Peter Adams | Technology Doesn’t Solve Problems

• The greatest source of friction in your business
• How to identify a good business system quickly
• The first step in building a scalable tech infrastructure
• Ways to differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace
• And more

Listen now…

Episode Transcript:

Doug Hall: Welcome to the Go for Growth podcast. I’m your host Doug Hall and today I have a special guest with me, Mr. Peter Adams, the founder and chief thinker and probably visionary of the Lighthouse Information Systems company which was a west coast sort of bay area, Seattle focused a specialty company. And I’m going to let Peter explain it because it is a unique spin on information technology and IT. And I want you to pay particular attention to what Peter has to say about this because I believe they can make a difference for you.

So, with that introduction, I want to bring my friend, Peter Adams and business colleague, too. We network together. I want to bring him to the floor here and welcome him. Peter, welcome to the Go for Growth podcast.

Peter Adams: Thank you Doug. Thanks for having me.

Doug Hall: So Peter, I kind of teed things up by saying you had some special sauce, but I really want you to, before you get into that take us back, because you founded Lighthouse some time ago and I want people to understand how much history and gravity you have in this IT and business improvement space. So tell us a little bit of your background story.

Peter Adams: Actually, I came out of college as a biochemist, really wanted a job doing research and had a great opportunity to interview with a company who was full of PhDs and I only had a bachelor’s degree. The guy who was interviewing with basically said without a PhD I was qualified to wash glassware. That’s not quite what I had in mind. And really got me thinking about what I had to do to really realize my ambition. And at that point in time I didn’t have much of an ambition. I just had … I knew I wanted to be doing something to help people, but I didn’t know how.

And I fast forward that a few years I was working for Shared Medical Systems, which was a hospital management company based on the East Coast and I basically did, was responsible for the installation and implementation of our hospital systems.

And in the early 1980’s the first attempt for at cost containment was basically being rolled out. It’s called ICD-9. And I was right there at the forefront of that. I was basically responsible for Western US in terms of our hospitals. And at that point in time we had one hospital that was really making money and all the rest of them were not. And so I had to go spend the summer at this one hospital to understand what they were doing, it was having to them make money.

And there were a bunch of things going on there that were really clever. The biggest takeaway from that is really that it was the way they had thought about their business and the questions they ask. The kind of answers they needed that drove how they thought about the systems they were using and the IP that supported it.

And that was really an eyeopener for me. And at that point I really said. It’s amazing it’s not about the technology. I can deploy the greatest technology on the planet, but if it doesn’t actually solve a real problem. Then it’s a waste of time and money. And so at that moment everything kind of came together and I said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to help people build better businesses.”

Because it matters for not only their sake, and their families and their employees, and their employees kids, and sending kids to college and all that kind of stuff. But really it’s a way to drive business and create a sustainable future. And I said, “Great let me help people build better businesses.” I understand the lever of technology so I can use that as a lever to drive business forward. That was 1983.

Doug Hall: And that was high tech then. Shared Medical was pretty hot stuff I remember that.

Peter Adams: Absolutely. They were the 800 pound gorilla at that time.

Doug Hall: Yeah. And you had like the most advanced hospital information system out there and you were in what I would imagine from the outside when I saw it, I was at Burroughs at that time, kind of another big mainframe kind of company and you know, we thought you guys were the highest tech out there. And then you came to this epiphany but it’s not the technology.

Peter Adams: Right. It surprised me when I figured that out.

Doug Hall: Has that been the guiding light for 30 years plus now?

Peter Adams: Pretty much what I find interesting is we work with customers all through the years and it’s still true today. There’s a lot of people get wrapped up in the tool or the technology. They come to us and they say, I need a ERP system, or I need a CRM, or I need a new mail server or whatever it is a trend to presuppose a solution. Without actually having a really good grasp on the problem they’re trying to solve.

One of the things we do is we always try and take it back to what’s the core problem that we’re actually trying to solve and what would it look like when it’s solved, because that’s what I want to orient around. And then I’ll help them figure out what the appropriate technology is. Maybe it’s an ERP system or maybe it’s not.

