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Adam Dębowski: Who are you now, Mariusz?
Mariusz Gołaszewski: I present myself everywhere as an “entrepreneur”, ie a person who “still wants something more” and is still looking for creative solutions. He is looking for new ways. I am also a lecturer and, inter alia, an expert on public debt. I run a consulting company that deals with this niche. I am a teacher by vocation. I like to talk a lot and at some point I found what I was saying was well received by the audience. I get the so-called feedback from them, according to which I can talk so simply about very complex financial topics that even a person who does not have specialized preparation in the form of, for example, financial studies, is able to spot the basic concepts that govern finances. I consider this to be the main value that sets me and my company apart.
I have passed this skill on to my people and it is of great importance for their relationship with their clients.
It is worth adding here that your company cooperates with local governments, helping them to obtain funds for investing in municipal infrastructure. In addition, you also perform financial audits in public institutions such as offices or schools. I invited you to this interview, because apart from the fact that you have extraordinary knowledge about finances and company development, you also have very tangible results. Last year, your company’s revenues increased by 50%, and in this, despite the lockdown in the economy, you are also not giving up.
The COVID epidemic was a rather unpleasant experience for many entrepreneurs. However, in the case of our company, it turned out that the market needs even more of our services and in the first half of the year we doubled our revenues. Starting from 2015, our revenues grew on average 50% per year, which means for the company an almost insane development, comparable to driving on a motorway at 250 km / h without slowing down in curves. Because when it is going so fast, only taking care of driving safety slows down the passage a lot. Of course, I am not advocating any madness in business here, especially in the area of the public sector and public money in which we work. While working with local governments, we identified a kind of niche in 2012, which is quite specific – testing the creditworthiness of local governments. This is a completely different issue from, for example, creditworthiness considered in the case of mortgage loans or the financial standing of enterprises. The public sector is governed by slightly different rules. So we identified this niche and boldly entered it. And since then, these 50% increases in revenue seemed to us to be a fairly rapid development of our company, although compared to what is happening this year, it was still nothing. Now we really need to buckle up and hold tight to the steering wheel in our Formula 1 car. And be very careful if any wild boar will jump on the road, because at this speed, meeting him can be really disastrous.
It must be an interesting experience …
Oh yeah. For me, as the owner and president of the company, who is responsible for everything with his reputation. I have just written a book that will be distributed to all local governments in Poland, about the impact of the COVID 19 crisis on local government finances. They need this item right now, as they are struggling with the effects of a pandemic lockdown.
I know you wrote it for two weeks on the computer. On the other hand, “mentally” it certainly took much longer. It started with thinking about the need to write this work. Besides, even when you have a lot of knowledge on a given topic, transferring it to the pages of a book is a process in itself, sometimes it is really not easy.
Coming back to your company’s turnover growth curve – there are many indications that you can double your size this year?
If it doesn’t, it will mean that we have botched something when the market is favorable for us. The epidemic caused a really sharp decrease in the income of local governments, which generated specific problems in the context of the creditworthiness of these units, and therefore the possibility of financing various projects in their area. The newspapers contain information on various anti-crisis shields, but you should know that their task is primarily to support entrepreneurs and they do not solve the basic problems of local governments. And here comes a niche for a company like ours. Our company is a typical think-tank – not only a consulting company, but a “knowledge company” that creates this knowledge. In 2011, we entered the market with a completely new concept, previously completely unknown in this sector. It is about debt restructuring. Before, local governments used only loans, we came up with the idea of ”municipal bonds”, which from the point of view of local government is a much more appropriate instrument.
Thanks to a series of trainings and lectures, I was able to convince the market that it is worth changing old habits. I consider this innovation a success. We must remember that local governments are the largest employer in Poland. We think of the state administration as a giant juggernaut with lots of money. Local governments are in the mass a similar “financial tycoon” when it comes to the masses of money at their disposal. However, they employ incomparably more people.
And in our case, one man went against all habits. Our ideas are contested on the market and we still have to “break through” with these innovations. However, I have an inner conviction, even a kind of “sense of mission” that without what we proposed to local governments, a large part of what you see around you would not exist. Local governments are responsible for schools, kindergartens, urban and rural road infrastructure, and so on. Also the fact that we have tap water and then municipal sewage is treated is also the area of responsibility of local governments. And for all these tasks money is needed.
