Welcome And Guest Overview

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Episode of Industry Leader Insights, sponsored by Co-Fanancial Group here with Chad Co. We interview leaders from around the country that share their wisdom and their insights to help us all become better. Today we have Gary Grossman, a longtime friend of mine, 25 years of extracting insights, validating perspectives, and turning complex challenges into actionable strategies that deliver real, quantifiable results. He has guided organizations through growth, restructuring, large-scale transformations, and so much more. He's worked in over 170 companies in six countries. He brings a deep operational expertise and data-driven approach to help businesses streamline processes, improve profitability, and maximize enterprise value. Gary, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Thanks, Chad. Appreciate this opportunity.

AI Is A Vehicle Not A Goal

SPEAKER_01 0:58

So the opportunity is this AI is the buzzword of today that we're all investing in, we're all part of, and we're all using in our companies, whether a small company or a large company. You have a very deep conviction around what AI is and how it should be used inside of companies.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Yeah. Chad, AI is not. Many people said, you know, we have to do AI. Our company has to get into AI. And even some people say we're afraid to get into AI. So it would be like AI is a vehicle. It's something that allows it takes you from here to there. It's like a plane, right? Going from walking, riding to a plane. So this plane is taken off, and there are people who are afraid of flying. The opportunity here is that when you're doing, when you're preparing your company to leverage AI, you want to do it thoughtfully and pragmatically and prescriptively so that you don't rush into it and end up with a failure and going back to you know horse and buggy, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

So when you talk about failure with AI, I don't get it. AI is the answer to everything. I put an AI, my scorecard on my golf, and it gives me the score. Like AI reads and looks at and analyzes everything. Why can't we rely on it for everything we do? I don't I don't understand why not, Carrie.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Right.

Why Business Data Confuses AI

SPEAKER_00 2:31

So AI does make some things easier and some simple things easier. But when you get into a company, it's a whole different ball of axe. Your your golf score, though complex in the way that you finally figured out how to get one that's good, is it's a whole different ball game. You're dealing with sales information, general ledger information, accounting, so accounting information, uh purchasing information, all sorts of different ARAP and all sorts of projections and forecasts and what have you. And when you're combining all that and you want AI to give you an answer, if you will, then you have to help it understand what's what. And when you're doing that, so one of the keys that we focus on is having a solid set of turns, that everything's defined the same way. With a golf score, a golf score is a golf score, right? But when you're talking about sales, when you're talking about cost, when you're talking about profitability, those numbers mean different things depending on what area of the business you're in.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

So now I'm starting to understand that the AI is good for simple things, simple tasks, good questions. It can give you some feedback so that you could use it in your company to help you make logical decisions based upon the people and the and the structure of your company.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

So it helps you to understand your company and what's going on. But if you want your company to be able to understand how to use it and how to leverage it for the company's benefit to take you to a new level, you have to make sure you consider the the employees themselves. You have to be able to, and the quality of the data that they're that you're using and the quality of the systems that you have.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yep. So as I do podcasting and talking to experts and getting these insights, human beings have a soul. AI doesn't have a soul. And so AI gives you answers and gives you insights, but it's not giving you insights based on the people you're interacting with who I believe take the data differently. And in some cases, if the data's wrong, they don't even know that it's wrong. So it should all be double-checked. Correct.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

And these should all things you do. Right. So we double check it. There should always be a human in the loop to double check to make sure that solutions that are implemented have a human in the loop to validate and verify. One of the biggest, so doing ARP implementations and other system implementations, accounting systems, what have you, for many years, and doing reporting and analysis for over 30 years, where I had to reverse engineer spreadsheets where they'd say, here's a spreadsheet, figure out where to get that information out of the system.

