Stop Solving the Wrong Business Problem | Kevin Dias

Kevin Dias, founder of Ambiki and author of The Problem First Method, joins Small Business Pivots to explain why many businesses waste time, money, and energy solving the wrong problem.

Kevin built Ambiki as a software platform for speech-language pathology private practices, helping teams with scheduling, billing, clinical documentation, and practice management. Through that journey, he discovered one of the biggest mistakes companies make: jumping straight to solutions before deeply understanding the actual customer problem.

In this episode, Michael D. Morrison and Kevin discuss how business owners can slow down, ask better questions, define their ideal customer profile, and build solutions that actually solve meaningful problems. Kevin shares how Ambiki narrowed its focus from trying to serve every type of customer to focusing on pediatric speech therapy private practices with stronger growth potential.

They also explore Kevin’s Problem First Method, including feature alignment documents, the “problem atlas,” customer feedback, niche focus, business pivots, and why competitor pressure can lead companies in the wrong direction.

If you are a business owner, startup founder, SaaS founder, consultant, or entrepreneur trying to grow your business, improve your offer, better understand your customer, or stop wasting time on the wrong priorities, this episode will help you think more clearly.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why businesses jump to solutions too quickly
 • How to identify the real customer problem
 • Why customer requests are not always the real problem
 • How to define your ideal customer profile
 • Why niching down can accelerate growth
 • How Ambiki grew by focusing on speech-language pathology practices
 • What a feature alignment document is
 • How to use a problem atlas for strategic planning
 • Why AI should solve a real problem, not just be added as a trend
 • How better questions lead to better business decisions

About Kevin Dias:

Kevin Dias is the founder of Ambiki, a software company serving speech-language pathology private practices across the United States. He is also the author of The Problem First Method, a book about helping businesses understand customer problems before jumping to solutions.

About Small Business Pivots:

Hosted by Michael D. Morrison, Small Business Pivots features entrepreneurs, authors, business owners, and thought leaders sharing real-world strategies to help business owners get unstuck and grow.

Ranked among the Top 10% of podcasts globally by Listen Notes.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:02

If you're a business owner feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and ready to grow, you're in the right place. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, where founders share insights, stories, and pivots that lead to sustainable growth. I'm your host, Michael D. Morrison, a business coach helping business owners get unstuck and grow. All right, welcome to another Small Business Pivots where we have guests from around the world. And truly today, coming from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, our guest today is around the world. It's a different day, it's a different morning, we're evening, their morning. But I know that no one can introduce themselves like the business owner, the author. So I'm going to let you do the honors of introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your backend for those that don't know Kevin. Welcome to us.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Thank you, Michael. My pleasure. So I'm Kevin Diaz, founder of Ambicie. So we make software for speech language pathologists, their private practices. This is everything from their scheduling to their billing to their clinical documentation, basically the operating system that kind of runs their private practice. We've been building this for, I want to say the past four or five years, targeting private practices throughout the United States. And it's really fun to work on because the majority of our customers are in the pediatrics. So it's always nice when you can see like you're helping kids and you know, not directly, but you're helping the helpers, is what I like to say. And this year I also published a book called The Problem First Method, which has a lot of stories from my personal journey at Mbicke, but also some stories from larger companies like Google and Apple, of stories of how starting with the problem and being really able to understand what problem needs to be solved and whose problem is it before jumping to a solution. And it's business book, it's story driven, but it does have some different templates and frameworks that we've used at Mbicki to help us get better at that and make sure that we aren't jumping to solutions because I think in today's world there are certain forces that are pushing companies, and you don't even know that these are there sometimes that are pushing you towards jumping to a solution before really digging into the problem.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Absolutely.