As an example of this, we’d have one of our clients who makes grills approached us with a fairly significant project. To handle inventory control problem they had. They were thinking that about $200,000 project in my mind to solve this big inventory control issue is basically long story short. What they had was lots and lots of inventory because they sold these grills and then they sold pellets to go into grills. And so what they really made their money on was a pellet. Grills were kind of like the razor and the razor blades.

And so all these bags of pellets looked exactly alike. And so they have warehouses full of men. I didn’t know what they really had in stock and they’re quoting on delivery times and then go out on the warehouse and find out, no, they were out of apple wood, but they had access mesquite or whatever it was.

And so they were really using a problem for their customers. So we got invited and we’re looking around, we’re doing our typical assessment to understand the nature of the problem. And when we finally figured out what it really is. We took a lunch break in consultant and we ran across the street to the local hardware store. Bought our color coding label maker, came back after lunch. And started tagging bags with color coded labels and solve their problem for about 120 bucks.  Significantly different than what they had in mind, but it kind of outcome-

Doug Hall: No Barcode, no fancy stuff, just color.

Peter Adams: Well, at this point in time, that was all that was needed. We solve the immediate problem and that gave everybody time to think about what a long term solution would be that could scale. Clearly just color coding isn’t going to scale, but it was a major step in the direction that relieved an immediate pain point and save them a couple hundred thousand dollars in the system. That probably would not have scaled either. Now we have the time because that pressure’s off.

Now we can actually figure out what a real solution is, because when we started doing that and we look at integrated solutions across all the disciplines in the organization. Now we can say, okay, it’s actually what’s needed really is a new ERP system. To match the processes the business needs today, and what they anticipate they’re going to need because the system they had was rooted in the past, not in the future.

Doug Hall: In this case you use the color labels as sort of a stopgap. It relieved an immediate pressure as you normally find that kind of a stopgap with clients or just part of the time?

Peter Adams: Just sometimes you know that was one really great case study, but the thing that is interesting to notice that stopgap last of them about two years. It really allowed us to take the time and then to take the time to really think about the future and plan and design the system they wanted to have rather than trying to major or way into it.

Doug Hall: Otherwise they would have had to be hasty. Might not have made the right choice.

Peter Adams: Well, most companies end up with is a collection of systems all for good reasons. But each system stands by itself and you lack the integration between the systems. And that becomes an ongoing cost of the organization, it’s very high. It tends to show up not just overall inefficiencies, but slow time to market, slow response to customers, core business decisions, higher operating expenses, et Cetera, et cetera. All these things they go on for forever and so I want to put a stop to that. I want to help companies build efficient operations and organizations.

Doug Hall: Right. That’s a great example. We may have kind of assumed in a way. But step back and describe the sweet spot for Lighthouse Information Systems? How do you really characterize what you do, the ideal client you serve and the ideal solution approach for that kind of client?

Peter Adams: We’re really experts, well generically called a small medium business space, particularly around manufacturing. Helped clarify that a little bit further.  Small is probably on a $10,000,000 a year revenue side up to large, maybe a half a billion for us. So that’s kind of where we fit in that space. That’s a pretty broad space, but covers it. Geographically we work along the Western seaboard from San Diego to Seattle and all we require is that our clients have a major operation somewhere in that geography.

They can have operations in offices elsewhere. We have clients that are in Europe and over in Asia and whatnot. But they all have some major presence here on the West coast, and so there’s that. And then we also do work in other industries, construction, agriculture, healthcare. Not so much on the provider side, but more on the delivery side of the bigger systems. We do a lot of work with venture back startups. It’s a pretty good cross section of businesses in that space.

Doug Hall: The theme of our podcast is Go For Growth. Give us some idea of how this fits into growth situations, what you consider to be growth situations?

