TLSE Season 2 Episode 1

In late 2021, the COO, founder, and CEO of BPM Associates gathered to do their annual planning. They decided that they needed a new vision statement that would resonate with their core ideology. They watched Simon Sinek's TED Talk on starting with "why" and realized that people don't buy or work for BPM because of what they do, but because of why they do it. They decided to focus on doing business with those who believe in their why, even if it meant walking away from certain clients and employees. They wanted to create a company that attracted outstanding people and provided top talent for life science projects. I'm Steve Vinson, and this is episode one of season two of the Life Science Effect. Welcome. In late 2021, Denise, our COO, our founder, Jeremy, and I gathered in a conference room in Fishers, Indiana, with our executive coach and our factional sales leader. Like we always do, toward the end of a year, we were doing our annual planning. It had been a couple of years since we had laid out a strategic plan with a multiyear focus, so we knew that would be the goal. Normally, the three of us would serve clients and do client work. We were also leading the company, but today would be about shaping the future of the company. We filled our coffee cups, we got settled in, and my intent was for us to revisit our vision statement. I had everybody take a deep breath, including myself, cleared our minds, nice sunshine coming through the window. Those of you that know the Internet of Things lab up in Fishers, Indiana, it's a cool, sort of innovative-looking building with a combination of high-tech stuff and warehouse-looking Silicon Valley startup feel to it. They have great coffee. Those are several things for you to know about this conference room, and the windows are great. We were getting a nice morning sun coming through the windows, nice hot coffee. We just worked on putting the cares of the day behind. If you remember back in 2021, we're coming off quite a year. The pandemic was finally looking like we could start to wind it down because of the vaccines that had been rolling out all year long. Our company was privileged to be able to help distribute some of those vaccines, so in some small way, we had a part in getting vaccines to folks in Indiana. We had all had our vaccines, and we were headed toward the end of 2021, and we were ready to look to the future like everybody else at that time. We gather, we take some deep breaths, we do a little clearing exercise, and now we are ready to try to discover the words to describe what BPM was all about. What was our core ideology? We needed to put some words to that. In short, we felt like we needed a new vision statement. Our previous vision statement wasn't bad. It was fine. It wasn't true, but it really said more about what we do and how we do it than why we do it. What is our core ideology? It was also a bit corporate sounding, sort of like one of those things you see framed in a large corporation that looks like it was written by a committee, but again, it was a tad uninspiring, but not bad. It was extraordinary people building high-trust relationships to deliver life science projects that are complex and or mission-critical for us and our clients, so not bad, but sort of like a committee wrote it. We needed a new, inspiring, something that would resonate. If you know me, I was ready. I was prepared. I had gotten us ready to go through this exercise. It was time to reimagine, re-energize. We got the projector going, figured out how to get the laptop connected up, and projected Simon Sinek's amazing TED Talk. I'm going to play a little clip of that for you next. If you've heard it before and you want to skip ahead, it's around five minutes. We'll play that and then come back. <Video Plays> Great video. I've watched it at least several dozen times. I bet I've watched it more than I've watched the Office series all the way through, which that's really saying something. I've watched that probably 18 times. If you notice what he says in there that just really hit and just really hit a square in the chest, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Once that video ended, we got quiet, and we all just let the silence sit there and do its work. It wasn't the first time we'd heard it. We'd all heard those words before from Simon Sinek. It makes the rounds in professional circles, and we'd all heard it before. But given what we were there to do that day and the gravity of what we were trying to get to, it really did hit different. So, this concept began forming in our minds, and it occurred to us. People don't buy what BPM Associates does. They buy why BPM Associates does it. And we added, people don't work for BPM because of what we do. People come to work for BPM because of why we do it. So, I clicked to the next slide because I had read Simon Sinek's book, Start With Why. It's a great book, highly recommended. Highly recommended. But another thing he said in that book hit pretty hard. And he said, the goal of business should not be to do business with everyone who needs what you have. The goal is to focus on people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business, only with those