Where Problem First Thinking Comes From

SPEAKER_00 2:44

So what was your childhood, your upbringing like? Because I know a lot of our business owners that listen, or business owner wannabes that listen as well, they kind of like to know who is telling me this information today? What's the back end? What where how did you come up with all this?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yeah, I grew up in western Massachusetts. My mom started her own business probably when I was late elementary school. So she was a professional photographer doing sports photography for kids. So I that was kind of my earliest memories of a first job. I would often accompany her on photo shoots to help with the setup and teardown and collecting payments from the parents. My dad worked at a company called Craning Company. They made the paper for the US currency before it got printed. He was an engineer, so he was doing different things like you know, the all the security features and the cameras that they have on the machines, making sure everything's operating well. But he was kind of also a jack of all trades. Like he built our house all on his own. He, you know, helped friends all the time with building decks or fixing plumbing or this and that. So I think you know, a lot of the book and what I learned came from a combination of those two. So my mom's you know, entrepreneurial spirit and setting up her own small business, but also from my dad of just his like ability to like very quickly kind of get to the root problem and then come up with creative solutions from there of how something can be can be solved.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Fantastic. Well, I know there's one thing that every business owner has, and that's problems. Sometimes we refer to those as weaknesses or challenge, but they're really problems. So I appreciate you taking the time to come on and share. So let's just start tackling about the problem first method and how it works. Frameworks are beautiful for business owners so that they can think clearly through, like your dad was an engineer, and that's kind of the process of thinking through things. So, where does the problem first method come from? First of all, let's start there so people get an idea of its origination.

Why Teams Drift Into Solution Mode

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah, so what pushed me to write this, this was, I would say, late last year, I was feeling these various pressures at work that I felt like we were jumping to solutions before we had really understood the why or had really deeply examined it. And it was at first tough for me to articulate what was going on. And part of writing the book was like me, the process of me getting the words out on the paper and really clarifying my thinking. And what I found through that was also looking back over our history of what we had done over the past five years building software at MVC. But I saw that there were these forces that were kind of driving us to be solution first thinking. So one of them was you know, customers are getting more sophisticated by the day. You know, 10 years ago, when I started building software, customers would come to you with this ambiguous pain point of like, I wish I could do this. And they didn't even really know what was possible with technology yet. And then you could build something for them, and they were like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know you could do this. This is great. But in today's world, like, you know, customers are using technology on a daily basis. They they've seen great UI in UX, they've seen terrible UI in UX. So they're no longer coming to you with these ambiguous pains, they're coming to you with very specific solutions or requests of like, I need a Excel export on this page, I want SMS, I need an API to connect this thing. And that might be the right solution, but sometimes it's not. And sometimes you need to peel back the onion and really understand well, why are they asking for that export to Excel button? Like, what are they going to do with that Excel export once they have it? What's the workflow that they use this in? And I think sometimes if you can really dig down and understand the root problem, you can often come up with an even better solution that, like, maybe you cut another 40 minutes off their day because they don't even need to do that Excel pivot table anymore, because you could create, you know, exactly what they need in the app or something like that. Another thing that I saw was oftentimes, you know, competitor pressure, like a competitor launched this feature, and then you feel like, oh, we we gotta copy it. Our competitor has this, we gotta copy it. But your customer base might not be exactly the same there, or your customers might not have that exact same problem. So before just jumping to like, well, our customer has it, so we have to have it, like really understanding, well, what would adding that feature, what problem would that solve? And then I think as we've all seen, like, you know, with with AI, you know, everybody in the world's saying, like, well, are you gonna add AI to your product? Are you gonna add AI to your business? Well, hey, yeah, AI is great, but like we need to know, like, well, what specific use case, what problem are we solving by adding AI to this? Or are we just adding it for AI's sake and to have you know AI on our landing page? So so those were the initial things that kind of drove me to have that frustration of like we were we were jumping to do this thing before I felt like we were really understood the reasons and the problem that was the underlying foundation for that.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

So you walked in those shoes, is what you're saying. That you discovered this through experiences.

