with Joey Brannon, Founder - Axiom Strategic Consulting
Service organizations can only grow as much as their vision allows. Joey Brannon, the founder of Axiom Strategic Consulting, shares the 5 layers of competency every service organization needs in order to succeed. In this interview we discuss the strategy vs focus and how his consulting firm guides businesses to achieve their vision long term.
Notes from the Show
Joey Brannon is the founder of Axiom Strategic Consulting, a firm that works with service based and home-service based companies to achieve growth and vision. Axiom works with businesses to change behavior, train and coach employees, and develop leaders within the organization to shoulder more responsibility to accommodate growth.
Joey says that building a strategic plan is just another way to say getting focused. Axiom helps businesses focus on growth and building a foundation to deliver the services they are selling. They do this by focusing the business’s activities for at least 1-2 years to make significant progress towards the vision.
Joey outlines 5 layers of competency that he uses to break down the processes of a company, using these 5 layers to determine weaknesses and find solutions on the path to growth.
5 Layers of Competency
Culture: What are the values? What is the vision? What is the shared purpose? What is the mission statement?
Leadership: To what extent do you have people within an organization who are called to serve others and put others in front of themselves? What are the clearly outlined roles and responsibilities?
Business Operations: How are you going to deliver the service you’re paid to deliver? What are the standard operating procedures? How is pricing established? How are profits measured?
Sales Marketing: How are you reaching customers? What services and packages are available in your services?
Customers: Who is your ideal consumer? What services do your customers need?
Financial Health and Profitability: How are you generating revenue?
Axiom begins working with clients with their due diligence process known as their strategic assessment. They outline all of the priorities for their clients to achieve their vision. Joey describes working with Axiom as working alongside a guide with your business's best interests in mind. You can find out more about them on the Axiom Strategic Consulting website and podcast.
What’s Inside:
Five layers of competency every service organization needs in order to succeed.
The importance of knowing what you want to achieve & why strategy is more than just applying best practices.
Using proximity to avoid competing on price.
Why do clients hire us?
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:35
Hi everybody, welcome back to stop the noise. I'm Susan Tatum and today I am really thrilled to be talking with Joey Brannon, who is the founder of Axiom strategic consulting down in Bradenton,
Joey Brannon 0:48
it is Bradenton, Sarasota, Lakewood Ranch, it kind of covers all that, all that geography. So,
Susan Tatum 0:55
I call that the area of the most beautiful beaches.
Joey Brannon 1:01
That is the draw for a lot of people for sure.
Susan Tatum 1:03
Gorgeous down there. So Joey, welcome. So your focus mostly on home services and professional services firms, and you're helping them to achieve their vision for their businesses, is that fair to say?
Joey Brannon 1:15
That's correct. We don't necessarily have an industry specialization. But in this part of the world that we operate in, in the southwest coast of Florida, heavily service industry based so we do, like you said, a lot of home services, construction, new construction, remodel, retail home improvements, pest control, you name it, if it happens around the home, or if it happens for a homeowner that's really big down here, in addition to healthcare, hospitality, not a lot of manufacturing, we've done a little bit of it, but for the most part, our clients tend to be folks with trucks driving around, and we're dealing with consumers, right.
Susan Tatum 1:52
So that is growing a business like that would be very different. In my mind, anyway, from growing a business to business type of firm.
Joey Brannon 2:03
It is, I think it's you can differentiate it in terms of business to business versus business to consumer. And you can also differentiate it just in terms of the service versus kind of widget making or manufacturing, the businesses that we work with their path to growth literally entails finding more people to deliver the service. So it's a very, you know, human capital, payroll intensive type of industry. And people require other people. So it's not enough to just put five new trucks on the road, oftentimes, that means you have to have a new supervisor. So the businesses that we work with, when we're talking about achieving the business owners vision for what they want that that business to become. And there's growth involved in that we have a whole series of challenges that are created around getting people to change behavior, learning new skills, coaching people up developing leaders inside organizations that can can shoulder more responsibility as the business grows. So that's a lot of what me and my team focus, you know, our day in, day out on, there's quite a bit of planning, but the vast majority of our day in day out activities are executing the strategic plans. And they all involve people doing certain things according to certain timelines and struggling through that coaching them over the the roadblocks in the boundaries that stand in the way.
