Mike Figliuolo on Running a Successful Training Firm.
Mike Figliuolo is a McKinsey alum and West Point graduate. He is the founder and Managing Director of ThoughtLeadersLLC, which provides training to corporations that is inspired by the types of internal training that consultants receive at McKinsey and other top firms.
He is also the author of three books:
One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership
The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, and Get it Approved
I heard about Mike’s firm from several Umbrex members, who have helped deliver some training sessions for Mike, and I recognized his name because Mike was the very first person to interview me when I applied to McKinsey, seventeen years ago. So it was nice to reconnect.
Mike is my guest on Episode 29 of Unleashed-How to Thrive as an Independent Professional.
Mike gives an overview of his most popular courses and talks through lessons learned he has had in building a training firm. Lesson 1 — somewhat counterintuitive — don’t customize your training! I like the metaphor he uses to explain why: you need to be at the baseline or at the net.
Mike shares the business model of how the fees get split four ways each time a session is delivered: one share for the person who wrote the course; one share for the person who sold that particular session; one person who delivered the session; and one share for the house.
Do take a look at his firm’s website: thought leaders llc.com
Mike is happy to write a check to consultants who help him develop new business, so if know some clients that could benefit from his firm’s services, he’d love to hear from you.
Will Bachman: Tell us a bit about your practice, Thought Leaders.
Mike Figliuolo: We’re a leadership development and training firm. Most of what we do is comprised of in-classroom training. We fly to the client, spend a day or half day teaching, and then we go home. We touch on leadership, communication, problem solving, decision making, strategic planning, and a bunch of others. We teach all the things your professional staff needs to know that nobody ever teaches them.
We do a lot of other work that’s related to leadership, things that we picked up in corporate or in the military, decision making, some strategy stuff that we learned as consultants combined with what we learned in corporate strategy groups. The work we do in problem solving and what we call structure thought in communication are essentially directly consulting skills.
I’ve been running the firm since 2004 and went full-time with it in 2008. It’s been an absolute blast getting to serve some really awesome companies, and work with some incredibly talented people.
What does a day in one of your courses look like?
We start by giving people an overview of the methods so they see what the entire process looks like, then it’s good old adult learning theory. It’s, “Here’s a step in the process, here’s an example, now do an exercise.” Step, example, exercise. It’s very heavy on the experiential in the classroom, and then the last third of the day we do a case study where we give people a more complex situation and they get to apply the method.
Have you found that your course content has evolved over time?
When I built the course there were a few iterations of it to really get the exercises and flow and timing right. But once we had that right and people were giving really favorable reviews, we stopped tinkering with it.
We worked on a seven-point scale on our feedback forms, and we’ve been asking the same fourteen questions for fourteen years. When your results come back between 6.2 and 7 for every one of those answers you stop tinkering. You got it right. Every once in a while one of my team members will say, “Hey Mike, we should really revise the course.” And I say, “Okay, so if we revise it, our scores are going to move up how much? From like 6.2 to 6.3?” And they say, “Yeah, maybe.” I said, “Okay, is the client going to pay us any extra money for that movement?” And the answer is “No.” So why would we revise the course?
What are the areas where you find people have the biggest “AHA!” moment during a course?
I think it’s really about flipping the way they approach communications. Folks come in and we ask them how they’re building their presentations, and they say, “I have all the information and then I boil it down to its essence.” Rather than asking, “What am I trying to communicate” and then getting the relevant information, they’re starting with all the information they have and trying to distill it down. When you do that you end up with this burnt sticky mess on the bottom of the pan because you don’t have a clear structure, you don’t have a clear narrative, and you darn well don’t have a sense of what your audience really wants to hear. The big “AHA!” starts with that answer.
How much of a half-life do your lessons have, and how do you extend the impact?
There are a lot of things we do to cement the training and give them support. Every class can be distilled down to a one-page laminated cheat sheet and people walk out of class with it. We put those in their hands. I was back at a client one time five years later, and a guy stopped me in the hall and said, “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.” He reached into his portfolio, pulled out his cheat sheet, and said, “I use it all the time.”
Leaders attend the class, then hold their people accountable. We also provide after-the-fact coaching via phone call or email or Skype. We’ll go back to the client anywhere from four to twelve weeks later and be there for a day and people can schedule time with us to get additional coaching. We also have applied concepts versions of the class where we can go back and do a half-day version of the course where they bring in a presentation they’re working on and we apply the entire method to that presentation.
The last two things we do as far as reinforcement for the structured thought and communications course … I just had my book come out on that subject, and that book is there with additional detail beyond what they get in the presentation and their course guide. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Linda.com, but it’s online video-based training and I’ve got 15 courses in the library, and another four in post-production. People can use them for ongoing reinforcement.
Tell me about the business development side, and what kind of folks are delivering your training?
I’ve got a team of 28 and they’re all independent contractors. Some are executives at large corporations, some are at smaller companies, some are entrepreneurs, some are full-time executive coaches. Some are ex-consultants, some are long-time corporate folks, so it’s a bit of an eclectic mix, which I really like because we can put different backgrounds on the podium for different clients.
It’s a pretty good model because it gives them flexibility and it gives me flexibility. From a business development side the incentive is all with the instructors. For any engagement that we do we split the proceeds four different ways. A portion of it goes to the house, some of it goes to the person who wrote the content. Some of the proceeds go to the person who made the sale, whether they’re the one who delivers the training or not, and then the remainder goes to the person who’s delivering the training.
What are some lessons learned for someone who wants to put together training for the corporate market?