The Feature Alignment Document Shift

SPEAKER_01 9:00

A lot of the most of the stories in the book are are from my own experience at Mbicki. And a lot of templates and frameworks that I present in the book came out of that experience. To give you one example, so we have something called a feature alignment document. So in software, you have these PRD documents, product requirement documents. But that is kind of like after you've already understood what we are building, what's the solution that we're building, you write out this PRD. I felt like we needed something before that. So before we knew the exact solution, when we were just trying to better understand the problem. So that was the idea behind having this feature alignment document. And when we first had it back four or five years ago at NVICI, the last question was, you know, what is the user or business problem that this feature is going to solve? And we were still making mistakes, we were still like jumping to solutions. So the big change happened when I moved like small change, but I moved that question from the bottom of the document up to the top. So it was the first question that the person writing the document had to think about. It was the first thing that the reader of the document had to think about. So everything now like centered around like what is the user or business problem that we're trying to solve. And do that with stripping out any solution language. It's easy for like solution or feature language to creep into that, right? So it can be easy to try restate your problem as like, oh, our customers say they they need SMS messaging. Well, SMS messaging is like the solution, right? Like we need to dig a little deeper. Like, what is the problem? Is the the problem that they need appointment reminders for their parents? You know, it's not SMS is like that's a potential solution for you know their parents are missing appointments. So that change of moving the problem right to the top and putting it, you know, right in the face of that's the first thing you need to think about, that small step actually had a big impact.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

I can see that so that you're not stuck on one solution. And one of the character traits that we encourage as business coaches at my company is being adaptable. So your framework allows that to happen and not just say this is the end result, and it actually works backwards, right? Or takes the end back to the front, as you said. So is the book published?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Yeah. So it came out in April. The ebook and the audiobook are available on my site, problemfirstmethod.com, and the paperback and hardcover are on Amazon.

Why He Wrote The Book

SPEAKER_00 12:08

What encouraged you to actually go through and write this book? Because I know a lot of people say, Oh, I wish I could do that. I know I'm one of those. We talked earlier about why I wrote my book, and it wasn't for monetary reasons, it was mainly just to get my story out there so people knew who they were possibly gonna work for as a business or work with as a business coach. What encouraged you to do that so that maybe that might inspire others to do the same?

SPEAKER_01 12:37

So, the number one reason I have three young boys, and I also have a terrible long-term memory. So I have a good friend who has an amazing memory, and he'll be like, Hey Kevin, remember back in 2006 on that Friday when we were at dinner at that restaurant? Like, I can't remember dinner yesterday. So I wanted to, you know, I was thinking like, you know, 20 years from now when my kids are going into the workforce, like I feel like I have some good stories I could tell them and some good lessons from my own, you know, work life, but I didn't want to lose those. I didn't want them to be lost to my memory. So the the biggest impetus for writing the book was I wanted to get those down to be able to kind of hand the book off to my sons when they get older and they, you know, go into their careers. So that was number one. I think number two was what I hit on earlier of for me, writing helps to clarify my thinking. So last year when I was you know feeling stuck and having a hard time of really articulating why I didn't feel comfortable that we were kind of I felt we were jumping to these solutions, but I couldn't really articulate like what was happening. That process of writing really clarified it for me. And then I think similar to what you and I discussed before we jumped to the recording, like it was a bucket list item for me of like the uh not not many people can want to check off.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah, not many people can say they wrote a book. And I know there's a lot of people that either say they wish or want to write a book and still have it, or they say, I don't have anything to say. Why would anyone read my story or my lessons? And speaking of lessons, you mentioned lessons, the lessons you learned. Let's jump over to the business

How Ambicie Started Inside One Practice

SPEAKER_00 14:25

side. So as you were building this company, can you tell us a little bit about the problem? Well, you already kind of told us the problem it solved, but how you came to say, I want to build this software and kind of those early stages of the business, because we have uh entrepreneur wannabes, we have people that still want to start a business and quite haven't got inspired for whatever reason. And then we have others that have and they're still in those early stages. So, what are some of the things that you learned in the early stages that you could share with others, maybe some pivots?