A lot of money flows to local governments from the European Union, but all these subsidies require co-financing, that is, some so-called “own contribution”. These are, globally, amounts in the billions. Last year, Polish local governments invested over PLN 50 billion in social and technical infrastructure. This is much, much more than a central government. Therefore it is worth realizing the importance of this sector.
And every year you exceed one billion zlotys of repayable financing for local governments.
It will probably be a lot more this year. And we were just prepared for this occasion.
Now, to summarize substantially and practically some know-how that each of us can take for ourselves using your experience, I would say this: the key issue is always to find a niche in the industry in which you operate. You have found yourself in the niche of loans for local governments and local government bonds. Secondly, you use the current “market situation” in your industry, being substantively prepared for it.
When we advise various clients, we see a rule. Namely, when the company reaches the turnover of two million, then five, ten and twenty, you have to be prepared for success. Everyone dreams of financial freedom and success understood in this way, but until they experience multi-million revenues, they have no idea what it means to be or not to be prepared for this success. Also in the context of a career in a corporation or in a medium-sized company – until he starts talking to the management board about difficult matters, he does not know what it really means to reach this higher level. And if you invest in these preparations first, you are also ready for what you don’t know you need to be ready for.
In your book we read about the importance of working on yourself, developing your “power zone” and “competence zone”. The former is the area of our talents, and the latter is the grinding of our imperfect features. You had a certain aversion to writing books…
It’s true. Already three years ago I had ready-made book concepts, only somewhere I had a blockage. Most of us remember when you wrote your master’s thesis – how difficult it was. In my company, people write their master’s theses in three days. It’s all about motivation and management, I believe. You said everyone should be ready for success. It turns out in the wash. 2018 was a time of great boom for us. I paid for this with the so-called “winner’s depression.” When a man achieves what he dreams of – for example an athlete wins a gold medal at the Olympics or a mountaineer completes the Crown of the Earth – what is next? Because it’s hard to find anything more. This is really a problem, though I wish it to anyone who follows the path of their passion.
When the 2018 results came in and I saw how well it went, I thought then: heck, it probably won’t work that well. And then came 2019 even 50% better, and now we have 2020, which promises to be twice as good. Although I managed to get used to this thought, also thanks to working with Adam. I am convinced that the leader of the company does not have to be involved in all processes. For example, I only deal with high-level strategy and marketing. The public sector is very “hierarchical” and a bit “hermetic”, so my main task is to “strategically move” our company [18.30] to trendsetting levels.
For example, I was invited to the Senate of the Republic of Poland just before the outbreak of the epidemic and when I was standing in the queue for a pass with the senior directors of the Local Government Finance Department of the Ministry of Finance, who deal with the public debt of local governments, I had the opportunity to talk to them about it. In such a rather loose conversation, we exchanged risk measures related to the indebtedness of local governments. These measures are not published anywhere. One of the basic factors is the number of years during which the self-government in Poland is able to pay off its debt on average. In 2018 it was probably 3.3. And the department director who spoke to me says: five years earlier, it was 5.5. Then I noticed that they calculate it as well, as we do. It turned out that, regardless of the Ministry of Finance, we proposed the same credit risk measures for local governments.
We, in our company, also monitor by doing a lot of cross-sectional analyzes to know what is happening in the sector. We then provide these analyzes for free.
This is the so-called added value that you offer to your market. Similarly, the Institute of Change Leaders provides everyone with free, for example, the daily “60 seconds of a manager” – an e-mail with an inspiring message for each day or various types of podcasts. In this way, we can give our market a free value, which is of course a marketing tool, but also a mission tool. In every industry, each company should find so-called “added value” for which you can take money or not, but this is something above the standard service that most competitors do not do and therefore it becomes our advantage in the market. If the tool we offer is very valuable, and at the same time free of charge, and people appreciate it, then our brand grows on the market and customer loyalty increases with it. And if this free added value is also part of the sales funnel, it is a masterpiece at all and every company should strive for it.
We used it a bit in the wash. Because we started with analyzes. We have built an IT tool that allows you to easily assess the financial situation of a given local government. It allows us to identify problems faced by the individual we are interested in. After all, a consulting firm lives off problem solving. These problems are either realized by the client or not. And when he does not see them, it is difficult for him to sell anything because he thinks that he does not need our offer. And if our analyzes, whether individual or cross-sectional, allow our clients to see their problems, then some of them will turn to us with a request for help in solving them. Therefore, we decided to make this IT tool, which we initially treated as our internal one, available to potential clients – local government units. Not all those who get this tool from us buy our services afterwards. It doesn’t matter. [21:30].