Organizational Intelligence People Never Document

SPEAKER_00 5:12

One of the things that people overlook the importance and the value of is what we call organizational intelligence. So we have artificial intelligence, this is organizational intelligence. And that is the intelligence that exists in people's heads that they don't ever write down. It's the, oh, by the way, we do it this way in this situation, we do it this way in this situation. And if you just take technologists and you say, automate our AR functionality or our purchasing or whatever it is, they'll take it based on what a standard approach is and maybe a couple of key people. But it's the secret people that the cotter pins in the organization that are hidden that have the real deep understanding of how things actually get done on a daily basis that's missed. And that's why AI solutions often fail, because it's missing that piece. And then you end up going back, as I said before, to the horse and buggy. You go back to Excel, back to paper, and back to all these other things that they used before, because suddenly nobody trusts it.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

So as I'm interacting and talking to people about AI and what we do, are you contrarian to how AI is going to be used? Or are you actually going to help implement and have companies use it a lot, but use it in a more strategic way?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

I am grateful for that question. I I do believe that it's a lever to help companies change and to grow at the speed that they're actually capable of growing at, as opposed to where their systems have held them up to this point. The challenge is truly is truly getting in and helping and understanding how it fits best, lowest common denominator in the company, and and then figuring out how to what fits best in different areas of the company. They can leverage AI at the executive level. But different parts of the company will use it differently, depending on their sophistication level and the requirements and what their true initiatives are. They have to truly understand what they want, not out of AI, what they want to create, what they want to understand, what they want to build. And when they get that clear, yeah, AI is a great tool to help them get there. So I'm not a contrarian that they shouldn't use it and leverage it. It's just how they see it and how fast they rush into it without truly understanding some of the extra sort of one or two steps back for five, 10 steps forward.

Venn Strategy Finance Tech Operations Together

SPEAKER_01 7:49

So, so, Gary, as we talk about AI, I've known you and your company for a lot of years, Venn Strategy Group, where you have the different circles, and then some circles intersect and then some don't. Describe to us how Venn Strategy Group works, and then give us some examples pre-AI as to what you used to do for companies. And then my follow-up question is going to be how do you use AI currently in the companies you work with today?

SPEAKER_00 8:18

All right. So the first question, the three circles. So the benefit of Venn is that we are we understand finance, technology, and operations, the people, the data, and then the vision of the company and what it wants to do. And we the the area in the middle where that all intersects, traditionally companies are siloed. So they would all run it independently and they all do their own thing. Sales sells stuff, they throw it over the wall to operations, operations does their best to figure it out, or they swear at sales saying we can't really do this. They do their best and they run into problems there. In the meantime, accounting is over here somewhere going, how are we supposed to keep track of all this stuff? And so now all three of these areas are working independently. What we do is we bring them all together and understand that they have to intersect, they have to collaborate in order to understand how to work best together for the benefit of the business, the voice of the business. So the business has its own purpose. It was brought to life for a reason, and we help it realize its purpose in that way. So AI, matter of fact, I literally, Chad just got off a call this morning, and there is a small company where an owner is struggling to run. It's an engineer who took over his father's business. Real story. And he's not really comfortable with running the company. We're going to help them understand which of the people in the and there are people in the business that are sort of taking advantage of the situation. We're going to find out what those people are. And some of this operations we can streamline with AI. And on the other hand, so people aren't going to lose their job to AI, but if they're not doing their job, we can leverage some things with AI. The goal, my goal of AI, and any initiative that I've ever been brought into is never to get rid of quality people. The goal is to save to streamline the operations and the and the functions so that they're running as clean and clear as possible with a with an accountability structure that makes sense. And so that these great people can do more and add benefit. They're greater assets to the business. And the combination of those makes the company be what it's meant to be.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

So, Gary, give me a little bit of your background. How do you get into this whole Ven building companies, take talking to CEOs who are uncomfortable, and that you're the guy to come in and build this business and maybe have it grow double, triple, or quadruple? How did you become this guy?

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Oh, that's a good question. I work on good questions. Exactly. I started in in fine and I started in finance and technology and leveraging technology for the benefit of the company. So reporting and analysis, data analytics, what have you. That's always been my motto. So when I started in accounting, and and they said, Well, we can't get this to balance, it has to balance. Accounting always balances, so you just have to figure out how to make it happen. And then I switched to reporting and analysis and data analytics. And they said, here's a report that I need, here's the system, there's no map between the two, but we need to know every single transaction that creates these numbers and figure it out. And so year after year after year, I just kept doing those types of things and solving problems that that other people would give up on. And it just sort of rewired my brain to think differently about what's possible. The other thing is, Chad, is that when I go into businesses that have been doing things the same way for years, I don't know how it's been done. So when I'm, you know, I leverage my ignorance for my clients' benefits. I say, I don't know how it's always been done. So how do you think it should be done? And we talk through it. We talk through what's possible, not what's been done and not what's why it can't be done. And that's how we get there. And that's what you do with AI as well. What's possible with AI in order to get us somewhere new that we haven't been before? And how do we do that?

