common understanding of how you’re going to do it. But everyone has a part to play in getting there. And so that concept of helping people get on one page is an important mindset versus get on board or get out of the way, right? Which I was told at one point when I was trying to when I was part of a product team. So I know what that feels like. The other thing is, one of the principles I lay out early on is not only know the problem you’re solving, but why is it urgent to solve? Now? I’m creating urgency for your team, for your customers, for your investors, uh, for for your supporters. Uh, requires clarity about the. What if this isn’t necessary. In other words, the problem you solve, the consequence of you solve it, and the consequence if you don’t solve it. And sometimes I think we fall in love with our whatever it is we’re solving. Um, but we don’t realize the world has changed around us. And my favorite example of that is during Covid, there was a huge spike. The product managers for toilet paper were like, man, have we nailed this spike in growth? The great demand is up. But um, but then it ceased, right? So something changed.

Susan Schramm: And I think that what we’re sometimes not thinking is, has the has the demand for my solution, uh, is anything about it change? Is the market a niche versus a broad place? Uh, if there’s been a change, what do we do? Well, that could be addressed. But many, many times I think that when when it comes back to alignment, it’s the balance between inviting people to have a to play a role in shaping that plan B on one page. And they understand their role, they understand what’s expected, what they have to do, and they believe and trust you that that makes sense. And you combine that alignment with urgency and you sometimes can. You personally may feel urgent about it, but the rest of the team doesn’t feel urgent. They’re not going to take action as you expected. And it’s not again, it’s not just your team, but it’s all those people in the entire end to end model that you serve that are going to have to take action. You have to think through. And and truthfully, I would give everybody a test right now. So what if it doesn’t happen, you know, go there as a team. What if what we’re doing never happens? What’s the consequence? And if that doesn’t what’s the consequence of that. So you get you know, you keep going deeper to to really find the motivation for why now is so urgent.

Trisha Stetzel: This is amazing. And the the thing that’s coming through here is people, you know, we talk a little bit about this human factor and having the right people and the right room doing the right things. So what what is your thought around the people on the team that are going to take action? How do I know that I have the right people on my team?

Susan Schramm: Well, yeah, it’s um, it’s an interesting one because in in good to Great, Jim Collins talks about having the right people on the bus. I mean, you whatever, wherever you’re going, that bus, if you don’t have the right people on the bus, you might as well stop. Um, and I one of the things that I’m finding is that the hesitancy to step up to solve that is often when you have a small team, it’s hard to let go of someone who really isn’t the right person. Yeah. Um, the one thing I’d also say about this subject, which is values, alignment if everything falls apart, I we, I went through in the telecom industry and the tech industry, Three. Unfortunately, we spent a lot of time doing layoffs and ups and downs, hiring and then layoffs, hiring. And when we had to start over again, one of the questions we always also always asked was if you only had a rowboat, who are the 3 or 4 people you’d want in that rowboat and don’t care what the role was, you just want that person in the rowboat. Because your values were aligned, you were able to adjust that ability to pivot. And the risk if if risk is unknown, then how if they’re going to be part of a team where there’s constant risk, are they going to be someone who can, who can openly and and without too much fear? Um, adjust.

Susan Schramm: And but that might be adjust their strategy but means they’re just their role as well. And so the values alignment I work with a lot of organizations who put wonderful posters all over every room that talk about values, and then when it gets down to making day to day decisions with customers and employees, you question that those values are real. And so translating your values into because our value, for instance, is teamwork, we’ve decided to hire as in team interviews. You actually speak to your group. These values direct these actions on our part. And that’s accountability for the values. And then the second part is this idea of hiring for people who are adaptive leaders, not just technical leaders. They are actually leaders who who are comfortable. And this can be groomed. People can learn this. It’s part of my book Fast Track. Your big idea is actually helping you build teams that are adaptive from the beginning. But that takes an intentionality. And if you only had three people in your rowboat, you’d want people who were open to that.

Speaker4: Um, yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, how’d you know I was going to ask you about your book next? It’s like you knew.

Speaker4: You read my mind.

Trisha Stetzel: So tell us more about your book. Give us the title, tell us where we can find it and tell us what we’re going to learn from it.