I understand that the appropriate clerk in the commune receives from you a document with a financial analysis of his local government unit. Since you provide such – quite simple – analyzes for free, can’t they do it themselves?
I will say diplomatically that they certainly do not have time for this. Our knowledge, on the other hand, is certainly well documented, but we certainly do not cover all issues. We go much deeper than they do, based on our many years of knowledge. Since 2011, we have served over 350 local governments – that is a good 15% of local government units in Poland. Counting the creditworthiness of a local government is so complicated that it was only in the fourth or fifth year of work only on this that I finally became sure that I knew what I was talking about. We then started sending local governments a calculation of their creditworthiness, responding to the mayor’s needs resulting, for example, from his election declarations. He won these elections by promising to build a school or repair the road and now these investments need to be financed. There is no chance of covering these expenses from the commune’s tax revenues or from EU subsidies and they simply have to get into debt. A natural question for every entrepreneur or mayor is: “How much can I take out a loan?”.
When you want to calculate this capacity, you search the Internet for a loan calculator that examines the conditions of +/- 50 banks. You will receive the answer to the question of how much loan a given bank will offer you in 10 seconds. However, in the world of public finances it is unfortunately not that simple. And we have developed an absolutely new solution here, “totally innovative”. Nobody on the market has done something like that before and still doesn’t.
The best ideas are developed over the years. It is necessary to keep an open mind. In our Business School, one of the modules was inspired by your search and has a working title: “Search for what is difficult for the client”. Identify the biggest problems the client is struggling with and propose solutions to them. After all, the reports that you prepare for subsequent municipalities are not simple and easy to compile. Now, years later, you have become fluent in it, but it is still very difficult for customers.
Moreover, very helpful. We started by asking why they don’t do it to themselves. Because it requires a deep knowledge of the subject. And the trick is to present this knowledge in a simple and legible way. I believe that all those who speak in a very complex and hardly legible way for a person who is not a specialist in a given field are actually very insecure about their knowledge. And they try to mask it with the complicated structure of their argument bristling with difficult words.
It also happens that although they have a lot of theoretical knowledge on a given topic, they do not have practical knowledge.
Or the ability to pass it on. This is the most important thing here. I love the concept of the Blue Ocean…
This is one of the basic modules in our Business School. When the company has already reached the level of the Blue Ocean in its development, it means that it is very well established on the market. She has already achieved such a position and has such good prospects ahead of her that running a business ceases to be an everyday struggle with adversities and becomes a metaphorical “sailing on the blue ocean”. And we lead our clients in this direction with the help of other tools of the module called Blue Ocean Strategy. This is also how the concept of “Little Homeland – Big Changes” was born.
Coming back to the development of my company. When I started my own business in 2011, I didn’t know everything I should do. I started my career in corporations earlier and I have some nice “stickers” in my Coca-Cola resume or one of the big French banks, which I founded a daughter company in Poland.
One day I sat down like this with a friend, the president of this bank, and we wondered what we actually do. And it turned out that we can’t do anything concrete, because we are neither welders nor plumbers. Because he only managed this bank and I was his right hand man. And our ambition was not to work for a corporation anymore, but to be an employer on the labor market. That is, not to earn the French, but to earn yourself. We did not know what we wanted to do, but first of all, I urge you to start. Move your butt and go out to the market. Anything to do. Talk to people.
Our clients generated the most ideas. Our company did not start with a creditworthiness test. We started with helping to issue bonds. We didn’t really know how to approach it either. And with the first project, it turned out that the problem is not the bonds themselves, but the creditworthiness of local government units. And then we immediately switched to this competence center. We walked out “around the corner of the building” and saw a completely different “clearing” – let’s call it “blue” – where no one was grazing. And the need was enormous, much greater than even then I suspected.