Peter Adams: There’s two forms of growth. One is growth of my own business, but what’s more interesting is the growth of my customer’s businesses. And that’s that I have a lot more examples of that. Poor systems basically promote poor process and poor process actually friction in your business, everything slows down. It takes longer to do everything, which means the cost to get the end product into the customer’s hands, always a higher cost and it takes longer. And so I think our approach is to figure out how to grease those wheels to build efficient operations are faster to market, respond to customers more quickly, build product with less cost, build better product. So it’s all those things combined.

Different customers have different variations on that theme, but it all kind of falls into those buckets. So our whole approach is about deeply understanding the objective of the business owners and the executives. And then helping them make sure that their teams are lined up behind that and that the systems and support that vision. And so we use what we call a Tipsy Model, which is basically to ask really good questions about the business.

What questions do you want to ask? What information do I need to answer those questions? What processes give rise to that information? What systems and automate those processes? And finally what infrastructure into those systems running and when we look at that-

Doug Hall: That’s an abbreviation, With a Q?

Peter Adams: I T I S I.

Doug Hall: Q I P I S I say something like that.

Peter Adams: Yeah, something like that. Anyway, but what that gives us a way or methodology of working with our customers to try and elevate whatever the symptom is that they tend to bring to the table, get to the root, cause the root problem, and then build a solution around that root problem so that we have lasting impact.

Doug Hall: What’s an example of one of those? Let me use the color code for the pellets. You got another one in mind?

Peter Adams: Sure. So we were working, it was more of an M and N scenario, but we were working with a client in the San Francisco area that had just recently IPO and they had made an acquisition of a private company up in Canada. And we were asked to go up and understand what they actually acquired and how we were going to integrate them.

Initially I had thought that was kind of strange to spend that kind of money, and not have an integration plan in mind. But what do I know? So we went up to Canada. We looked at this company, we did a bunch of interviews, and what we found is two things. One is that they didn’t own the IP to the product and so we helped our customer get that all handled, that was kind of a big surprise,

But one of the other things that showed up is they were running an ERP system up there. Called Expandable which was, probably the best implementation of an ERP system I’ve ever seen. And what made it so interesting was that every action in the physical world had a corresponding action in the ERP system. So you can track product flows through their entire operation in dollars and units. And that to me was absolutely amazing.

And We did not do the implementation but like my high watermark for what a good implementation should look like. And when we saw that we basically pull our customer not to do the ERP conversion, to leave them on their existing ERP system, and do a roll up into their system for financial reporting purposes. Because the original idea was we’re going to go in and basically replace their ERP system when the big fancy one. But their system was dialed in so well into their business and their process and it was running so well. I did not want to do anything to disrupt that.

Doug Hall: Interesting.

Peter Adams: It’s a strange example, but there-

Doug Hall: But a good one, and I think you’re. You have a bit of a specialty in this MNA area of being a real technology guide in the midst of an app of MNA activities, right?

Peter Adams: Yeah. A lot of our client base is in the San Francisco Bay area and their venture back startups. So in the years that we’ve been working in that space, we’ve probably been close to 200 transactions which have a large body of work.

Doug Hall: A lot. Is there anything … A lot of our folks on this podcast will have no, I know touchstone and venture backed funded companies. What is just as an aside. How do they act and what drivers are there when there’s DC funded this startup mentality, what does that do to you guys in terms of helping them?

Peter Adams: It makes a really interesting environment. Number one is they tend to be extraordinarily passionate about their product or their technologies that they’re trying to build. And they’re all trying to change the world and so they have an almost  evangelist type of approach. And that kind of energy is really fun to, too.

The VCs tend to only want to invest in companies where they can get a really high return and so they’re looking to really drive those businesses. So there’s a lot of focus on building for the future and of course for what we do that’s a natural fit. It’s a lot of fun, but we also have to take in a pragmatic reality that only about 10% of those companies actually IPO probably another 20% or so are acquired. And the remainders kind of either just kind of barely survive or go out of business.

While we have to build for that great future, we also have to take in a pragmatic realities of maybe they don’t quite get there. So when we’re working with those firms we have to build them a platform and an approach that scales as they scale. It always has to stay slightly ahead of where they need to be, but it can’t lag because it slows them down. And slowing down that anything that takes more time to get them to market is death.