who believe in our why, trust emerges. So, with that morning sun beaming through the windows of the conference room and with freshly peaked inspiration, we started asking each other some really bold questions. Are we ready to take a stand? What do we believe in so strongly that we would walk away from a prospect? I have here in my hand, you can't see him, this is a video, but I promise you, I'm holding in my hands a list of clients who we, I can tell you who they are, they're companies you would recognize. Really well-known, successful companies who don't believe what we believe and we decided to walk away. I could give you names of people who have worked for our company who we decided, mutually with them, it wasn't a good fit because they didn't believe what we believed. They were great consultants, good at what they do, highly experienced. But we said, you don't believe what we believe. We don't have values that are the same. You can't be your best self at this company. Best wishes and good luck. Now, I'm not saying those other companies are bad. I'm not saying those employees or those consultants are bad. It's just that they don't believe the same thing we believe. I'm not making a moral judgment here. I'm just saying there's something that we believe and if you don't believe it, we probably are going to have a lot of trouble with trust and you're not going to feel like you could be amazing and extraordinary in our environment. If we're talking about a client, we probably can't do our best work with you and we don't want to be there doing less than our best work because we don't have values alignment. We don't believe the same things about business. Again, these are very successful companies, so I'm not making a moral judgment or even a business judgment. They've been very successful believing what they believe. Great for them, right? Great for the people that work there if they also believe what they believe. Great for the people that work there if they also believe it, but if we don't believe what you believe or you don't believe what we believe, it's just not going to work. What is that? As BPM, as Denise and Jeremy and I sitting in that room together, what is it that we believe so strongly that we'd be willing to make those statements? We better choose wisely. After all, we might have to put it in our email signatures. Anyway, the mood was set. This room was ready to stand for something. We were ready to believe in something, but what? Little divergence here. I'm going to give you a very, very brief history of BPM. I'll do another podcast. I'll interview Jeremy here in the next week or so. Jeremy's the founder. I call him the spiritual heart of BPM, and his story is our story. His story is our story. I will interview him. You'll get a lot of details on the history of BPM, but I'm going to give you just a short snippet of history of the company. Jeremy has always been clear about his values. If you've ever met Jeremy, those of you that know Jeremy, you know he wears his heart on his sleeve. He's so generous and he's so vulnerable with people that you know where he stands. He's willing to take a stand for what he believes in. I knew and we knew that whatever the vision we came up with, whatever the core belief ended up being, it had better resonate with Jeremy. We knew if it resonated with Jeremy, it would resonate with us. His values are so attractive to people. That's why we're in the room with him. That's why we're there, because we already know we believe what Jeremy believes. We just need to come up with the words to say it. Why did he start this company? We talked like, imagine back to the day you left this nice, cushy, secure job and decided to start your own company. Scarce, right? Think about the days leading up to that and think about what was in your head when you were doing that. I don't mean like, what were you thinking? I mean like, what really were you thinking about? Why did you do that? He said, well, even before he started the company, he wanted to work with outstanding people. He would always seek out who are the outstanding people, the cream of the crop, top leaders, top technical experts, and put together great teams to do great work. That's what he wanted. He said he wanted BPM to become that kind of company. He didn't see a path to do that with where he had been working before. He thought, let me start my own company and I can build this thing. I can build a company that's recognized for providing reliable people, for providing that top 10% of talent who could get the important, difficult jobs done. More importantly, he wanted a company that put people before profit, valued relationships over money and status, and served a cause bigger than ourselves. As we talked about those early days, it was clear that we're all resonating with this story. We're nodding. We're getting maybe a little teary-eyed because it's like, oh my God, your story sounds like my story. We can relate to how he loved his work because he got to work with great people and he got to do great work. He saw what was possible when you bring together a high-performing team and you build trust, that you have a clear, compelling objective. He wanted to keep doing that. He wanted