SPEAKER_01 15:01

There was like the pre-Mbicky time, but let me start with Mbicke. So that actually wasn't really a startup at first. Back in 2018, one of my friends that I worked with back when I was in investment banking, he called me up and he said, Hey Kevin, we just purchased this speech therapy company in Tennessee. It has about 60 therapists, but these therapists are super burnt out. They're taking work home at night, they're having to do a ton of reports at the end of the month. Do you think you could come in and help me with operations? I know that you're good with software. Could we help make the therapists' lives easier? And I thought this is kind of a cool challenge because it kind of combines my like I was I've done some English as a second language teaching in Japan for kids, which is probably as close to being a speech language pathologist without you know being a speech language pathologist that you can be. And then I had also worked in the translation industry and done a lot with natural language processing, so it felt like this was kind of melding different parts of my past experience together. So I jumped on that opportunity. We spent about three years building different internal tools for this one practice. And by the time we had looked up three years later, you know, we had this full practice management system that had helped them grow from 60 therapists up to 170 therapists. And it was at that point, you know, now we had a couple other developers on the team. It's like it probably makes sense that we take what we built here, roll it out into its own company, and start selling this to private practices more broadly across the United States. So we were kind of lucky that we got to build this under the umbrella like of serving one specific customer. And then when we had a working product, we were able to kind of take that and spin it out into a startup.

An Early Career Pivot Through Feedback

SPEAKER_01 17:08

But another experience from the past, or before that, um back in the 2013 or so time frame, I had this was I was teaching English. I wasn't yet in like and I still hadn't had a professional development or programming job yet, but I wanted to get out of teaching, I wanted to do that. So I started building some tools for my friend who was a translator in Tokyo. And at that time, for translators, they had this software called CAT software, computer assisted translation. But the computer-assisted translation tools that existed, they were super high-powered and that had a very high learning curve. And then you had translators on the other end of the spectrum who just would open up Microsoft Word and start translating. But there wasn't really anything in the middle. So my friend, he was kind of the Microsoft Word translator, but I felt like, oh man, you're you're losing so much. Like every job, it's like starting anew. You don't get to reuse any of the past translations that you've done and leverage that work that you've done in the past. So I tried saying, like, can I build something for him that is more user-friendly, not as high-powered as the cat tools that are out there, but you know, something in the middle range that can help him leverage his past work, but but not have a super high learning curve. So I built that. I went to go advertise it on a site called pros.com. And I get in touch with the sales guy to try and run some ads on their site. And he's like, you know, this is cool, but like, unless it has X, Y, Z, like I don't even want to take your money. Like, it's gonna be a waste of your time to advertise on our site. So I was like, Oh, cool, thanks for the feedback. Kind of hung up, worked my butt off for the next 24, 48 hours, implemented all the stuff that he said, called him back up and said, like, hey Drew, I did all that stuff. Can I advertise now? He's like, like, I thought you were that would take you a couple months. I wasn't expecting you to call back. He's like, you know what? Like, let me put you in touch with the owner of our company. You guys also have a connection because he sometimes spends time in Japan. And so ended up having a conversation with him, and he kind of aqua hired me to come work for pros.com. I mean, it wasn't much, like I didn't really I didn't have any users for this app yet, but like that was the first time I had like, ooh, I actually like sold a business kind of and got got to go work for pros.com, and that was an amazing experience that kind of taught me about leadership and development uh and kind of kickstarted my career.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

You're listening to Small Business Pivots with Michael D. Morrison. If you're ready to get your business unstuck and grow, let's chat. Schedule your free session at michaeldmorrison.com. Now back to the show. Fantastic.

The ICP Pivot That Unlocked Growth

SPEAKER_00 20:26

So, were there any pivots along the way that you could share with business owners? Because I know different industries require different things can happen. In fact, we could put five companies that do the same thing in a row, and their challenges are going to be different, right? Different resources from their they might have a great programmer like yourself, or one might have more money than the other. What were some pivots that you came across?