Susan Tatum 3:26
So if I can paraphrase that a little bit you are you, you focus on helping them grow. But you're also focused on creating or building the foundation that allows them to deliver the services that they are selling? it's important
Joey Brannon 3:44
Yes it is. And if we look at any business's ability to not just build, but also execute a strategic plan. Here, at Axiom, we focus on five different skill sets, or five different kinds of layers of competency in an organization. And each one builds on the other. So at the very bottom, you have the culture of the organization, what are the values that govern behavior? What is the vision that's driving the team forward? What is the shared purpose for why people are signing up to do this alongside one another? And what's the mission statement that tells the outside world what we're about and why we're about it? And that we kind of all group into a subset of activities and initiatives and behaviors around culture. And then on top of culture, you have leadership. So to what extent do we have people in the organization who really believe it's their calling to serve others, and are willing to put others in front of themselves and be leaders in that servant leadership capacity? And also in that arena, you have things like, very clearly articulated roles and responsibilities to people know what they're going to be held accountable to. Above that you get into business operations, which is how do we actually deliver the product or service that people are paying us to deliver so standard operating procedures and efficiencies and everything from how pricing is established and how it's reviewed and how costs are tracked and how profitability on particular job or service ticket as measured and above operations, you get into sales and marketing. So where are you going to find your new customers and then above that, you get into financial health and profitability. And each one of those layers kind of builds on the next. So if we're having trouble with financial, health and profitability, it's it couldn't be because we're just not generating the revenue. So we look to the layer under that we're having trouble generating the revenue, it could be because we're not creating a consistent where people experience for our customers. So we look at business operations, and we have to fix there. And if we're having struggles in business operations, it could be that we don't have the leaders who are clearly communicating the roles and responsibilities and are serving their team members. And we're, if we're struggling with our leadership group, it couldn't be because we've got a culture that nobody's really attracted to. So we have to tackle these different layers in a certain priority, because we could wind up just chasing our tail, solving one little tactical problem, but not really getting to the root cause of the symptom that we're trying to fix.
Susan Tatum 6:14
So let me ask this, what's happening in a business? What does that owner like failing or struggling with, when they come to you?
Joey Brannon 6:22
We work with businesses that are typically around 2 million to $50 million in revenue. So if you're in a service industry, you can think of that you may not know the revenues of the businesses that you visit, but if I told you that the teams we work with are probably somewhere between 20 and 300 350 employees, that gives you an idea of the kind of organizations we might be working with. And when a business owner comes to us, it's usually because they're being pulled in 100 different directions, whether they've been doing this for five years, or 25 years, the amount of fires that they have to put out and the number of things that they're responsible for on a day in day out basis is just untenable, they're getting to a point where they're kind of fed up with it. And that getting pulled in 100 different directions has taken their focus off the growth that they initially envisioned giving them the freedom to have a better quality of life, more autonomy, time to spend with kids who are getting older, because they sacrificed a lot of that time when the kids were younger building the business. And so they come to us and they say, I know we can grow this, I know we've got a good product. I know we've got some good people. But we just haven't been able to do it to the scale that I always imagined I would. And so we don't, we're not necessarily turning around businesses, none of the businesses that come to us are in terrible shape, actually doing fine. But that business owner is kind of reconnecting maybe even on a subconscious level with a vision that they had initially. And there's just a sense that I'm not there. I'm not, I'm not where I want to be. And the first step for us really is helping them reconnect with that vision or re articulate or possibly articulate for the first time and in a couple of decades. What do you want this business to accomplish in the world? What kind of footprint Do you want it to have? What kind of influence do you want it to exert? In what ways do you want it to change the world around it? And let's get that down in writing, and get it in a in a media that we can share with people so that it resonates with them? And they'll come alongside us and help you do that?