SPEAKER_01 12:58

I feel like I'm in a blender. And I know that you have a blender mentality kind of concept that you want to share. So go ahead because right now I've taken you all the way back to the beginning where you're a finance and technology major, going from accounting to corporate business development and growth for the companies you work with. You're dealing with a lot of people out there, we know this, that don't have the confidence and don't have the ability to lead in a way that they want to, and they don't take the care, they don't take the classes or have the courage to be able to become bigger or stronger. So they bring you in. But now that you're there, what's this whole blender mentality

The Blender Mentality And Bad Inputs

SPEAKER_01 13:35

about?

SPEAKER_00 13:35

So they're a little they're separate. So they bring me in because as just like I did, I'll separate them out. They bring me in because when I used to train on software, I knew the software. My approach was I didn't have to train on some sort of canned training approach. I trained the people based on how they learned best and what they wanted to learn. And then we adjusted the training. There was a time when I went to South Africa to do a training, and the the examples in the book were based on US states. So the data didn't make any sense to the people in South Africa. So we took the book, we closed it up, we left them in a stack, and I said, Come back with all your examples and we'll learn the software based on the stuff that you want to create, the the information that you want to get out of the system so that you can make smarter, better mission-critical decisions. The blender mentality is people now who are rushing into AI, they say, Well, I'll take all my spreadsheets and I'll throw it into AI and AI will give me an answer. Well, if you took a bunch of stuff and threw it into a blender, because all of the ingredients, not stuff, if you take the ingredients and you put them all into a blender and you're not clear about what the mixture was supposed to be, you end up with a disaster. And the same thing with with AI and with if you throw everything, sorry, if you throw everything into the set, you upload it to AI to a claw or chat or any of these systems, and you say, here's a bunch of financials, tell me what you think. But it will give and it will use some pretty nifty assumptions, but it's not necessarily right for you because you haven't given it the clarity, the context, and the uh specifics about what each piece that you put in means to the final picture. So the art of using AI is not dummy proof where you just shove a bunch of stuff into AI and it'll give you an answer, it'll give you something and it will look pretty, but it may not be right. And the people who enter the data, the people, or it may you may want it to access a folder, for instance, and the person who isn't on board with AI didn't put the data in the folder correctly, or they used last year's instead of this year's. AI is gonna grab it and say, Oh, this you probably meant this to be 26 instead of 25. So I'm gonna assume it's 26, and I'll forecast for you forward for you. Literally, that's what it will do because you told it it was gonna get 26 information, and you put a file in there that's 25, it'll say you must have meant this was 26 and forecast it forward, and nobody will know.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

So that's Gary. My head is spinning, right? So we have AI, now we have a notebook album.

Pick Tools By Outcomes Not Hype

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Google has one, uh X has one, everyone's having this, they all look very similar. Why do all the AIs look so similar as we use them with the prompts and with the different things that we do? Do you know?

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Yeah, they all have they they're intended, they look similar. We go back to your golf game, it looks similar. All golf clubs look so driver is a driver unless you're really good. And when you're good, you can tell the nuances and the differences. And so different clubs. I had, as you well know, we'll tell everybody else, I had clubs for 25 years. I couldn't hit anything. I got a new set of clubs and it changed the game because I was can that I was dedicated to making that change and dedicated to understand how the new clubs work. The key is understanding what is the specialty of each of these AI tools and what they do best and leveraging them for what they do best. And by the way, for money companies, they're building automation and solutions. There are they hire AI architects to design solutions for them. One of the things we pride ourselves in is that we're not technologists on the front end, but we are outcome architects. So we help people think through what they want out of the system so that they ask all the questions and get all the clarifications and validations into the system that the architects are building.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