We have to do everything we can to make sure that the entire technology infrastructure is never an impediment, and allowing them to operate at optimum speeds. And it has to be obviously within a budget they can afford. Better make them different than anybody else out there.

Doug Hall: No. And they may be well funded. I mean, they may have an apple budget, right?

Peter Adams: Oh some of them have huge budgets, but it’s certainly matters, It’s always better to have more money than less. But there’s no argument about that. But the biggest driver is more the vision of the executive team and how collectively their entire team is on the same page. If they’re all heading in the same direction and lockstep. More often than not, they will be successful.

One of the biggest things that kills those kinds of companies is they don’t. They’re not in lockstep. They’re working at sometimes across purposes or they understand how to build the technology, but they don’t understand how to satisfy a customer, or put that product into the marketplace. And that’s probably the one of the themes I wanted to hit on growth and that is the importance, and I’m not a marketer, let me just clarify that. But marketing, which is basically I think, it was two functions.

One is listening to the marketplace to make sure that you build a product that the marketplace wants. And then the second one is making sure the marketplace is aware of what you’ve got. So it’s both halves of that and I think marketing is probably the single biggest key to building a business going forward, assuming that you have your executive team on the same page. Because if you have a good marketing, you have a good executive team.

I actually think in this day and age. Capital is not that hard to come by. And so if you’re a venture back company, you can get the capital. The VCs that we tend to work with have never been cash constrained. They’re more constrained by time. And so if you can’t perform, they don’t want to fund, but if you can perform, they’ll be, you’re pretty much as much money as you need.

Doug Hall: Interesting. So on our theme of growth, what’s been the most helpful in growing Lighthouse and is that the same as what you’ve observed in your client base?

Peter Adams: Well, so, and the gold rush in California and the West Coast here. The people that actually went out and tried to mind to gold weren’t the ones that made the money. It was the providers to those people. Levi Strauss is a classic example, blue jeans. They’re the ones who make the money. So we are boutique company. We’re not trying to be the next fortune 500 company, that’s not what we do.

Our growth is somewhat inherently limited by the fact that what I want to do is I want to be the company that enables other companies to be successful. I want those miners to go out and find the gold and reap the rewards and see if they’re very successful. Then we also are successful as well, riding on their coattails. That all works pretty well for us, but it also means that we are a smaller business. All of our clients come to us by referral. I’ve only in this last week, literally last week that I have somebody approach us after looking at our website and this call us up. That is number one and I’ve been doing this for now that 35 years. So

Doug Hall: That’s kind of slowly generation. I agree.

Peter Adams: Well it, slow but steady and it’s a lot of reasons that I do that. There’s a reason I do that in my business, but if that’s not the business model that you have. Or your listeners have out there and that’s why I kind of stressed the specifically thinking about marketing. Because marketing is the magic sauce that allows you to know what the marketplace wants is willing to spend money on, and then make sure that your products fit that too.

If you have a good fit to the product, the market and the market knows you exist, they will beat a path to your door. That’s the role of marketing. You know too often in silicon valley in particular, I see just great technology mouse traps for which there is no market. It’s really cool technology, but nobody’s buying. That doesn’t build a business.

I’ve seen the products out there that are actually not as good, clearly inferior products and they win the day, so I’ll date myself. You remember the old VHS versus Betamax.

Doug Hall: A big, big battle. They battle.

Peter Adams: Beta absolutely superior technology, no question about it. It took only a matter of seconds to see the difference. No question, absolutely better technology, but VHS just completely took over the marketplace because Sony could not. They could not market the Betamax product and technology very well or Panasonic market and VHS brilliantly, so the better technology doesn’t always win. The better marketing almost always wins.