Susan Tatum 8:26
So do you find that sometimes they're impatient, and they want to like I want to grow right now. And you're saying, Hey.
Joey Brannon 8:33
I don't know that I've ever met an entrepreneur that has an abundance of patience. I think that's one of their, one of the reasons they are where they're at. And they do have almost universally bright shiny object syndrome, which, you know, they take a shower in the morning, and by the time they brush their teeth, they've got three ideas for brand new businesses, or product lines or locations. And so yes, they're impatient. They want to grow yesterday. That's really where so we say x is a consulting firm. There's a lot of different types of consultants. We're a strategic consulting firm, meaning that our our role is to help businesses focus on the things that are most important, which are not necessarily a set of best practices. So there are other consulting companies that are industry consultants. And you may you may have 20 or 200 HVAC clients that sell air conditioning systems around the country or you may have 300 Pest Control clients or you name the industry, there are industry consultants who can come into your business and I'm not knocking there's it's a very valuable service. They come in and they say, Hey, like 90% of the world that operates in your industry, that is your size does things differently than the way you're doing it. Let me show you how they do it. And if we can get you to do it the same way there's gonna be some efficiencies involved here. And that's from an industry consulting standpoint that consulting around what are best practices can can lead to some efficiencies. What Axiom is concerned with is how effective which is very different from efficiency, how effective is this business in achieving its vision. So you can take two business owners who are in the exact same industry, the exact same market demographic, they're actually they could be catty corner to one another and the busiest intersection in town. And one of the adults, they sell the same product, same pricing, same market, same everything. The only difference between those two businesses is that the guy on the south side of the street, just wants an extra day a week to go fishing with his grandkids. And he's looking for a little bit better lifestyle. Meanwhile, his counterpart across the street, she wants to become the next, you know, 100 store chain in the area. And she her vision is way different. The only thing that's different between those two businesses is the vision of the owner. So you can have an industry consultant come in and say, well, there's best practices and those best practices may help that one business owner get an extra day a week because of extra efficiencies. And they may help that other business owner open a second store because their efficiencies, but are those industry practices going to be effective and helping them achieve their vision. So for Axiom, that's the yardstick for us. And back to your original question of patience, a lot of times that has to do with constraining the focus of the business owner to a certain particular subset of activities that we've agreed to pursue for a couple of years probably, to focus the leadership team's efforts so that we can make significant progress toward the vision. And that strategy. Strategy is just another word for focus. So we say, we're going to put together a strategic plan, we're saying we're putting together a plan to focus the businesses activities over the next two to three years, so that we can make significant progress toward this vision.
Susan Tatum 11:49
I like that strategy is another word for focus. I'm gonna quote you on that one. But you know, you're talking about best practices, and in my world of business development, and and my former life in marketing, to me, best practices means this is what everybody's doing. So don't do it. Because you're just gonna get lost in the noise. But I think if you're talking about making processes more efficient, that best practices can make sense in that in that area. But it's not always a great thing.
Joey Brannon 12:19
Yeah, that's a good point. Because there's a huge difference between differentiating yourself in the market, and having a good standard operating procedure. I still think that, you know, we do a lot of SOP work, we do a lot of workflow, process analysis and workflow deconstruction and rebuilding, our team has to cover all of those different areas. So we have to be able to cover culture and leadership and business operations and sales and finance. And so we play in those areas. And the interesting thing is that every business that we work with, because of the type of business and when I say type that two to $50 million business, that's probably it's got a surprise, a second generation involved, but the first generation typically is still kind of the chief decision maker and person behind the scenes. They, they do things the way they do, because that's the way they've done them for 20 or 30 years, you know, it's they've never had the benefit. A lot of it, you know, you'd be surprised at how few of our multimillion dollar business owners and as a multi million in terms of the net worth of the business, not the revenue, they're all doing more than a million in revenue. But these businesses are worth multiples of a million dollars. And they don't have a college education. They may have barely gotten through high school, a lot of times they were in the truck. And their first day as a business owner was the day they drove their own truck and went to the first customer call. And so they're incredibly smart. They're incredibly generous. But they've never had the benefit of being exposed to more than maybe two or three other practitioners of their craft. And when they were in those spots, they were at the very bottom rung so they weren't privy to what is the way the best way for an invoice to go from a purchase order at the supply house through to product costing through to invoice to the customer and a final gross profit report on a big job.
