How can you leverage your membership to its fullest? What does it take to become an exceptional member of our community? In this inspiring session, our 2024 Member of the Year will share the mindset, actions, and strategies that set them apart. Learn how to manage the volume of ideas you get from the community, how to get ideas implemented and how to build meaningful relationships with fellow members. Whether you’re a new member or a seasoned veteran, this session will leave you inspired to elevate your own engagement and impact.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serve Podcast brought to you by Collective 54. This is a podcast for founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you find yourself in IT services, consulting, accounting, or marketing agencies, if you’re in the expertise business, this is for you. What we hope to accomplish on this show and through our membership is to teach you how to make more money, make scaling easier, and maybe someday get to an exit. Our method of teaching is peer learning, which takes me to the introduction of my guest today. We have with us today a very special guest. His name is Don Goldstein, and the reason why Don is special—one of the reasons he’s special for many reasons—is that our members vote on the 2024 Member of the Year, which is the highest honor you can get within Collective 54. It’s a very meaningful thing because it wasn’t like some authority picked Don out of a member directory. It was bottoms-up and voted on by members. On today’s show, we’re going to discuss how to get the most out of membership. Now, we’ll use Collective 54 as our use case, but if you’re somebody who’s not a member, maybe you’re a member of another community, I think these lessons will apply to you as well. But before I jump into my long list of questions, Don, as always, it is great to see you. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Don Goldstein: Thank you, Greg. It’s really a pleasure to be here on this milestone episode. It’s an honor to be recognized by my peers. I am with 5Q, and we are an IT services company specializing in cybersecurity in the commercial real estate industry. As Greg likes to say, the riches are in the niches, and we’re in one of those.
Greg Alexander: Okay, very good. All right. Let me jump into my first question because I got a lot of them. So, Don, what actions do you take to engage in the community?
Don Goldstein: I think it’s important I start at the beginning. When I joined some four years ago, right in the middle of COVID, I was actually referred by another member, Matt Rosen, the CEO of Aleta, who is, to me, a model member of the Collective 54 community. He really sold me on the fact that I needed to be part of this community if I wanted to get to where I wanted to go in my career. Having spent most of my career in corporate, being an entrepreneur was a totally new thing to me. To get the most out of my membership, I knew I had to learn. I had to listen. It started with the boutique, and Greg, you were going through each one of those chapters, all the questions, and I think I attended almost every single one of those. A lot of it in the beginning was just learning, getting my bearings, and understanding what running a boutique is all about. I learned so much from that that it really brought me to the point where I knew I had to connect with other members to take my learning to the next level.
I’ll say a couple of things here that I think are important for people to know who are either in Collective 54 or thinking of joining. I felt I needed to be present at those sessions, so I turned on my video every time because I felt I wanted to be seen, and I wanted to see others and feel like, okay, I’m on camera here; I better pay attention and not get distracted. Then you had the expert sessions that I thought were, and are, tremendous because they focus on someone not necessarily in our community but with ideas that resonate—sessions that I knew I could learn from. The smaller leadership board calls were really critical to make those connections with other individuals in the community and get a deeper understanding of what they’re doing with their boutiques. Then you had the blocks that I signed up for because I felt I needed to dive into some areas specifically. The mentor-mentee relationships that were formed during my participation in three blocks over three quarters were just tremendous in giving back to others and learning from others. I can get into that later. Then you came out with the founder bottleneck, and I realized I needed to take a lot of what I got from that very seriously if I wanted to continue to help lead the firm in the best way I can and get the firm to the next level. I started with growth, went to scale, and am in scale but kind of moving over to exit very soon. Each of those phases resonated with each area, whether it be those other meetings we had with other members in the smaller groups or just you running through each of the chapters of the boutique and then the founder bottleneck, which takes you through the scale into the exit stage.
Lastly, there’s a wealth of information on the Collective 54 website—not just the podcast and episodes, but the templates, solution guides, and connections with other members. I have found it tremendously helpful that I don’t have to start from scratch. A lot of that is already there for us to use.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, fantastic answer. It answered my second question, which was, how did your engagement change over time? And you just articulated how you kept adding, deleting, augmenting, and modifying over your 4-year journey with us. So let me skip to the third question, which listeners are probably asking right now. So, Don, you’re the CEO of a significant firm. How the heck do you make the time for all this?
Don Goldstein: Okay, so I don’t consider myself finding the time. Over the years I’ve been part of Collective 54, I make the time because it’s a choice and it’s a priority. Even at my age, with all this white hair, I know I can still learn and grow. If I stop that, I feel like I’m done. How am I going to grow? How am I going to get better? The only way to do that effectively, from my perspective, is to participate. If I’m all in on something, I’m in. So the time I have to make now.
I also find it’s often the busiest people that are able to find the extra time in their days that actually are the ones that get tapped on the shoulder to do other things. It seems to always be those busiest people. But I can tell you one more thing. I am very blessed, as you are, to have an incredible executive assistant who manages my work life. I know you’ve talked about that in previous sessions. Why is that important? Because I know, like you do, I can have a call with her first thing Monday morning. We can lay out that whole week, and I say, do not schedule anyone over these sessions. Block it out. No one can schedule a call, and they have to go through her anyway. So I know it’s not going to happen. That’s how I make the time. I just make it. I’m not finding it. It’s there.
