Framing Success

20 Essential Lessons for Achieving Entrepreneurial Greatness from a Self-Made Multimillionaire

Leslie McIntyre-Tavella

• Publisher: An Inc. Original
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781736028346
• eBook ISBN: 9781736028353
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Being a successful entrepreneur is exhilarating, but it's not for the faint of heart. In business today, being good is merely the entry fee. In order for your business to thrive, you must be consistently exceptional. No one knows that better than Leslie McIntyre-Tavella, who, at the age of only twenty-two years old—without a high school diploma and with the odds stacked against her—started her own business, which she bootstrapped into a $20 million award-winning firm.

Framing Success highlights Leslie McIntyre-Tavella's keys to entrepreneurial success, including how to

• build a strong foundation to construct a solid business;

• find and secure a rock-star crew through strategic and unconventional talent optimization practices;

• cut through the distractions and noise of a business and quickly get to the root issues;

• provide outstanding engagement for your customers;

• articulate, share, and grow your vision.

The lessons Leslie offers aren't things you can learn at Harvard Business School; they are crucial lessons she learned on the job. Now you can take her hard-earned, practical, and invaluable experience and create your own rewarding blueprint for entrepreneurial triumph and success!

PART 1

The Build—Breaking Ground

So here you are at go time. You’ve either started a business and need some direction, have that entrepreneurial blood coursing through your veins and want to create your own company, or are looking to buy a firm. In any case, finding or building a good, solid foundation is vital to your firm; a deal breaker would be a foundation that is cracked or crumbling beneath the weight of its framework.

I spent a great deal of time investing in the core structure of my firm, working on its culture, and filling it with top talent. Since I have spent most of my career in the people business, I can tell you that over everything else, people are your most important asset. These days, you can work anywhere, and brick-and-mortar locations are not as important, but your crew—it all boils down to them.

The pressures of owning your own firm are extreme. You’ll have to prepare your crew for the ups and downs of the unexpected. By providing the right tools and communicating a consistent and steady vision, you can arm your people for what is lurking around the corners. Most importantly, you must ensure that your crew is one united front, all working together toward the vision you have laid out before them.

LESSON 1

Securing the Footings

“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation.
You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have
a strong superstructure.”

—GORDON B. HINCKLEY

Under every house is a foundation, and under most foundations are footings. Footings are an important part of a foundation’s construction. They are typically made of concrete with rebar reinforcement that has been poured into an excavated trench. The purpose of footings is to support the foundation and prevent settling. If the footings are not placed properly, or if the soil conditions were not properly diagnosed, the result could be problematic, causing weak bearing conditions or outright failure.

If the whole house settles slowly and evenly, some additional settlement is no big deal. But if settlement is uneven (differential settlement), there could be damage. A frame house with wood siding and drywall interiors can probably handle up to a half-inch of differential foundation movement, but even a quarter-inch of uneven settling is enough to cause cracks in masonry, tile, or plaster.

In construction (and in business), it’s the unusual situations that cause the most trouble. When the footing is laid out off-center so the wall misses its bearing, or you encounter a soft zone on site, or the footing is undersized, the builder faces a judgment call. If you think there is a problem ahead, you know you should stop and call an engineer. But if the risk is low, you would like to keep the job moving.

Ultimately, the footings get covered up, thereby burying the problem and removing it from daily visibility. However, if the reinforcement is not done properly, the long-term results can be catastrophic and cause a tremendous amount of damage.

Paving the Way with the Right People

As an entrepreneur, it is critical that you also start with a solid foundation, something on which you can solidly lay the rest of your business. You must continually keep a watchful eye on obvious details that will tell you if you have a foundational issue. Building a strong base is vital to the long-term success of a business, as is doing the right work along the way.

So, what do you need to create a solid foundation? The right people! It starts and ends with finding and retaining the right talent. The company that you build and its culture are important, but the culture is really made by the people. We had people in our company who had outgrown their positions and had no advancement opportunities, but remained with us for an additional two or three years because they loved the people they worked with and the culture we had created.

Let’s face it: We spend more time with our colleagues than we do with our own family, so liking who you work with is extremely high-ranking among reasons to stay in your current job. The million-dollar question, and what keeps executives and managers up most nights, is “How do we find the great talent we need to drive our businesses forward?” It starts with the beginning—and the beginning is the interview.

The Candidate: Look Beyond the Résumé

People at my firm often used to question my interviewing style, as I spent a great deal of time asking potential hires about their families and upbringing. I wanted to understand how they were raised and what, if any, obstacles they overcame in their lives. From this information, you can generally understand a person’s motivators— why they work, why they do the things they do, what they want out of life, and what decision-making processes they are going to apply to their work. People tend to say they are hardworking and motivated, but it is more important to ascertain this information from their actions, experiences, and background. Your job as the leader is finding out what their principles are, their motivations, and the kind of decision-making skills they would apply to the job. This is vetting and credentialing talent for their behavioral skills.