Susan Tatum 14:06
Yeah
Joey Brannon 14:07
just do it the way they've done it because in a lot of cases it worked when they were three or $400,000. They've still shoehorned it into a process that will work when they're 20 or 30 million. But, but you have somebody come along and say, Hey, have you ever thought about doing it this way? I'm like that sounds like it would work and you know, it changes their world in some respect to make things work a little bit more efficient. But discovering and taking to market how your plumbing company is going to be different from the other $20 million plumbing company across the street, that can't be about doing it the same way to your point, there has to be a differentiation between you and them for you to win market share, and do it on a worthy basis where you actually deserve that business because the customers are coming to you for a very different reason that they're going to the other person.
Susan Tatum 14:55
And if the customers don't have that reason, to drive their buying decision, it's going to come down to price.
Joey Brannon 15:00
It does and we see that we see that a lot in the first place, the first place that that rears its head, is when we're growing a sales department. And the sales team has slipped into a routine and a rhythm of competing on price. And one of the first like standard operating procedures that kind of comes down the pike and a growing business is standardizing prices. So say a roofing company, we've got a roofing company. And we've got two guys out there in the field who are visiting customers and doing proposals for roofs. And one guy's got an Excel spreadsheet on his computer that's totally different than the Excel spreadsheet the other guy's got on his laptop, and they're pricing jobs differently. One guy's is updating his prices every week from the supply house, the other one hasn't updated his in a year, we go in and we say we've got to standardize the contracts we're going to standardize the pricing. And we're going to take away any flexibility you have other than a very special situations to offer discounts or have any discretion over pricing. And the first thing they start doing is screaming like, I can't do this film, we're getting beat out on price price pricing like, well, that's interesting, because we have a we have a 30 year history in this area. We are widely regarded as the best at what we do. Why are you not selling on that? Why are you trying to compete on price with the guy who's got one truck and just started his business two years ago and isn't going to be around in a year and a half to service a warranty call? Why are you why are you doing? And so yeah, it is absolutely fear of moving into a commodity market. Like that's there are industries that you have to play that game, you have to differentiate yourself on a little bit different level. But for us, in our area, dealing with a service based industry, there are all kinds of opportunities to differentiate yourself and avoid becoming a commodity.
Susan Tatum 16:44
I would you know when when you and I talked previously, you gave me an example of I believe it was a roofing contractor, and how and things that could be done to perpetuate new business in the area to build new businesses in the area beyond like putting a flyer on somebody's gate. I would love for you to tell to talk about that a bit. Because I think that although most of my listeners, and my clients are business to business, professional service providers, you can always get good ideas from other how other areas are handling things. So let's talk about this roofing contractor.