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Yeah, let me talk about one from Mbicke. So we have tried to be very narrowly focused on our niche of like pediatric speech private practices in the US. But even within that targeted niche, you have everything from a solo practice owner who they just started their speech practice and it's just a one-person business, up to you know, private practices that have 40, 50, 60, 100 therapists. And when we were first starting at Mbicke, we were trying to please all of them, trying to have all of them. We hadn't really defined an ICP. And we tried along the way, like we knew like we probably want to target these bigger, you know, 20 to 50 person practices. But we also kept like, we're we don't want to lose the solos either. Because when we looked at the numbers, you know, solos were. 45% of our customer base. But the number that we didn't look at at first was that these solos were only 6% of our revenue. So it wasn't till we made a pivot to really focus and define our ideal customer profile as you know five-person to 50-person practices and really focus on that, that we were able to accelerate our business and accelerate our growth. And like I think the tough part is with any sort of pivot or any business decision, there's always trade-offs, right? Like it wasn't easy to say like we're not going to focus on solos because you know, on the one hand, these solo practices, they they love word of mouth, they love talking in the Facebook groups, they're the most active. And a lot of our business was coming from word of mouth. So while yes, they were only six percent of our revenue, like there was that potential trade-off of like our is a lot of our word of mouth business potentially driven, you know, from them. But you know, I think with every tough decision, every trade-off, like you have to balance it. And so we just when we but when we did define that ICP, that really helped to to kick start our growth, to focus our marketing efforts and to focus our implementation team of to focus our sales team of who we'll do demos for, where we should spend our time. So that was a pivot of going from like, let's try to capture everybody and be all things to all people, to really picking a lane.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

What was your experience once you picked the lane? Because I know almost probably most business owners think the same thing, but what about those guys or those girls or that size business and that size business? But when you pivoted and said, okay, we're dialed in here, can you kind of share what happened afterwards just so people can feel confident? Like my business will serve better if we niche down.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna say it was easy, and definitely there were teammates on you know the team even afterwards who are still like, Are you are we sure we should give up on solos or you know, shouldn't we also like keep doing this for solos? So I think what finally, you know, when we started to see that traction, when we started to see the ICP demos going up, when we started to see revenue increasing, those became the proof points that like the whole team would say, Oh, yes, like this is working. So, you know, to be real, like it it wasn't easy at first, but then like once you start to see those elements of the traction, that definitely helped to get the the buy-in and across the the broader team.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

So if you don't mind, I'd love to talk about the clarity that you discovered because as a business coach, we have lots of startups come to us with a great idea and they want to serve everybody. For instance, we had someone that wanted to do like a cutting board, but he wanted he wondered why he wasn't doing many sales, but then he also wanted it to be a kind of an art piece in a kitchen because these were really nice cutting boards. And I said, Well, those are two price point customers, right? The person that wants just a cutting board is not gonna pay your 150 bucks for a cutting board, and the people that pay 150 bucks for your cutting board are not gonna cut on it if they want it for an art piece, right? So we have two different logical things.

Niche Focus As A Competitive Advantage

SPEAKER_00 25:56

What was your process using the problem first method of how you came to that conclusion?

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah, and I would actually step back and say, like, we saw the benefits of this. The reason that we decided on this very targeted niche of speech private practices was that our competition was doing the opposite. You know, they were trying to like, okay, mental health is this huge multi-billion dollar market. Like, we got to be in mental health. So a lot of our competition, the speech piece, the speech therapist, that part of the EMR, the clinical documentation, they're kind of an afterthought. So that has actually been our biggest advantage in the market, is we can say, like, Ambicki is really tailored for SLPs. Like, that's our focus, that's who we care about, that's who we built this software around, and they can really feel it. So even before the like ICP decision we made, we should have known that because like that was the the big cornerstone of where we were able to get a lot of our initial traction was doing the opposite of what our competitors do were doing, where they were trying to be everything to everyone: mental health, speech, PT, OT. And then by trying to be everything to everyone, you kind of end up being mediocre at best to each piece of that. So I would yeah, definitely encourage your listeners like by being very focused and specialized, I think you can serve that customer extremely well. And if you can own that piece of the pie and own that market, then you can always like figure out how to expand from there. But I think a mistake is like trying to start too broad too early, and then you end up being, you know, just not really good enough like for any one particular customer. And I think for those early stage businesses, like you gotta be like great for that. You gotta really be overwhelmingly awesome for that particular customer. Win those first customers who love you, build that word of mouth, build your reputation. And I think that would be my advice of like how to get that anchor in.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