So, what you said, which is so different from all the other people I'm talking to, the people that I talk to about AI are the ones that are creating the inputs at the beginning, the architect of the beginning and how to think and which AI to use, whether it's Notebook LM or Perplexity or Gemini. But what you're saying is you're more focused as a company on the output so that the data they get they could be used for anyone sitting in any seat in the company, and that you work very hard on getting every employee to have buy-in, that this isn't taking your job, this is enhancing the company's well-being. So the goal is that it could grow.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

That's correct.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yeah, so I heard that correctly.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

You did hear it correctly. Not every employee, right? Every employee at their rate. So one of the things that we joke about when it's called dairy load. And that means that I hold the hands of the people I'm working with and say, look, we're gonna cross this chasm together at whatever speed you need to cross it at. And we'll show you that what we're going to be doing is just a little bit faster way and a little more efficient way of doing exactly what you're doing now. And the art of shepherding them through that thought process at their rate, so meeting them where they are is what makes these projects successful.

Planning With Leaders And Setting Real Goals

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Gary, you know, being a co-financial group, one of the things that I do is I take people through an abundant life roadmap, which is a blueprint when we're done with your values, your goals to be able to reach a destination through the planning. Will you share with me some of the input? So now you're sitting with this CEO or president who just reached out to you, said, I inherited the business. I'm a little bit nervous about where I'm going. I'd like someone to come in there and help me create a plan. What does your planning process look like when you walk inside of a company? Are you wearing a suit or do you just go in with a sport coat?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Just a sport coat? I mean, I guess it depends or jeans, depending on mean in a in a sport coat, depending on where we're going or golf shirt. Because I want to be one of them. My I am with them, I am not above them. I don't know. I I'm just here to be them and help them past their mind blocks and perhaps some of the other things that have stopped them or slowed them down from from being what they're meant to be. And the companies, companies have a voice. So you're if I when I go into a company and I ask them the question, if your business had a voice, what would it say? And often they say, Well, we need more sales. Okay, if your business were a child, how would it feel it's being treated? Oh well, it's kind of stressed and and and you know, all kinds of other negative things. And the answer is how do we get how do we fix some of that? And if we were to able to fix all that, fix all that, what would happen? What could this business be? And that's where we start. What could it be if we got all that out of the way? 30 million, this $8 million business can be 30 million, but you never even thought because you're busy focused on all these other things that that are you know hobbling it in the meantime? Let's figure out what's really holding it back.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

And and so what's holding it back is the people, and you want to be able to help it grow. So, what is your what is your thoughts around these big audacious goals? You just went from eight or 10 million to 30 million. Why not 50 million or a hundred million? I know that you could get companies there. Are you are you trying to be big and audacious enough, or are we thinking too small?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

We have they'd been at 8 million for years. If you talk to them about 50 or 100, they say you're crazy. Okay. Yeah. They may think I'm crazy to begin with, which is all right, but it's better that we start with a smaller goal and we bet. If we get to 10, if we get to 15, they still win. If we get to 30, they win big. And if they get to 50 or 100, they get to tell me I was wrong.

Walking Around Beats Purely Remote Work

unknown 22:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

So now that you've done that, the companies have grown. You've worked with over 150 companies in your career and oh in over six countries. So now someone hires you from another country. How are you interacting? And what are you doing with these people in other countries? And how are you working there? Are you remote? Are you are you in person? What are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 22:48

I do, I always start like to start being in person because I like to feel the energy and watch. Uh there's an old management philosophy of management by walking around. It's very old. And that is what I do. I walk I have learned more by watching the interactions, the dynamics, the the things that go on, listening to what happens. I mean, I went to Japan to help with with a project once, and they had a six-month project that they were planning on. And we were looking in the data and the systems and talking to people and found out that we could I we came up with a solution in a week that could be implemented in another week to save them six months' worth of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new system. So there's ways just seeing things and and thinking, turning it a little bit different to see what's possible.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

So are you mostly working with manufacturing companies or service companies?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