Joey Brannon 17:20
Yeah, so I'll give you I'll give you two examples, I'll give you that one that's more of a business to consumer, I'll give you another one. That's a business to business because the principles is fairly similar. So we've done this with roofing companies, we've actually started with a painting contractor. But the idea is you're going in and you're going to have a crew there, the crews gonna have a wrapped truck in front of the residents, there's probably going to be compressors and other equipment that's going to be running for a day or two. There's gonna be delivery trucks coming in blocking the street. For the neighbors, it's a little bit disruptive. And what most companies do is they print out these little door hangers. And they ask the salesperson who sold the job to go by on the day of the job start and hang these door hangers on everybody's doors, you know, either side of the job and across the street. And they call it Clover leafing. Right? Because it makes like a cloverleaf around the job site. And the idea is, you know, hey, here's our fancy marketing door hanger, call us if you need your roof replaced or call us if you need your house painted. And instead of taking that approach of look at us, and give us your business, we said what if that salesperson showed up the morning of the new job start and went to each house knocked on the door and told the homeowner and so we've done that in the roofing contractors cases told the homeowner Hi we are we're I don't know if you've noticed, but we're tearing the roof off your neighbor's house and it's a major construction project and they're great people and they're very gracious and we've tried to go out of our way to minimize the inconvenience to them but we also recognize gonna be an inconvenience to you. And we're a roofing company like our job is putting nails and wood and some of those nails. We do a very good job we think of making sure none of them find their way into the street. But if they do and you happen to get a flat tire or If the crew fails to pick up a single bundle wrapper and it blows into your yard, if you have any issues whatsoever, if guys are smoking, they're not supposed to be smoking on the job site. If you have any issues whatsoever, here's my card, my cell phone numbers on the back, just please give me a call first, and give me a chance to fix it for you. So that we don't inconvenience you any longer than we have to. And if you do happen to get a nail in your tire, we will pay to have that sucker patched or replaced or whatever. And that makes an impression, not be saying, look at us. But we're saying, we've already got the business that we were looking for, we just want to make sure that us getting the business doesn't hurt you that it doesn't inconvenience you. And, you know, there's a pretty good close rate on jobs around that house in the next year, as people start to look at their own roofs. And in this area, you know, a lot of our neighborhoods are built around the same time, they're kind of, you know, massive developments. So if your neighbor needs a new roof, chances are you're going to need a roof in the next couple of years anyway. And that person's card has a way of sticking around and that salesman gets a follow up call, six months, nine months a year later says Hey, you did my neighbor's roof. I'd like you guys to come back and do mine. So it's about thinking about the homeowners of the people adjacent. Who there's two, two critical pieces to that, number one, you're visible, you're in proximity to the people who could use you in the future. That's really important. It's not and we live in a world that focuses a lot on digital marketing. And yeah, you could film a YouTube video and put it up and say, Hey, we're doing this house in this neighborhood. Isn't this great? You know, but it means a lot more when people can walk out their door and see your trucks when they can see your people when they can see your finished product on their neighbor's house. So that's number one, make sure that you're focused on the people who are who are nearby. And number two, it's focused not just on showing those people what we do, but on eliminating some kind of inconvenience for them, we got to serve them in some way before they even give you $1. So the other example illustrates the same two points. It's a roofing company, but they do commercial roof coating. So you have metal warehouse. And that warehouse is 20 years old, and the roof starts to leak because it's a metal roof. And it's got little pinhole rust leaks and that kind of stuff, they will spray this elastomeric coating over the top like a thick rubberized coating gives you an extra 15 to 20 years on your roof without having to replace a lot of metal. And they do these these buildings all over the southeastern United States. And what they will do, as you can imagine, a lot of their work is in like industrial parks and business districts. And so their project managers will identify other buildings in the area that are about the same size that would benefit from the same type of application that are about the same age or the roofs are about the same age. And they will find out don't cold call and find out who the building manager is in that area. And when their project Foreman show up, they'll deliver a handwritten note to that building manager, that property manager saying, we are doing a roof for X company around the corner, perhaps you know, Peter, he's the building manager at that location, we're gonna be there for the next three days, if you're interested in seeing what one of these jobs looks like, or you want to ask Peter what the process is like, we just want to let you know we're going to be here until Friday, they've had a lot of success, because what you know you're eliminating and inconvenience you got a building manager who's got a ton of stuff to do. But on his lunch break, he can take a 32nd detour to turn into the complex, you know, one road down from his building and see a crew that has all of their equipment out has all their guys on the roof, the building manager is going to be accessible because he's got to be there to supervise them. And he we can get a referral and a testimonial on the spot while jobs in progress. And there too kind of leveraging the psychology because while the jobs in process, Peter, who was the building manager who's having this work done, Peter wants everybody to believe he made a brilliant decision to hire this company. So he's telling him how fantastic this is. And this crew is great, and so on so forth. So there's a few ideas, you know, how do you how do you take work that you're already doing, and leverage it for the next, the next sale?