In the Change Value Process taught at our school, we call this “agile strategic management”. We know more or less that we want to do something, we start – in a safe or risky way, and then we improve our behavior from month to month. It was the same with me. I knew I wanted to work with people, I knew I wanted to work with companies and I started with training. But then, year on year, my offer was constantly improved. It’s not that a person comes up with a brilliant business and then automatically has millions after a few years. It is a constant work in a dynamically changing reality…
We also constantly analyze what is profitable, what is selling. The situation in the world is changing dynamically. Who would have thought COVID a few months ago. We have already prepared a product precisely tailored to this situation and we have also published a book on this subject. I urge everyone not to be afraid to share knowledge. Therefore, during the trainings I run, and in this book, I share practically all my knowledge. However, keeping to himself such a clou – “central competence” that customers will never have. It results, for example, from the fact that when we deal with bonds, we advise on 70-100 issues a year. We are a serious player in this market. We are there all the time and fully knowledgeable about it.
Only one of the banks, PKO BP, is bigger than us in terms of turnover on this market. This really gives us an amazing knowledge not available to someone who issues bonds every two / three years. And this is the above-mentioned “central competence” that no one will take from us. And I will be happy to share my knowledge on how to issue bonds.
Sometimes it is possible to do it naturally, sometimes you have to consciously search. So what are the most important competences we can share on the market for free in order to provide customers with information of great value, knowing that the customer will come back to us anyway. I remember how we started running free webinars many years ago. In this way, I shared my knowledge, until at one point our marketer says: “Adam, give people something really best, of really great value.” And I was like, “But if I give it to them, they won’t come.” This dilemma really blocked me. And then our marketer says, “Exactly. It will be quite the opposite. They will come because they will feel the great benefit of contacting you as you share such valuable knowledge with them. They’ll think: if he is offering something so important and valuable for free, what will happen when I purchase access to his paid training. ” Then another dilemma arose for me: “Okay, but if I now sell them something of utterly exceptional value, and then my next offers are not that exciting anymore, they will feel bad about it.” It was then that I had to realize that I had not only one outstanding value up my sleeve. I have many more. And I don’t have to give everything away for free. But for example, out of 10 “products” of my knowledge, choose two / three and return these for free, but let the interested person pay for the rest. And then, after a few years, I realized that both the market and we were evolving. As a result of this evolution, knowledge as knowledge ceased to be a value in itself. And the greatest value here is the ability to bring the client to the desired result.
I would have said it a little differently. Customers need to be told quite broadly what needs to be done and what will be the result. This is what we convey in marketing communication: whether through leaflets, books, or maybe films – one of these media will always interest someone. However, we tell very little about how to achieve this desired state. This is the clou of our service.
I personally learn all the time, because the development of the owner of the company is the basis of its success. It is his mindset, his CEMKs that are the company’s greatest limitation. So you have to work on yourself, on your emotions, on your approach. At the moment, I see my company as one big “kindergarten”. I just babysit people here mostly. Of course, I also deal with strategy, making sure that we are in the right place on the market. I also do strategic marketing, which we call “analytical marketing”. Every year we prepare three / four analyzes for each of our clients. Now, during the COVID 19 epidemic, we have run a great simulation of what the drop in local government incomes may be and how it will affect their creditworthiness and liquidity. These are their greatest fundamental concerns. Then we distributed these analyzes for free as part of a great educational campaign, while offering help in solving these problems. Because they can either deal with it themselves, using the analysis provided by us – which few people can do, or ask us for help in this matter.
Another topic is people management in the company. This is such a big story because people are different.
So the key things for you are: strategy, marketing and people management.
No doubt yes. In addition, I am developing a personal brand as the face of the company. I highly recommend being an entrepreneur at all. At some point, you start to choose only those things in the company that you like to do – the rest will be taken care of by your co-workers. And then work becomes an absolute pleasure. I wondered for a moment if I was a workaholic and decided that I was not. I just like doing it. I’d be bored if I didn’t. It is really fascinating what we do. We also have a lot of positive feedback from customers, on the basis of: “How good that you showed up”. It really gives you great satisfaction. If it weren’t for us, there wouldn’t be a school or a sewage treatment plant – a fundamental investment for our local societies.
So in making a small summary at this stage, I would highlight four areas that are of key importance to you:
- Shaping the company’s strategy
- Marketing management
- People management
- Self management
The latter in order not to be in the company, as its head, a limiting element. And when it comes to marketing, you travel a lot around Poland, giving free lectures to teach treasurers of municipalities and other officials on various things useful for them. You show yourself by building a brand: both yours and yours, proving that you know many things. There is another very important aspect of this “preparatory activity” which could be described as “influencing the customer mentality”. For a large number of municipal officials it is debt, something normal for businessmen operating thanks to loans, it is a problem. You had a series of lectures all over Poland, during which you showed that local governments have to get used to being in debt. Without it, local government simply cannot function normally. If someone is averse to credit, that is, to debt, he is not able to move forward normally.