Susan Schramm: So the book is titled Fast Track Your Big Idea. And if you were to go on Amazon, you could find it. Um, it’s navigating risk. Move people to action and avoid your strategy going off course. I wrote the book because so many people, after I worked with them, they said, you should write a book. You should write about this. And what I found was that the workshops that I run and the consulting that I do and speaking often, it starts a conversation. It prompts you, as this conversation has to go. I hadn’t thought about that. Let’s go deeper. And so what the book does is it walks you through what is a good strategy. And if you’re leading a strategy, whatever you are in your stages, how can you, from the beginning plan for risk? And how can you from the beginning plan to build a team that is comfortable adapting to risk. Um, and it has tons. It has over 20 deliverables that you can download and use with your team. Um, it has um, chapters where actually help you build a strategic message playbook so that everybody on your team can consistently communicate your strategy. So there’s a lot of wonderful, you know, pieces of it. More than anything, it allows you to, you know, I want everybody to write in the margins and keep track, because wherever you are, you’re in a you’re a work in process with most strategies. And, uh, it was designed to help walk with you wherever you are starting or, or or if you’re stuck getting back on track, that’s just as useful in those roles.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. Okay, you guys fast track your big idea. Or you can even look up Susan Schram on Amazon and I’m sure you’ll find the book title there. You need to go out and get a copy of it. It’s going to be a great read for any business leader. I think this is fantastic. Susan, I have one more big question for you. Would it be okay, one more as we close up here today? All right. If you could give leaders one simple, practical way to de-risk their next big idea, no matter what stage they’re in, what would it be?

Susan Schramm: I’m going to ask you to ask a question more frequently than you may today. And that is at the end of a big session where you’ve got a big plan. Stop and say, what risks have we not talked about that we should be considering? Simply ask the question what you will do is you’ll do two things as a leader. Number one, you’ll invite in broader thinking. But the other thing you’ll do is you set a tone. You’ll set a tone that you don’t have all the answers, that you’re willing and humble and courageous enough to accept that you may have setbacks. You’ll invite and build courage and confidence of a team who, if they if they run into problems. It’s not that you weren’t open to adjusting. So it just sends a huge message to the people that you’re trying to lead, and that they feel more excited about being part of a place where their ideas are respected and they can contribute it to be on one page with you.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, can we just talk for another hour? Susan, this has been so wonderful. I’m just, like, taking it all in. I’m like, oh, there’s so many ideas here. I want to go execute my next big idea. This is amazing. I really, I think that everything we’ve talked about today will resonate with the whole audience, but in particular with all of my veteran friends who have moved from a place where we didn’t get to choose who was in our room. We just had to execute against whatever the mission was to. Now we’re in business and we do have choices, and we can start to ask those questions around risk. Yeah. Okay. I’m so excited. Susan, thank you so much for being with me today. This has been amazing.

Susan Schramm: Well, this has been so much fun. And I’m just really I have a heart for this audience. I think you you’re creating an amazing community of people who we all appreciate the service you’ve all had and then the the idea that you can shape a world that needs, needs, good ideas and, and and people who are, as you said, not, uh, not give uppers. Right. There are people who are have tenacity and courage to keep going. It’s just sometimes it helps if you’ve gotten off the road. It’s helped you to get back on track a little bit. So that’s.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely. And you know we all we all put on our our big big boy big girl pants and say failure is not an option. But it does come. And that’s how we learn our lessons. And the more we talk about risk and de-risking the things that we want to go do, the more lessons we can learn in front of these mistakes that we might make right, or these failures that we might encounter. So, uh, great conversation. Susan, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today. You guys. All of her information will be in the show notes, as always, but if you’d like to connect directly with her, you can get her by email at Susan at go-to-market. Impact.com. Her last name is spelled S c h r a m and you need to go find her book on Amazon and grab a copy of it fast. Track your big idea or look Susan Schram up as the author, and it will take you right to the page you’re looking for. I’ll also put a link in the show notes so you guys can just point and click and get to Amazon to grab the book. Susan, again, thank you so much for your time today.

Susan Schramm: So much fun. Look forward to seeing everybody.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. All right you guys, that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation I had with Susan, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, a veteran or a Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.