Susan Tatum 23:18
is about an approach that you've used with your own business?
Joey Brannon 24:35
That's a good question. In the sense of visibility, a little bit, I'll give you an example. So we the first four to six weeks of a new client engagement with us is called a strategic assessment and we are crawling all over in and through that business doing extensive employee interviews, financial analysis, reviewing collateral materials, websites, website analytics, just to get an understanding of where, where that business sits in each one of those five tiers from culture all the way up to financial health. And the end product of that is a day that we spend, it's the better part of a day, call it half to three quarters of a day that we spend with the business owner. To break down everything that we've, we've discovered and lay out a roadmap. So whether they choose to work with us going forward or not, they have a roadmap of priorities that they need to tackle in a certain order according to a certain timeline. So that they can put themselves in a good place to build an execute a strategic plan and have a good chance of success in doing that. And one of the things that happens when you spend four to six hours with a business owner, covering six weeks worth of work and laying out 40 to 50 slides of information, you can imagine, it's like drinking from a firehose, and you know, they they get triggered, because it's their baby. So they will get fixated on a point that might have been made 20 minutes ago, and it's still rolling through their head. And the meantime, they've missed, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of new information that could be relevant, you know, as relevant as the other stuff. And so we recognized that it's difficult for them to process all this alone. A lot of the times they cannot, the stuff that we're saying, you know, we invite the business owner only because we're laying out hard truths that could have to do with their number two person who's been with them for 30 years, right? So we can't necessarily have that person in. And so what we do is we say, is there somebody that knows you and your business well enough? To tell you the hard truth? Were they to have the benefit of enough time to study the facts? Is it somebody that you trust as somebody who's counsel you listen to. And when we find out who that person is, we say, we would like you to invite that person, ask them to clear their calendar, do you a favor, come for the day, and sit beside you while we lay out all of this information. And, and our intent in that we didn't do this intentionally, for the reasons that I'm about to describe, but our original intent was to allow them to to not have that drink from the fire hose and leave at the end of the day with having nobody that could process this with. So if they had a trusted advisor alongside them, he could go through this. They could go off site or meet the next day and say, Wow, what do you think like, what should we do? What should we focus on first? Should we hire these guys or not? Should we should we try to do you agree with what they said? Were they way off base? Were they holding back? Or do you think that they were just trying to be nice this part? Or? Or were they trying to be mean? Or was this the honest truth? And so we saw tremendous benefit in that what's happened is that that business owner sits there, because it's usually a fellow business owner, I should say that too. So the person that you're going to invite,
Susan Tatum 26:26
Okay.
Joey Brannon 26:27
it tends to be a friend of yours, who also owns a business, it tends to be somebody who's kind of walks in the same shoes you do, day in, day out in terms of being a business owner,
Susan Tatum 26:36
okay
Joey Brannon 26:37
so they invite this other business owner who spent six hours watching Axiom do what we do, and helping their friend walk through this process. And at the end, a good chunk of the time, they say, Hey, what do you guys think about coming and meeting me and my team, maybe you guys would be a good fit for us, too. I see what you're doing it for my friend. Would you consult them again on another client. So again, we didn't intend it that way. But it does make a lot of sense when we stop and think about giving people an opportunity to witness what you do, and giving them enough insight information so that they know you're a little bit different from everybody else, that that roofing customer, the neighbor of the roofing customer, is not just seeing another roof getting put on, they're getting some insight into how that customer is getting treated, because you're treating me with respect and you're treating me with consideration. So I got to believe you're doing the same thing for them. Now, when when that building manager comes over, and he sees how the worksite is laid out, he sees where the equipment's placed, he sees how they are following OSHA safety protocols and how they've marked points of ingress and egress to keep people in the building safe. He gets some insight into hey, these guys are really conscientious. They got their act together. Maybe I want to have them do my coding as well.