That’s right. During the last presentation for the authorities of communes I summoned up my courage – because such “going against the tide” of generally accepted beliefs simply requires some courage – and I formulated a few such “iconoclastic” theses. The first one, really shocking for this sector, is:
We will never repay the debts owed by local governments in our lifetime
Most of the discussions about your finances take place among local governments under the title “How quickly will we pay off this loan?” And I made them aware, based on historical data and on the basis of analyzes of possible options for the development of the situation – including the use of funds from the European Union, that it is impossible – formally speaking at the level of all local governments – for us to reduce the debt. This also applies to “public government debt”. He will not pay off in our lifetime, although inflation will help in this case. I highly recommend getting interested in the topic of How Governments Get Rid of Public Debt. In the past, wars were waged for this purpose, although it is not worth it, because the easiest way to do it is with the help of inflation. The third method, which is practiced by only a few countries, unfortunately, is economic growth. in Poland there is an “inflationary” model of public debt reduction, but now is not the time to develop this topic.
This is an extremely important element of the whole process – you need to ask yourself what are the biggest objections of our clients. And for several years you have to educate yourself in your different market, so that you do not have to reduce the customer’s objections already at the sales stage. It is good for him to be prepared for this interview thanks to the previous “educational activity”. Then a kind of “collective consciousness” will emerge, a certain mindset. For example, my father-in-law was now buying a new car and wanted to buy it with cash. However, we convinced him: “Lease the car. It is more profitable for you to spend 50,000 for two years with a new car than to get rid of 150,000 at once. And then still grapple with selling “.
On condition, however, that Audi is the working tool. Because we must necessarily distinguish between “consumer” debt and “investment” debt. We call it “good” and “bad” debts. Local governments talk about it: indebtedness “for monuments” or “for engines”. A monument is quite often a senseless ambition of the mayor, who necessarily wants to “put something there”, which costs a lot and is only a burden. This proverbial “engine” is what drives the local economy. Let it be, for example, the development of the plot where the investor will come to create jobs. Such a distinction between “good” and “bad” debts was shocking for many local government officials. Today they use these concepts in their daily work.
And we don’t have to convince only the commune steward and its treasurer. After all, the most important decision-making body here is the commune council or the city council. And only when we convince the councilors that it is worth talking to us, we can actually start working.
There are no formal requirements in the regulations as to the level of education and experience of a member of such a board, so they are representatives of the public who have the knowledge about finances that the public has. We need to convey to them the concepts of action we promote in order to convince them that what we are proposing is good for their local government unit. Because still people have an allergic reaction to the word “debt”. They remember the stories of various acquaintances who got into a consumer loan, then they had nothing to pay for it and problems with the bailiff began. This is the first association for the word “debt.”
And we are talking about “investment” debt, which later pays off from the income generated by the investment.
My father-in-law was finally convinced by a salesman that it is better to take this lease than to get rid of all the cash we have. Because then it will have over PLN 100,000 at its current operational disposal. I am talking about this to show that the task of a trader is sometimes to influence a person’s worldview, persuading him to change even well-established beliefs. Those business owners who do not have a mindset like Mariusz – I have been watching them closely for many, many years – have evident drop in income when they only deal with operational work or sales. At the same time, they do not think strategically, they do not think in terms of marketing and they do not bother with managing human capital. And they certainly do not think about developing their competences. Against this background, Mariusz is a brilliant example of an entrepreneur who grows because he develops these four areas. Other entrepreneurs even experience some emotional or financial “dips” when any of these areas fail when they fail in any of these areas. And now I would like to ask Mariusz what happened in the last year and a half. We started work in January / February last year, when you experienced what you called “winner’s depression”.
I was looking for help then …
And you said two important things. That the first thing you want to do is make sure you don’t screw up your success. Secondly, you needed a sparring partner to “grasp reality”. Please tell, from your perspective, “essentially” what happened in your company – regardless of our work – what prepared you to achieve this success? And what did we do, i.e. what was the value of our consulting work that it was worth investing in?