Doug Hall: That’s a really good point. I think you’re right. First of all, I by the time custody that doing great work for clients and having a referral lead generation is a proven way to grow. I commend you on getting your first web based lead. So the challenge is that’s awesome man. That the challenges is. How do you ramp that up? How do you get more awareness out there? And I’m not saying today you and I are going to propose a solution to our listeners, but that is the question, Is for. You operate among a scores and scores of IT service providers who to the clients. Many of you look alike. 

Peter Adams: Yup. We do. We all look alike. We also promised the same things is a big the problem.

Doug Hall: That’s a problem, a big problem.

Peter Adams: And so, you know, that’s one of the things I’ve been struggling with is how do I differentiate ourselves? And so what we’ve been doing, we always doing experiments. We try to experiment with different narratives in the marketplace to see what plays, what fits different offers all still on the inside is still the same group of people, the same skill sets that can deliver it. But we speak about it differently in the different market segments.

You know at this point in the game were speaking mostly about the work you do in ERP systems because that seems to be getting a lot of traction now. Helping companies build process and build systems to automate those processes seems to be the thing that’s really driving our new business at this point and that tends to pull in some of the other aspects of our business, which is all fine, but that one thing I want to get known for doing ERP systems and being world class at that and we don’t resell them because I’m not interested in the resale.

I think the implementation, the quality that implementation matters more than the system they buy. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say you can take an average system, and do a really good job of implementing it and you can get great results. You can also take a really great ERP system, implemented poorly and get garbage. In fact, what you do is you actually get garbage faster and that doesn’t really help your business. So that presentation really is the key. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Doug Hall: Yeah. I second you on that. I think you’re absolutely right on. So it’s actually getting your message to your ideal prospect know for, in this case, if he focused on manufacturing, it’s identifying, well what kind of manufacturers that look like? Is it in that sort of 10 to 500 million or is it more like $20 million for 80 million?

Peter Adams: Interesting.

Doug Hall: Narrow that down and-

Peter Adams: If I narrow it down, it probably is closer to that 20 to 80 million. Probably a really good way of putting it. That seems to be where the biggest turnover is. For those companies who almost all companies started on QuickBooks and then when they started having issues with inventory control, MRP, foreign currency transactions, anything like that.

All of a sudden QuickBooks doesn’t really handle that well. Ventilated, developed excel spreadsheets around that or maybe they try and do a bolt on product into QuickBooks and buys them another year or two, but it’s not a good solution. It’s a stopgap measure. The problem is those companies tend to suffer because they wait too long to take. The next step is that QuickBooks really ceases to be a viable tool for automating your business processes. Once you start leading things, but it doesn’t do.

And I want to pick up, I want to help companies at that point. Invent a new future to take their business to the next level. And typically, we do a lot of work. I’m calculating ROI because everybody’s interested what their return on the investment. And I will say for most of ERP projects we work on the return is within one year. That’s even some fairly expensive ERP systems now. Wow.

I don’t always recommend those, but my point is that an effective system should have a very quick ROI, right? It should not be expensive to the enterprise. It should actually save you money pretty quickly.

Doug Hall: I mean, it may be a sizable investment, but you’re talking about a 12 month return raising pretty amazing, I think most, any business owner would be pretty happy with a significant IT return in a year I to.

Peter Adams: And there’s lots of ways to get really creative about how to phrase it, how to do the implementation to mitigate upfront costs and stuff. Anyway, but the point is really that, a good system should, show a return and when you can show a return that quickly. What it tells me is they waited too long to take this step. It actually shouldn’t be that faster return, but right there already suffering with too many inefficiencies right now.

Doug Hall: Right, right. Two or three years would make sense, would be reasonable for a year is like wow, you waited too long.

Peter Adams: Exactly.

Doug Hall: So, here’s a question that I think I’d like you to comment on what you and your partner do versus what you observe an excellent client situation is. Or do you have any favorite leadership tools or management tools that you use or recommend to people outside of the direct product you’re helping them with? So it’s something that vein of growth, like growing leadership capability or growing management capability.

Peter Adams: Yeah, so the number one challenge that I think all companies have, mine included is communication. So making sure that multiple people are on the same page, heading in the same direction with the same objectives, the same timeframes in mind. That’s actually. It’s easy to say and it’s very hard to do.