I remember an extremely competent candidate we interviewed who was raised on a farm. She told me stories of what her days looked like and how, from the age of eight years old, she got up at five a.m. consistently, seven days a week, to start her chores. She told me her family counted on her support and good work to keep the family business moving forward. No task was too menial or beneath her; she did whatever was needed without complaint. What she did not have to tell me about was her commitment to hard work. She had grit and determination, and because she shared her personal upbringing with me, I could clearly see how she would apply this strong work ethic to a new job.

This candidate was able to demonstrate that she was not afraid of hard work, was a team player, and would be committed every day. Additionally, she was a great candidate for a start-up operation or small business, as these firms need people who are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, with no task too trivial for their job description. She also had a checked ego and required minimal supervision—a superior fit for a small entrepreneurial environment.

My background prepared me for becoming an entrepreneur. I am not saying that everyone must go through what I did, but for me, it helped form who I am and showed me very early that there are a lot of obstacles along the way. Since I was accustomed to emotional volatility, it did not come as a huge surprise when I faced similar issues in business. The unique roller-coaster ride of my childhood—with one side of my family telling me I could do anything I set my mind to, and the other showing me a home filled with erratic, unpredictable situations where I had to be self-reliant—fully prepared me for the roller-coaster ride of being an entrepreneur.

When conducting interviews for your firm, look for what is not written in ink, wrapped up in a degree, or readily visible on the résumé. Your focus should include a candidate’s behavioral skills, not just their technical skills (i.e., their degrees), especially for roles that might not necessarily require a degree. Many of our customers often got wrapped up in a candidate’s degrees and prior jobs and did not take the time to really dig into their background and character. A 2017 Harvard Business School study found that because of degree requirements, three in five employers rejected qualified middle-skill candidates with relevant experience.¹ So take the time to dig into a potential hire’s stories, learn about their family and how they were raised, find out what truly makes them tick, and find out why they work. Then you might just hire an exceptional employee.

And keep in mind things are not always as they appear. A candidate was fifteen minutes late for an interview for a sales job opportunity, so the human resources manager crossed him off the hiring list. Thirty minutes later, the candidate arrived soaking wet. He said there had been an accident, so he got out of the Uber in the pouring rain, walked partway, and then ran the rest of the way to get to the interview. This candidate got hired and turned out to be the very best salesperson the company had because he had passion, grit, and determination! You will likely not see these traits jumping off a résumé.

When I meet a young, eager candidate, I think back on the people who took a chance on me—especially in the early days. If you want the best talent, you must find different ways to look for that talent. Stop looking for perfection or trying to check every box. It won’t happen and likely will result in you ending up with a less-than-ideal candidate.

In all honesty, I am rather surprised that the résumé or CV has not become a thing of the past. People do not have the bandwidth or the time to sift through résumés all day long. Unfortunately, people put a tremendous amount of painstaking effort into creating a résumé, oftentimes paying several hundred dollars to hire a résumé “expert.” There will always be a need for talented recruiters because firms simply cannot afford to take the time to screen through 100-plus résumés to find ten people to interview to fill one opening. On average, each corporate job opening attracts 250 résumés. Of these candidates, four to six will get called for an interview, and only one will get the job.² Assuming a company receives 250 résumés for a job opening, and it takes ten minutes to review each résumé, it will take forty-two hours for an individual to screen for one opening!

To maximize time, our firm started by creating bio briefs for our talent, which we then sent to our customers. These briefs summarized our talent’s strengths, behavioral insights, and takeaways that were not found on the résumés. By removing the need for our customers to wade through piles of résumés, we returned many hours of precious time back to them.

I would recommend that other companies do the same. Before you start your hiring process, make a list—such as the following— to help you select candidates with the characteristics, skills, and traits you want in your next employee.

•Determine what soft skills (i.e., traits and qualities) you really want in your company. If you have a set of values, think about how those values align with certain attributes, strengths, or skill sets that you want within your company or for a job opportunity.

•Next, create a set of behavioral questions to help you identify these traits in each potential hire. Here are some sample questions you might want to consider asking a potential hire:

1.What are your five best qualities?

2.Tell me a story about one of the following:

A.Your greatest failure and what you learned

B.Your most proud moment and why

C.A defining moment that somehow contributed to who you are today

3.What are your top three strengths? Give an example for each to support those skills as your strongest.

4.What talent or potential do you have that is not fully realized at your current job?

5.What is the most valuable piece of career advice you’ve been given?

There are many different types of questions you can ask potential candidates to determine their attributes, their depth and commitment, and even their creativity. Asking people personal brand questions about what they value about themselves or asking them to think in metaphors can quickly unlock powerful insights.

1.Which season—spring, summer, fall, or winter—fits your personality best, and why?

2.What would be the title of your autobiography?

3.If you were to choose a well-known axiom or slogan for your life, what would it be? (Bonus points if you can adapt this question for the meeting or job that you ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Build—Breaking Ground
• Part 2: Draft an Award-Winning Plan
• Part 3: Execution
• Part 4: Budgeting
• Part 5: Demolition
• Part 6: Cleanup
• Part 7: The Final Product
• Appendix
• Notes
• About the Author