It's great advice. And I know that being vulnerable here, I even experienced the same thing. When I first started coaching two decades ago, I wanted to be a business coach. And I took on clients, executive coaching, leadership coaching, business owners. And it was didn't go very well. So I give, well, for one, no one really knew how I helped them because what I discovered was each of the people coming to us, they had a different problem, right? And I didn't have a framework for all the problems. And so then I narrowed it down to business owners. Well, I ran into the same thing that wasn't deep enough because we have big business owners, we have small business owners. The challenges they have are on a different magnitude on the scale, and bigger companies, they know what they need, right? They're usually looking for a specific solution. Small business owners, we don't know what we don't know. And so, you know, I narrowed it down to small, and I just kept diving and diving and digging and digging and digging. And once we found our lane, as you said earlier, uh everything's gone smoother. So I encourage our listeners to really think about that. If you're having a challenge with your sales or your ICPs, maybe you haven't dug deep enough. And so, what were some of the other things that you've had to find clarity on before you could really start dialing it in?

Billing Complexity And A Managed Service Pivot

SPEAKER_01 29:46

We have a billing product on NVICI. So insurance billing in the United States is extremely complex. You have single payer, you have multipayer, you have Medicaid and Medicare. So over the first part of NVICE's eras, we, you know, we were building the software to allow private practices to manage that on their own, to be able to do all that, to have the software that helps them do that efficiently. But what we are finding is like some teams, they some practices that they have their own billing team and they can do that, and that's great. But especially the the smaller private practices, some of them are new to billing. Like a lot of them are speech therapists that are now starting their own business. And you know, what they went to school for was how to be the best speech language pathologist. They didn't necessarily go to school for how to do insurance billing or or how to how to run a small business. So that part is frustrating. You know, as an analogy, I would think about it like I don't like doing my taxes. And even if I had the best tax software in the world, I'm still just not gonna like doing that activity. I have a negative association with it. So I think billing was the same for these private practice owners. Like, even if we had the best software in the world, they're not gonna like doing it. So one pivot that we're you know currently in the midst of is can we offer more of a turnkey managed billing solution for them? Where not only do we have the software, but could we have the internal team that if they want it, our team could can manage those aspects for them? So I think sometimes it's seeing those potential pivots in the market, you know, listening to customer feedback, you know, continuing to listen to like what are the problems they're struggling with, what are the pain points they still have.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Are there any insights or tips and tricks that you can give on how to frame the question that you're trying to address?

The Problem Atlas Planning Framework

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Or has that just come out of the framework in the book?

SPEAKER_01 32:05

So one thing that we've done on our team in one of the frameworks I talk about in the book is something I call the problem at this. So, especially when you're in software, you've probably heard of a roadmap. A roadmap is like, what are the the features that we're gonna work on in Q3 or Q4? What's our roadmap, right? And sometimes customers want to know your roadmap to understand what's coming. Sometimes investors want to know your roadmap to understand what's coming. But when you think about a map, a map is very detailed. You have the street names, you have buildings. So to me, that felt like you're already at the solution. You already know what those features should be. And a lot of times that roadmap creation kind of gets rushed at the end of a quarter, like we got to get the roadmap ready for next quarter. And I always felt like we didn't have the system in place or the thing to like, where's that time we can set aside to really wrestle with? Like, what are the problems before we jump to the roadmap and the features? What are the problems we we need to solve as a business? What are the problems we need to solve for our customers? So we did something called the problem atlas. I called it the problem atlas because an atlas is a little bit not as detailed as a map. Like you can see the terrain, you can see the mountains and the valleys, but you don't yet have clarity on the street names or the buildings. So what we did was we I surveyed the team, I said, you know, name me like what are in your mind, what are the top three problems that our customers are facing? And what do you think the top three problems like our business is facing? And I had everybody on the team fill it out because I thought that you know each seat, everybody's perspective and experience was going to be a little bit different and provide a different insight. You have our our sales team who's you know talking to customers and prospects on a daily basis, you have our implementation team who's you know seeing like how customers get onboarded. You have the support team who has the tickets coming in. So we did that, got a lot of great info. I kind of took that, I you know, took out any duplicates and I created a second survey and said, like, all right, like here's the 50 problems that we've come up with across the team. Like, let's rank these now. So rank them both on you know how much in in your from your seat do you think this is a problem? And if we were to solve this problem, like how big of an impact would it have on our business or our customers? And so that was super helpful. Then we got this nice ranked list, and that became a great starting place of prioritization of all right, where should we start for our strategic planning for the the next quarter or the next half of the year?