First is understanding that you’re a trainer, not a speaker. You’re not there to show everything that you know. What you’re there to do is help people apply what you know, and it’s a big difference. If you’re going to do training, brush up on adult learning theory and the way to run a good classroom environment. The second thing is once you’ve got your content nailed, stop messing with it. Time is your most important commodity. You can either spend time messing with the presentation, or you can spend time selling.
Another dynamic is that there’s always a request from clients to customize. They’ll say, “We know you have generic examples, but we want you to make a specific example for our company so it will be really relevant.” You don’t get leverage and scale if you’re creating a new case study every time you’re teaching, but the most important thing is that the first thing the participants do is tell you everything that’s wrong with it. They’ll tell you, “Oh, those aren’t the numbers, that’s not updated, that’s not really how we do it.” You get in this big argument about the actual information, and then the participants solve the business problem of the case but don’t learn the method because they’re so focused on getting the right answer. It ends up being a bad experience. I use a tennis analogy. In tennis, you’re either at the baseline, or you’re at the net. If you’re in the middle, you’re dead. It doesn’t work.
How do your leads come about?
Some of it is former colleagues. Some of it is leads from our books. Some of the leads come in from our blog, or from podcasts like this, or our website, thoughtleadersllc.com. And some of it comes from speaking at conferences, speaking at events, doing keynote versions of our courses, which is essentially a one-hour distillation of the course itself. The other nice thing is we’ve been around long enough that clients move and bring us into their new organizations.
You mentioned your books. You have three, right? How have they helped?
If you’re getting into the book business to make money, you’d make more making sneakers in a sweat shop when you look at your hourly rate. I’ve found the books to have been invaluable for credibility. You have a conversation with a client and say, “I wrote a book on this.” Some of the benefit is people read the book and then call you and say, “I loved your book. Can you come teach?” That’s where you make the money, when you go in for a keynote presentation, or you go in and teach classes. I’ve gotten ROI on those books hundreds of times over from these types of situations.
My first was One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful Personal Leadership. It shows leaders how to use stories and examples from their personal history and distill them down to a set of rules or principles, then articulate that onto a single page that represents their personal leadership philosophy. What’s cool about the method is that rather than just telling your team, “My leadership philosophy is do the right thing,” you end up sharing your experiences and your stories so they get to know you. They get to understand you. And those stories end up being a lot more memorable.
The second book is Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results, which I co-authored with Victor Prince who is a Bain alum. We talk about how you change your behavior as a leader, how you get your people to change their behavior to get a higher return on the effort that you’re putting into them. And the third book is The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support and Get it Approved. It’s the structured thought and communications course distilled into book form. Its ideal reader is the folks who are being asked to make the decks: the analysts and project managers all the way up to the VPs and SVPs.
What are the books that you’ve either gifted the most to other people or that have meant a lot to you?
One that I really enjoyed was The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It’s a book on stoicism, and the inspiration for it is Marcus Aurelius. It talks about how to be a stoic, and the value of being stoic, and how it can help you get through obstacles and challenges. For me, the book really resonated. Another one that I read recently was about the founder of kayak.com, Paul English. It’s called A Truckful of Money by Tracy Kidder. Just a really interesting read about a guy who built multiple startups, and what it was like taking them through the development phase, the growth phase, the scaling phase, failures, successes along the way.
Aside from professional accomplishments, do you have any thoughts or personal practices you have around wellness, or mindfulness?
We teach some concepts around mindfulness and resilience. One of my guys, John Workman, is a huge expert. He coaches professional golfers and executives and has written a few books on it. One is called Hijacked By Your Brain. It talks about the amygdala, and your alarm system, and how stress effects it, and then how you can quiet it down.
For me, this stuff got real, real fast back in 2013 when I had my first heart attack. I had some things going on in my personal life, and there was the pace at which I was running my business. I wasn’t exercising. I wasn’t eating well. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I wasn’t being mindful and I had a freaking heart attack. I went to the hospital, they put in a couple of stints, and the next day I changed my life. I dropped 15 pounds, I started exercising and taking the meds, and really got my house in order. Things got a lot better. I was more resilient, I had better energy, and then I was on a flight and we’re about 45 minutes from landing and all of a sudden I start feeling chest pains again. I was having my second heart attack. I looked at the doc afterward and said, “What do you want me to do? What’s left?” He looks at me and says, “What about caffeine?” And I told him he was fighting pretty dirty, but again the next day I changed that habit, and now it’s only green tea.
Look, this stuff matters. When you’re running your own shop, you have to take care of yourself. Nobody else is going to. The excuse of, “I’m too busy. I don’t have time to work out. I don’t have time to eat well. I’m always on the road.” Here’s a hint: They sell salads at O’Hare airport. It’s a horrible excuse to say, “I’m too busy to eat well. I’m too busy to exercise.” Can you afford to be laid up in a hospital for a few days? Can you afford that? The answer is, “No.” It’s all a question of priorities. You need to get it in order, or bad things do happen.
I’m 6 feet tall. When I had my heart attack I was 215 pounds and now I’m at my fighting weight at about 200. I’m in good shape. I was 43 years old. This happens, folks. This isn’t just for folks who are obese.
As far as task management, I’ve gotten brutal about saying no. I get unsolicited requests a lot of times to write a blog post or be on a podcast or whatever it is, and in the past I used to write people back and say, “Hey, I’m not interested.” Now, it’s like look, I didn’t invite you in my inbox, I’m just going to delete your email. And I’m not going to feel bad about it because I’m not going to let you consume any more of my time for me to read your email. So, prioritization and not feeling bad about saying no is kind of key.
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