But there are some ways to help them get there and some of that’s through some technology tools, but technology is not communication. It’s just a medium for communication, often misused. familiar with theory of email where you basically drowned in email, but you know, getting through your inbox everyday doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

But email is a tool for communication, along with internal websites along with basically chat rooms or discussion threads, like slack and Microsoft just released their product called pims. They’re trying to compete with slack. These are all tools but they can be leveraged in ways to augment communication.

Communication is also a cultural thing as a business … I’ve been in businesses where everything is very secretive. You’re walking up and down the hallway and all the officers have doors and all the doors are closed and that basically is an indicator of a certain type of culture that’s not particularly communicative. On the other hand, I see these infrastructures are offices where everybody’s open. There’s no walls anywhere, everybody’s talking, it’s in central areas and the noise all over the place.

That is a picture of communication, but it also doesn’t guarantee better communication, but that is used by people to try this, right? But it’s using a bit of businesses to try and format good communication, embracing down all those barriers like walls and doors. And so those kinds of companies tend to have a better return when they leverage technology because they are inherently trying to solve that communication problem.

And so what we do is we help our companies, we communicate fairly effectively is one of the things I think is our strong suit. And so we come into our clients, we kind of set the tone for what effective communication looks like.

And just to give you a kind of a really mundane, silly example, which I call it email black hole, I sent an email to somebody and I get no reply, no response. So did they get? did they read it? Are they acting on it? Questions were, what’s going to happen? And so I look for an acknowledgement back and the acknowledgement back to me, thanks got it, know whatever. I want to know that they got it. I want to know that they actually read it and I think that is a simple etiquette. Fine. But that also leads to just a whole bunch of email going on.

So what if in the subject line of the email, you basically you could write in the word decision and that way when somebody sends me an email and the subject line that has the word decision, I know that I have to read that email because there’s something, I have to make a decision, I have to take action.

Otherwise if it shows up like nothing. And so there’s a whole bunch of keywords that we can help train our customers on how to put that in the subject lines so people know what to do with their email. Another thing that we tend to do people. Yeah.

Doug Hall: Let me interject something  that’s a great idea internally, but it seems to me that you can also get value externally with it.

Peter Adams: Oh absolutely, we do that with our customers and all of a sudden they start responding in time and so we don’t about actually having to go through and train them. We naturally lead and they see the effectiveness of that because it makes it so much easier for them and that they-

Doug Hall: Yeah, you’re communicating, you’re communicating and expectation in the subject line.

Peter Adams: correct Yes.

Doug Hall: Thanks for the interruption, you had another thought going.

Peter Adams: Well, I don’t know how many email messages you get. I get about 500 emails a day, so. And I think he got me to not let people get a lot more than I do, but I’ve probably 400 of those. I’m CC’d on there actually just FYI type emails. So if I don’t segment those off, my inbox becomes overwhelming and I have to go through 500 emails every day. Right. So I just write myself a quick rule that says if I’m not on the two line, I’ll just take that email and I’ll push it off on a side of the mailbox.

Maybe I read, maybe I don’t, I don’t make a promise to read them, but I’ve got him if I ever have to refer to them, so that paper, like my, my mailbox from $500, $100, $100, a manageable number. It’s a lot, but it’s still a manageable number. Now I can go through the subject lines and I can sort by those and I can say here’s the ones that are urgent and here’s the ones needed a decision. Here’s the require some sort of action. Here’s the one says delegation. I can go through those kinds of things, amount.

I can very quickly go through my box, get the stuff that matters so I keep the velocity and the pace of the business going and that works way better. Only takes me an hour or so a day to go through all those messages.

Doug Hall: Awesome. Great. Those are two really good actionable tips and if people don’t understand how to write a rule for outlook or whatever, that’s a very good reason for them to reach out to you Peter, you can gather.