Susan Tatum 27:48
That's, that's brilliant. You know, there's another thing that I think is important that you glossed over because that's not what we're talking about. But I want to I want to make the point is that you it sounds to me like any way you're initially selling your new clients on a roadmap that they are not committed to implementing with you and I see that as being such an important part of selling consulting services, to give them a chance to where it's not a one year commitment or a two year commitment, it's easier to throw down the credit card or whatever and just say, Yeah, let's do this. And then they see how you work and can make they're just much more comfortable in making and having that go. No go. point right there.
Joey Brannon 28:36
Yeah, I wish I could take credit for sitting how brilliant that was. And it's only in hindsight that I like yeah, that actually worked out exactly the way that you described it. Initially, we're actually doing a lot of that work for free. Because what we were calling it due diligence. For us, the biggest concern was, our clients don't go anywhere, like the things that we're talking about, we're talking about helping a business achieve their vision, we've got clients that have been with us a decade. So if that's the kind of relationship that you're talking about, you want to make sure that you, you get in bed with the right person, you want to make sure that you have a chance to date a little bit before you go to the altar and get married to this business as their strategic consultant who's going to be tied to them for a long, long time. So we did a vast amount of due diligence. And we couldn't help ourselves at the end of it saying like, hey, there's a lot of low hanging fruit here that you guys can knock out whether we move forward or not, we just want to put this on the table and a friend of mine, he's a business owner. And who is now a client said, he saw our due diligence package. So we have like a 20 page 30 page document that we would send over that had all these lists and checklists and document requests and things that we were gonna require to do this free due diligence, but it was costing the businesses a fortune and time and headaches to put this together. And he said, Look, I will give anybody a check to go away and solve a problem that I don't have to solve or to do work that I don't have to do. So why don't you just charge for this. So he started charging for the due diligence, and we called it a strategic assessment. And all the low hanging fruit or the prioritized activities that we would take out of the original due diligence, we started to put into a strategic roadmap, which is basically a timeline with the priorities worked into it of when they should be attacking what. And, you know, the interesting thing is, we put a lot of stock and value in that roadmap, we really believe it's worth every penny, they've paid for the strategic assessment. But the other truth is, everything that we do, I can give you a book list of about 20 titles on Amazon, and for less than three or $400, you could have access to everything that we do inside business, you know, we steal a lot of great ideas, and we cobbled together the best of them and put them into our what makes up our consulting practice. How do we help these businesses achieve this? And so it's not for lack of knowledge, or the lack of availability and knowledge that these businesses hire us? It is two things, I think it's one they're willing to pay for shortcuts. So while they could go out and invest the $400, do they have time to read the books, try all the things we've trie and figure out what the books works and what doesn't. And two, it's kind of nice to walk through this with somebody, it's kind of nice to have a guide along the way. You know, you can go watch a bunch of YouTube videos on how to catch Bonefish and the keys. Or you can pay some guy $650. And he'll take you out on his boat, put his fly rod in your hand, show you how to cast it show you where to cast it, put the boat in the right spot, and you can catch a bone fish. And there's a lot of people who would rather pay for the guide. And those are the people who tend to be our clients.
Susan Tatum 31:42
They're also the people that tend to be more successful. I think to achieve their visions.
Joey Brannon 31:48
Yeah, yeah, they actually catch fish.
Susan Tatum 31:51
That's exactly right. Joey this has been fantastic. And I could talk about this for hours. But we have run out of time here. So for anybody that wants to follow up with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Joey Brannon 32:03
Axiomstrategic.com that's our website. We have a blog post there, we have a podcast that we do on a weekly basis. We're also on LinkedIn a little bit but axiomstrategic.com is kind of like home base. All of our contact information is there. We love to talk to business owners. We've got several people on the team that feel like they were just called to do this. They were they were made for this kind of work. So we eat, sleep, and breathe it and there's nothing we like doing more.
Susan Tatum 32:30
Fantastic. And we'll put those links in the show notes for everybody. And thank you so much for being here.
Joey Brannon 32:36
Thanks for having me, Susan. I really enjoyed it.
Susan Tatum 32:40
Have a great day.
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