to provide that opportunity for others to do that. As I said, it was a familiar story because Denise and I, well, think about it. We work with people all the time. Work is about people. The joke is work would be easy if it weren't for the people, but then there wouldn't be work to do, right? So we work the kind of work we do. We're always working with people, sometimes great, sometimes not so great, sometimes wonderful teams, sometimes not so wonderful teams. But once in a while, you get to work with an extraordinary team, right? Think back on those projects, the projects that stick in your mind, that definitely make it onto your resume, that you tell stories about, right? Think about those teams. Those are extraordinary teams. And so Jeremy said, what if I could build a company whose whole reason for being wasn't to make money for the owner, but to bring together amazing people to do amazing things and have more of those kinds of projects and those kinds of teams that we all think about? And then when the money comes, when the success comes, he can share that success with everybody who had a part in it. What if he can build a company like that? That's your brief history of BPM up to the point where the company's founded that gets us into this conference room in 2021. Okay, great. So what is BPM's why? We're all ready to take a stand. We've talked to Jeremy about his story. We all kind of resonate with the story. But how do you distill that story of those deeply held beliefs into some sort of succinct, inspiring vision, like not something that looks like a committee wrote it? So we wanted to avoid that pedestrian statement, like, well, people are our most important asset. I can't drive three minutes on a highway without seeing plastered on a billboard or plastered on the side of a semi truck. We're different because our people are different. The thing that makes us better is our people. Like, well, if everybody's people are different and everybody's people make the difference, nobody's people are different. Nobody's people are... Of course, people make the difference, right? Of course, if you want to have a successful business, you have to focus on people. That's no huge discovery there. But here's the difference. If you call your people your most important asset, that's okay. That they're your most important asset. Great. But they're still an asset. Your most important asset is still an asset. And when I think of assets, pardon me, but I don't think of people. I think of machines and buildings and intellectual property and things like that. And if that's your company and people are your most important asset inspires you, that's great. Okay. But I'm talking about flipping the script. I'm talking about saying not that we have a business and in order to be successful, we have to have good people. I'm saying we want to have good people and we want to help people be great. And the mechanism we're using is a business. So I'd already played around with a few things. And as I was listening to Jeremy and Denise is chiming in with her agreement and we're all nodding and everything. I made a few adjustments on a slide and I clicked onto the slide and I said, well, what do you think of this? What do we think? And the slide said, we believe in the power of extraordinary people working together in a great environment to accomplish important lasting change. Again, the room was kind of silent. We all took it in, kind of let it marinate a little bit, kind of look at it, think about it, think about what each word kind of conveyed. And after a minute or so, we're all nodding and each one of us in turn said something like, well, that's it. Those are the words. That's our core ideology. That's our shared belief. That is our core purpose. So one of the things I like to say is 100 years from now, if you go to downtown Indianapolis, let's say, find the highest skyscraper, go to the top floor, find the CEO of BPM Associates. You grab them by the lapel and say, BPM Associates, what do you do? I don't know what they're going to say. Maybe they'll still say, we plan and lead projects and execute projects in life sciences to get medicines and devices to patients that need them. Maybe they'll say something like that. They might say, asteroid mining, clean energy, clean unlimited energy, or some futuristic sci-fi thing that nobody's ever heard of. That's 100 years after all. But then if you ask them why they do it, whatever it is, say, okay, that's what you do. Why do you do it? They'll say something like, we believe in the power of extraordinary people working together in a great environment to accomplish important, lasting change. Because at BPM, people will always come first. A great environment will always be non-negotiable. People having a great environment and having the processes, tools, and support that they need to be their extraordinary self, accomplishing important, lasting change, those will always be at the heart of what we do. Whether we're mining asteroids, creating unlimited energy, serving our AI overlords, whatever it is we're doing, the core belief remains the same. How we accomplish it, well, that can evolve with the needs of people evolving. Quick word on extraordinary