Greg Alexander: Since Collective 54 has been around for 5 years now, and you’ve been a member for 4, we have a tremendous amount of programming. My team is always adding things because they’re so driven to do things for the members. But there is a downside to that; there can be too much, and you can be overwhelmed. So how do you deal with the volume of programming in Collective 54?
Don Goldstein: Yeah, well, as I said before, I listen, I absorb, I filter. A lot of what I do is I run things by my team. I say, “Okay, these ideas I’ve got in my head, these visions, I want to implement all these things.” Almost everything I’ve gotten from Collective 54, I say, “I have to bring this back to my company.” Then I take it to my team, and they’ll tell me, “Don, it’s not the time. We’re not ready. Hold off. It’s too much. Slow down.” That is a problem because I want to implement everything right away, and I know I can’t. But I have that funnel, right? That says, “Wait a minute. We still have a business to run here. We know you want to make the business better, but we also have to run the business.” So, while trying to transform the business, we also have to run it. There is that balance.
Because I adopt EOS like you do, at my L10 meetings, I bring to them what I’m hearing and learning. They help determine with me, “Yes, let’s implement this,” or “Let’s take a closer look at that.” I try to take at least one thing from each session, one thing to focus on. If I take too many, it’s really too much. So, I try to filter that, and then I let my team help me filter.
Greg Alexander: Great, great. Getting your team involved is a big thing. Whether that’s indirectly in something like an L10 meeting in an EOS session, as Don just mentioned, or even formally getting involved in Collective 54, is a good thing to do. We’ve learned a few things over the last 5 years, and that is scaling a firm is too much work for one person. The founder bottleneck is real, and there’s a lot of programming. If you can get your team involved in some way, shape, or form, it’s likely that you’re going to get more out of the membership. I just wanted to mention that. Okay, let’s go to the next one, which is building meaningful relationships.
You talked an awful lot through your journey at several points about how you built relationships, as a mentor and mentee, and how much you’ve enjoyed being a mentor. What have you done to build relationships? Maybe share a story that brings that to life on the relationships that you built.
Don Goldstein: When someone in some part of Collective 54 talks about things that really resonate or things that I’m just not thinking about, or things that I think, “Oh, I know something that can help here,” I try to connect with that person. That connection can start with an email, but I want to get on the phone with that person. I want to talk to the person, get on a call, and see the person face-to-face on a Zoom. I’ll also take advantage of the local meetings we’ve had here in Dallas. I think it’s great that we’re going to have these regional meetings where people can be more face-to-face with each other. That’s been the toughest part in Collective 54. In addition to the annual retreats, having more regular meetings in our region will help us make those relationships meaningful.
When I have a call with a client, often serving as their fractional Chief Information Officer or Chief Information Security Officer, they bring something to me. It can come from anywhere—HR, finance, accounting, or the business side. They might say, “We have this issue. We’re trying to develop an HR strategy or an organizational strategy.” I reach out to the team. I’ll reach out to Jeff, Julie, or Matt and say, “Connect me with someone who knows this well.” They come back right away and say, “You need to talk to these two or three people.” I’ve done that on multiple occasions.
I’m reluctant to call names out because I don’t want to miss anyone and hurt their feelings, as there have been so many meaningful connections. But I will say, when it comes to organizational development, I reach out, and they’re always willing to help. Depending on this community to help me in the work I do is invaluable. I don’t know where else you get that. I don’t know companies off the top of my head that I can reach out to. Having them here with me in Collective 54 means I don’t have to vet them. I know they’re in Collective 54 for a reason. They’re learning like I am, and they’ll fit right in with the culture of what I’m trying to do with my clients.
Greg Alexander: Great, great advice. And that is how you build relationships. I remember we were in Fort Worth at the conference. I was observing the room, and you were like a hive. You had all these people around you, and I’m like, how the heck does Don know all these people in our virtual environment? We only get together once a year, and you just explained how that happened. So great advice. Let me go to the next question that I have, and that is leadership. How has your personal leadership style changed as a result of being a member? And has that translated to some new growth inside your firm?
Don Goldstein: Okay, well, I’ll highlight two things that I think are important here. One is, being part of large corporations, I’ve always been on the receiving end of building a culture. It was, “Here’s our company culture. Make sure everyone on your team—and my teams ranged from hundreds to thousands—make sure that culture is ingrained in your team, and that’s how they’re going to be measured.” This was my first opportunity to implement a culture in a company, and boy, was that one of the most exciting things I think I’ve done in the last six years with 5Q. I put that in my blog that I published on Thanksgiving Day about our culture. It was amazing. I think it may have even been your third chapter in the Boutique on Culture. It was right at the beginning. You need to build a culture. That told me, okay, it’s one thing to say, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Everybody knows that quote, but it’s not just that it eats strategy—it can be a strategy. I guess I didn’t really realize that other than maybe it’s in the background. But no, it’s important. If you want to build a company and you want to grow it, that culture has to be the right kind of culture. Everybody has to fit into it.