We do it's probably two-thirds, one third. I do work with manufacturing distribution a lot, but service companies I've worked with wealth advisors as well. There was a wealth advisory firm that where eight individuals came together with completely different styles and completely different methodologies, and they were required to come together as one team, and their success that they were going to be compensated on was if they succeed as one team. And they had never worked together as one team. So the first part was to figure out who's what roles. They're all used to being leaders of their own domain, and we figured out how to leverage the people and their systems. There was a one rainmaker who knew how to how to bring in money left and right, and the rest of these were pretty good. We've learned from him on some of the systems that he used, shared them with the rest of the group, and then figured out how to get each of the members of the group to find their position so the whole group would be better and more profitable.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

So it's like dealing with doctors or surgeons. They all have opinions, they have attitude, they all work on their own little island. Give us a couple of examples of how people have come to the Gary side or the Venn strategy side and really started to dig in, and then how you help them with that.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Let's see.

Integrations Private Equity And NetSuite Stories

SPEAKER_00 25:22

We had one holding company. So I like to do work with private equity companies because they don't always know what they're getting, but they know what they want where this piece of the puzzle fits. And so we had a holding company that was acquiring four businesses one year, and they wanted to get them all on one system. So we brought them all into NetSuite and helped them figure out how to. We took a base system that this that the holding company had said they want to use, adjusted it, tweaked it, and at the same time took the nuances of each of the companies themselves and the people in those companies and shepherded them through a process where they learned what they where they needed to be and they shared what they knew. So they felt special about what they could contribute and they still felt excited about the opportunity to grow without being overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

So you did it good.

Books Resources And How To Connect

SPEAKER_01 26:24

So I see behind you that you have a book. What are some of your favorite books? If if people are going to start learning about what you do and AI and this whole integration, and failure is not an option, what are a couple of books that you love to recommend to people?

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Well, of course, I love all your books.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Thank you for them. They could go to cofinancial.com, by the way, and download your financial dream house.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Yep. Yep. Chad, your books are great. You know, books these days are tricky. I'm not reading as much. My book is is called Becoming a Successful Manager, but it's mostly about building problem-solving cultures, which is core to what we do. There's so many books these days are so great. I'm not going to recommend anything specific, but I do know that that we're part of Success Coach, and that's been amazing. And all of Dan Sullivan's books are fantastic to read. They're easy to read for people like myself who are not fantastic readers. 10x is easier than 2x was a book that you recommended to me. Leveraging some of the principles in that were was fantastic. It just changes the way you think. And that's that's really what it's about for me is helping people think differently about what's possible.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Well, I like even the who and not how, which is getting the right people on the bus to do the job. And I think they're the who that a lot of people don't realize they need in order to get where they want to go. So everyone knows where they want to go, but many people have a ship without a rudder. And so they're not getting where they want to go or being they want to be because they don't have the people to inspire them to do it the right way. And people are afraid of making mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

They are afraid of making mistakes, but what's ironic, Chad, is that they they listen to people who are selling them based on their own agenda. I don't have an agenda other than to help them be the best they can be. And so the that's that's what's interesting about people and their decisions on their who's or they feel they can't.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

So you're doing this over 20 years, you're successful at it, you've watched people succeed, you know what the puzzle pieces need to be put together to make them and help them succeed. And I would highly recommend that everyone reaches out to Gary to be able to at least have a conversation and dialogue about how Gary could help you, whether it's doing AI the right way or management or sales or service. But if you bring them into your company and you actually let them walk around and see what's going on, I promise you, from my experience, you're gonna have some wisdom and insights that you never expected from talking to Gary. Thanks, Chad. What's the best way for them to find you? I have Venstrategy.com and your email. They can connect you on LinkedIn, they can reach out to you. You're happy to talk to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Happy to talk to anybody, and we can just have a chat about what's going on. And I'm happy to share something. My goal is that you get a win out of our conversation, whether or not we do business together or not. If you have something that's struggling, that you're struggling with, and you want to chat about it, let's chat and figure out how I can help you think a little differently or watch for things that you might need that'll save you from going down a rabbit hole that will cost you a lot in the future.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Gary, thank you so much. Value your time being here. Leadership insights is about helping people get wisdom and insights they didn't know that they wanted or needed. At Co Financial Group, we help you retire and stay comfortably comfortably retired. And on that note, we're gonna say thank you very much, show a quick disclosure and wrap it up. Thanks, Chad. Appreciate you. You bet, thank you.