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Right, I love that.

Where To Connect Plus A Leadership Trait

SPEAKER_00 35:14

I love that. So I know our listeners probably want to learn more. So what's where's the best place to follow you, connect with you, daily tips, tricks? Do you have any blogs, YouTube channels, all that good stuff?

SPEAKER_01 35:29

So I'm on LinkedIn. That's probably the number one place to find me. I also have my own personal site, kevin sdiaz.com, where I'm writing kind of short essays about leadership or startups or business on a you know, a couple times a week posting there. But yeah, definitely reach out, connect to me on LinkedIn. Would love to meet you and say hi.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Fantastic. Well, I encourage everybody to do that, and I always end with a question. And today's question is what is the one trait you believe in leadership that you have learned that everyone else should as well? It has served you so well that everyone should learn this in leadership.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

I'm gonna go with Japanese business concept called nemawashi, which is about socializing an idea before you get in the actual meeting, kind of getting alignment and buy-in before you go to the meeting in an informal way. When I haven't done this, I've run into issues. But every time I've done this, like the the meeting has gone smoothly. And it can even be for things that you think are like no-brainers. You know, for example, like just a simple hypothetical example. Say you're gonna go tell your team, like, we're gonna have a team lunch today at 12. You just jump on a meeting and say, hey guys, I'm taking the team out, we're gonna have lunch at 12. And then later you hear through the grapevine that like Sally was mad because 12 o'clock doesn't work for her. And you know, Frank doesn't eat lunch. Like it's it was this thing that you felt like, oh, this is obviously like a good thing. Like, why would anybody, you know, everybody eats lunch. But you know, if before that you had kind of gone around and said, like, hey Sally, I'm I'm thinking about doing a team lunch today, oh, you have a meeting at 12, okay, well, let's make it 12:30. And Sam, I'm thinking about doing a team lunch today. Oh, you're you're a vegetarian. Okay, we'll make sure to to pick a place that that suits you. And then when you get in the meeting and announce, like, hey, we're doing a team lunch today, everybody's happy and everybody's aligned. So I think that that concept has served me really well as a leader. You know, it's socializing the idea, like any big decisions, strategic decisions, like just making sure to talk it through with individual teammates before you kind of go into that the meeting that announces it to the whole team. That has worked out really well for me.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

I love that. And that could also be very useful when we're trying to figure out the problems our customers have. In other words, I just had a business owner the other day discover what he was going to do to serve his clients, but wasn't quite sure. And I said, Why don't you ask them? Like they'll tell you. Instead of you racking your brain trying to figure it out, why don't you go ask them? It's the same kind of principle, you know, go talk to them, communicate and everything. So, Kevin, you've been a blessing to many. Appreciate your time and insights, wish you continued success. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me. My pleasure.

Closing And Coaching Call To Action

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Thanks for listening to Small Business Pivots. If you're ready to get unstuck and grow, schedule your free coaching session at MichaeldMorrison.com. On social media, you can find and connect with me using the handle Michael D.Morrison OKC. And if today's episode helped you, subscribe and share it with other business owners. Until next week, keep pivoting.