people. We had a long conversation about that. Because if you say extraordinary people, like every company says, our people are extraordinary. We have great people. It's like, well, does that mean you have the best recruiting, the HR recruiting, hiring, the screening, the interviewing? That means you're making a claim that you find the best people out there. Isn't everybody trying to find that? Are there companies out there going, nah, we'll settle for the average. Our company believes that average people do an average thing. Nobody's saying that. We're out here saying extraordinary people doing important, lasting things. What makes us different? Why should you believe that? Here's one key to that. This came up during the conversation. I said, we said, every person on this planet is extraordinary. Every person on this planet has the capacity for extraordinariness. Now, as we go through our lives, we're not always being our extraordinary self, are we? What if you're in a job that you're not well suited for? You don't have the right experience. You don't have the right temperament. You don't believe what we believe. Well, you probably won't be extraordinary in that job. So we realized we're going to have great recruiting. We're going to have great screening. We're going to have great interviewing. Denise does a wonderful job at that among all the wonderful things she does. One of the wonderful things she does is she's really good at finding good people, right? And we said, when those people come on board, we need to monitor and ask and always be looking for, are you being extraordinary? Can you be extraordinary in this environment? What do we need to do in this environment to allow you to be even more extraordinary and to do important lasting change? So it's not that we only bring on extraordinary people. It's that we bring on people with a background and experience that we believe will help them be extraordinary. And then we monitor and ask constantly. And if we discover, well, maybe this role isn't the best for this person. Maybe they don't have the right experience or the best experience or whatever it is that's needed for that role. Well, when you're not doing great in a role, you don't feel that extraordinary either. I've been there. I've been in jobs where I'm like, I don't think I'm the best person to do this job. And when I'm in that job, I feel anything but extraordinary. And the best thing you can do is say, maybe there's another role for you somewhere else. Maybe it's not with our company. Maybe it's not with what we do. God, I would love to be big enough and diverse enough to have something for everybody, right? But as a small company, as a niche company, we're serving, as Seth Godin says, the smallest viable audience, the smallest viable group of people, people that believe what we believe. Now that we had discovered some language that was inspiring to us, and it expressed what we believe, we continued our planning process that day. Refreshed our coffees, ordered in some lunch. We like McAllister's, sometimes Panera, but DoorDash is great for that. So we were having our lunch, we were drinking our tea, and we were inspired. The rest of the day, the soup tasted better. The sandwich tasted better. The sandwich tasted better. The coffee and the soda tasted better, because we were now excited. We had to do our financial targets and projections, had to discuss sales strategies, make some commitments around that. We had to do some internal project planning to continue building out our infrastructure and our tools and processes and training. And we put together some methodology roadmaps to say, let's build this methodology. This is all, we love doing this stuff. We're project managers at heart, and we love doing this stuff. And this is interesting. This is our craft. This is, building these things is our craft. But you know what? They were anything but boring that day, because we had a sense of purpose, a sense of reality, like this is real, and something we can measure everything we were planning to do against something else. And that something else was our core belief. Does this align with that core belief? Will this help people be extraordinary? Will this build a great environment? Will this help our extraordinary folks make important, lasting change? We've had something we can prepare everything to, and let me tell you, we've been doing it. Strategic planning just became fun. So as we filed out of the building, and evening's coming on, it was crisp. It was toward the end of the year, getting a little chilly, sun's going down, and we're kind of filing out to our cars. We all have this little grin on our face, right? We're going to go, each of us do something different, meet up with family, friends, get some dinner. And no doubt, when we talked about work, it'd be a little different. We'd be sharing not just what we do at work, but why we do the work we do. Oh, and yes, we put the core purpose in our email signatures. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, subscribe on whatever podcast platform you use. Go check out bpm-associates.com, check out thelifescienceeffect.com, and keep coming back every week to continue to experience the life science effect.