The outlays for your consultancy turned out to be really small in relation to the effects, although at the beginning it seemed like a lot of money. When we started working, I really had such a “bottom” under the title: “what can I do even more here?”. I stopped wanting to work at all. And then Adam served me a few psychological and coaching meetings. He worked on me with me. And when I got sorted out a little internally…
And do you remember what was the source of this “inner order”?
Yes, we have come to the most important source of my inner worth – my sense of mission. It sounds very lofty, but it is thanks to this feeling that, despite the fact that you already have everything you need, you still want to act. As an entrepreneur, I went through several stages. First, I started doing business because I wanted to be wealthy. And here I really did my best. And I also had to do operational work here. Only later can this operational work be delegated to someone else. The next stage in my development as an entrepreneur came when I hired people. There were days when I told myself that I have to go to work because I have employees. Actually, I wouldn’t have to do it myself, because I was not the company president for someone to kick me out of bed at 7 am. But they are all already working there and maybe they need help with something.
And now I’m in the third stage. I felt that what we do as a company is important to our society. Sorry, it sounded lofty again, but my employees also share this enthusiasm. I think they got it from me. We realized at one point that during these few weeks, local government investments worth about PLN 25 billion were created thanks to us. Let’s not exaggerate, that only thanks to us, but we certainly had a significant contribution to this success.
I’ve always dreamed of having a lot of books. At university, I couldn’t afford it and my big dream was to buy all the books I want. Once I could afford it, I had to find other dreams.
Good work is also good marketing of your products, which then sell well. You know the saying: “Nobody likes being sold, but everyone loves to buy.” And the trick is that they love to buy from us. It is possible when we know that what we propose to them is really good for them, that it is the basis of everything.
Sometimes an employee comes to me and says that he has received a job offer from the competition that is financially better than what I pay him. And yet he stayed with me because “here is the meaning of work”. Thanks to the way our company operates, he “feels important”. It also has a feeling that what we are doing has a deep meaning.
I would like to add here that being driven by this mission and meaning has a tremendous influence on people’s motivation. Mariusz is also characterized by one very important “invisible competence” of entrepreneurship leaders related to “connecting extremes”. Such extremes skillfully combined by Mariusz is the fact that he is a guy from the world of finance, expert in numbers and tables, and at the same time has visions that attract people. And she’ll do Excel work on the contract and teach her people what they need to know. If necessary, he can drive the company and inspire people. However, he can also make difficult decisions and fire people who do not meet the required standards. It’s not that Mariusz creates a “turquoise company” in which it is nice and pleasant, but manages a modern company in which a person who meets the standards is really appreciated and has a lot of profits, including financial ones.
Regarding this layoff, unfortunately I had to lay off two people last week. I recovered from it all weekend afterwards. It is not pleasant, but sometimes there is no other option. Just as you have to remove a tumor in time, otherwise it will infect your body. Once upon a time, I took on one girl with great hope. It was simply brilliant in terms of content, but in the first month of work it was close to destroying my company culturally. After she was fired, I was taken out of my life for a good two weeks. Sometimes we face these kinds of challenges
Please note that Mariusz put the company’s culture above the expert’s merit.
Absolutely. Culture is everything. There is a popular saying: “A person is taken for skills and substantive competences and dismissed for personality”. I am the other way around: I take it for my personality, and he will catch up with the merits. There is time for that. However, you will not change your personality. Does the person fit the company or do they follow the appropriate values? I fired one employee because he was lying. I caught him once, he explained, and we gave him a chance. We caught him a second time and unfortunately. Certain things have to be enforced, because the company’s culture is everything today. I mainly employ people from the so-called “Generation Y”, 30-year-olds. And these people are really hard to motivate with money alone. Of course, they want to earn good money, but they need more than that. We have a great time together in our work and thanks to that everyone feels connected with each other. One will not leave the other. When one has a flood of projects, the other will sit over some of them and pore until midnight. And no one reports to me that they are making up any overtime. Sometimes I can see this when I see that one of them sent an e-mail to the client shortly before midnight. When I ask him the next day what happened, that he acts like that at night, he only says that he likes it so and let me back off. This is the organizational culture. And then I will appreciate such a committed employee a really nice bonus.
And when we discovered the meaning of your mission together, what was later important in our counseling and coaching work?