Peter Adams: That’s pretty easy stuff, but yeah,

Doug Hall: They can google that up. Fair enough. Fair enough. Now I do want you to think of something in the background. one of the things that I love asking on these podcasts is, is there any particular business book you’re reading right now that’s making an impression on you? And if you have any chestnuts? generally favorite business books? So kind of mull that over a little bit. While you’re doing that, is there any other management tool that you guys have found helpful in managing your team to meet customer expectations and. These two email ones are great tips, but any other favorite tools or things like you mentioned slack or teams, do you push those into your clients?

Peter Adams: Only as appropriate, what’s interesting is the solution. You’re the tool is not necessarily the best tool for all customers, but yeah, the world of technology which is enormous today by the way, and it changes on an hourly basis. It’s just giant pool of tools and we can bring to bear. And so we just looked at what the customer’s trying to produce, what the culture is, what their vision is, how they’re trying to get there, the skills are key, and then we can figure out what the most appropriate tools are to help them get there.

Doug Hall: Excellent That seems like a very rational way to go rather than the brightest shiny object technology actually look at the problem and make a recommendation.

Peter Adams: Cause the tool is the tool. You take two companies, one of them buys x, Y, Z tool, I may implement it and it changes their whole business.

Another kind of says, well look, they bought that. I need to buy that. So they go out into by the same tool and it just leave it on the shelf. What didn’t it a cost. So it’s not about the tool, it’s about how you think about your business, how you drive it, how you implement that tool, and how you really drive its usage. If you can do those things, then you can capitalize on all the promise, productivity benefits that it supposed to deliver.

Most companies don’t do that and you get mediocrity, you get IT that’s like that’s a cost instead of a real driver of your business.

Doug Hall: Yeah, there you go. So I’m now the book question. Are you reading? Are Interesting right now.

Peter Adams: I am I just finished the book, which I found really good. It’s called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss view as I guess the former really need hostage negotiator from the FBI. We use books and I don’t want to give it away the more you can interpret it on your own, but he basically talks about negotiation skills, which are the fundamentals of communication and how that translates from his world and hostage negotiations to the business world and they’re wonderful parallels. Anyway, it’s a pretty quick read. I thought it was an excellent book and it’s very pragmatically applicable. So that’s number one book in the last few weeks.

Doug Hall: That’s a great recommendation. The other kind of angle is, you know, think of all the things we’ve talked about during the podcast if you had to net it all down to sort of your number one piece of advice for somebody that’s building a business, they’re not just sitting on it, keeping it warm, but they’re really building their business. What’s your name? What’s your best advice to them if they’re listening in on this?

Peter Adams: Yeah, so I would say the number one thing is to have a plan. Now I’m not talking about a business plan, like you’re going to go out and try and get somebody will loan you money or whatever. I’m talking about a plan. What market do I want? What offer do I want to make? How do I get to be world class? If that one thing, who do I need on my team to deliver that? How do I get them? How do I attract them? Have that plan in place. If you don’t have a plan, then you get pushed around by the market and that may be okay. But at that point what you’re doing is you’re treading water until you develop a plan. Because until you have a plan, you’re not going to grow.

There’s no destination, you’re just going to tread water unless you just get lucky and I’d never want to discount luck, but if you really want to build a business, you’ve got to have a plan.

Doug Hall: That makes perfect sense. And it sounds like very wise advice. Born from experience. So if people want to know more about you and Lighthouse, what’s the best way for them to get ahold of you?

Peter Adams: Well, probably the website which is @lighthouseis.com. That’s probably the best way to get a hold of this. My contact information is readily available. I’ll do accept phone calls and be happy talking with you.

Doug Hall: Perfect. That’s all we can ask for you.  lighthouseis.com Peter Adams. You’ve been a delightful guest. Shared great wisdom. I thank you. I look forward to seeing you soon. And everybody out there don’t hesitate to reach out to Peter. I mean this is not normal IT stuff. This is business wisdom with IT wrapped around it. So that’s a little something special. So thanks again Peter.

Thanks everybody for joining us on Go for Growth podcast. And we’ll see on the next episode.