Adam is fun to talk to, but when we agree on something, then he is terrible at enforcing it. He asks over and over if I did something. And this must be done afterwards. Thanks to this, however, we are moving forward. What I like a little about him is that he is such a ruthless enforcer.
Good password. I take them from you. “Ruthless enforcer.”
For me, Adam connects impossible things. A deep knowledge of psychology that has always been something completely undefined for me. I had a very analytical mind so far, although it has changed a bit recently when I became the president of my company. Psychology was for me a strange “cloud” in which it was not known what exactly was going on. And Adam can turn it into structure. It’s brilliant for me, this ability to structure people’s behavior. And he can reduce them to numbers and specific criteria. And my analytical mind is beginning to understand this. We pass from this mysterious “cloud of human behavior” to concrete and Adam knows how to do it. And it was mainly for this reason that I started working with him.
A company is not only about arranging products, planning sales or making a business plan. Maybe it is so at the beginning, but then there are human problems. After all, a company without people is not any enterprise, but only a one-man enterprise of its owner.
So you start hiring. First, only a few people and these people, unfortunately, always have some problems. And you have to help them solve these problems for the good of the company. Or else they will bring these problems to the company and break it down from the inside out. Thanks to solving these problems, often emotional, they return to their work place as highly effective employees.
There is a series on HBO called “Billions” in which the coach solves the problems of her company’s employees. It is absolutely brilliant and I believe it is a must for any entrepreneurial leader.
The second one is House of lies “- about consulting firms.
When we finished working through the psychological aspects of your company’s functioning and started moving through people management to strategic and marketing issues, we started to strengthen your company’s brand. We developed activity on Facebook, we also made sure that each of your employees, when talking about the company, would use similar terms and pay attention to the same strengths of your activity.
Exactly. When another client asked, “What are you guys doing exactly?” I wasn’t sure what to answer. It was hard to fit in 10 minutes, we had so many areas of activity, and yet the elevator pitch lasts 10 seconds, because this is how long the elevator usually takes. And so we developed an image project entitled “Little homeland – big changes”. We showed what happens in local communities in Poland thanks to the borrowed money. That debt is not just evil. The filmmaker we hire travels around the places where we worked, for example five years ago, and looks at what they did for the money. He records it in such an interesting, a bit “youthful” way with the help of a selfie and holding the camera in his hand. So it should be attractive for viewers brought up on the poetics of young cinema.
The second thing I would like to recommend to you is to build your own “knowledge concept”. This is the second book I am working on. The essence of this topic is the BCG Matrix – Boston Consulting Club – which you will find in economics textbooks. It is already a symbol of a product, not just a brand. And we have developed such a concept in our company. We called the basic concept of selecting financial products for local government “AESCO Optimizer”. The name of our company is an acronym composed of the first letters of the names of individual steps that should be taken to properly finance the investment.
It is amazing that this model was in Mariusz’s head and in his notes many years ago. However, it was only during our strategic and marketing workshops, when we collected what the company is and what it does, that this innovative project was created. It will be published on YouTube and Instagram, showing different cities in an interesting way. Both cities and AESCO will therefore have good promotion of their activities. Often, unusual ideas are hidden somewhere deep, be it in the talents of the people or in the head of the owner. You just need to bring them to light with the help of various strategic and marketing processes. Then also implement and enforce their implementation.
Adam plays many roles here. He is a coach, psychologist and consultant. So he can get things out of me that I certainly couldn’t get out of me. This is really a great value. If you have a good business and a good market, one such idea turns into millions. And in comparison, Adam’s stake mentioned at the beginning seems embarrassingly low. It seems like a pretty sizeable investment at first. But then it turns into such money that I would, Adam, in your position, always ask for a percentage of that amount.
I won’t be from you, as an exceptional customer, although the rates will definitely increase. Many thanks to Mariusz for a piece of your history and for the energy you always give to everyone around you. Whenever we see a successful man, it is such a meeting that is very inspiring.
I always try to be a normal person. I enjoy the nice car I drive and the opportunity to buy all kinds of cool things, but the most important thing is that we don’t change in relation to people. Because they enable us to achieve this success. And everyone deserves respect: the person who cleans, and the assistant and the salesman. We should be grateful to the fate that he gave us courage – the most important trait of an entrepreneur and the ability to take risks. I am also afraid, like a clear thread, but if not me, who? And if I can’t handle it, then I’m going to Adam.