The second one is, and this is maybe a little correction from what you said earlier, I was CEO. But you know what? In the founder bottleneck, I said, I no longer need to, or even want to, be CEO. This year, I transferred that title back over to one of the founders and said, “You take it.” Why? Because you know where my heart is. My heart is in these leadership roles I’m playing with our clients—being CIO, being CISO, having a seat at the executive table with our clients. That’s what I love to do. I can deal with financials and spreadsheets just fine, but do I want to do that every day? No. The founder bottleneck told me, “Give it up. You don’t have to keep it, and you can have a meaningful position in the company. Keep doing what you’re doing.” I’m still a partner, of course, and I have a big stake in the company, but I stepped back from that. I didn’t need to have that title anymore. I was just fine delivering service and creating all the collateral around the service so that I can have a successor to that service. That’s the other part I learned—succession planning. I know that from my corporate world, but in a boutique, it’s much tougher to do. Now I realize how important that is, especially where I am right now in my stage of life and where I am in the growth of our firm.
Greg Alexander: Excellent story. I didn’t know you gave up the CEO title. That’s a demonstration of leadership, which is what my question was about. You’re doing what’s right for the firm first and foremost, as opposed to what’s right for you, and those two things don’t need to be opposing each other. Oftentimes, a great leader like yourself can figure out what’s right for you and what’s right for the firm at the same time.
Greg Alexander: Okay, let’s talk about mistakes. Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, right? Many of our members have never been a part of a business community like Collective 54. Sometimes they approach it as if we, Collective 54, are their vendor, and we’re not. Membership is very different. You give and you take. It’s not a customer or client one-directional relationship. I bring that up because that’s typically what causes mistakes. Did you make any mistakes along the way as a member of Collective 54? What did you learn from that, and what would you tell others to look out for?
Don Goldstein: I don’t necessarily look at it as having made mistakes. I think it’s more about whether I could have done some things earlier on that I did later. One example of that is, I realized maybe two years into my membership that instead of doing the hack I was doing—when there was a really good session, I would get on a Zoom call with the team and present it to them because they couldn’t access it themselves—I realized that wasn’t the best way to do it. I would be on the call while they were watching it for an hour. That was the best way for them to hear and learn at the time. But then I realized the best way is to get them as members of Collective 54. I think I would have brought some of my leadership team into Collective 54 earlier, not waited the two years I did. When I did that, it was very meaningful. They went in, stayed for a year, got what they needed, and moved on to other things. I brought someone else in, and now I’m thinking about who I will bring in next.
Don Goldstein: I think it’s a mistake to think you have to do it all yourself on Collective 54 and transmit it yourself. The best way for others in your leadership team to learn and gain from Collective 54 is to be in Collective 54. It’s not a big investment, and the return far outweighs it. I know I’m selling Collective 54, but I am really sold on the fact that the more people you get from your team involved, the more the learning will resonate and make an impact on your company. That’s one big thing.
Don Goldstein: The other thing is about the blocks. You have to do the work. It became really hard for me because things got busy, and I pushed things off, doing them in the last couple of weeks of the block. I realized with the later blocks that starting the work and keeping up every week is crucial. Leverage all the templates and resources already there. If you’re going to do a block, commit to it and do the work every week. It’s not a heavy lift, but if you push it off, it just accumulates.
Greg Alexander: Two more questions about mistakes. You reclassified them as maybe omissions, which I think is a good reclassification. How about actions you see other members taking within the community that you admire and want to highlight as things to model ourselves after?
Don Goldstein: I think I could do a better job. I do have a circle of people I connect with, but coming from the tech world and being the kind of person I am, I’m not naturally an extroverted social person. I have to work at it. I see others who are really good at that, and I would like to become better at it, even now in my career.
Don Goldstein: Another thing is that I should be taking more advantage of your office hours. That’s something you offer that is huge. Between you and Jeff, you have so much to give, and I really should take more time to take advantage of that. I know others connect with you and bring things to you, and you bring things to them and everyone else. I think that’s important and something I see others do.
Don Goldstein: Lastly, sometimes being more vulnerable when it comes to asking for advice is important. It’s hard for people like us, A-types, to admit we need help with something. We like to give help, but it’s sometimes harder for us to ask for it. I think that’s something I need to do more of, and I could learn from others who take advantage of that.
Greg Alexander: Perfect. All right, so my last question. As the member of the year, what is your vision for our community, and how can we all help bring your vision for our community to life?
Don Goldstein: I’ll start with an example of what you’ve done already, and I think if you do more of it, it will be amazing. Collective 54 leaned in and created that boutique AI bot, making it easy for people to search through information in the book. You even did it with a member.
Don Goldstein: Right, so you’ve presented many examples of where you’ve had members help in different areas of Collective 54, and I think leveraging the membership to help Collective 54 be better as a firm is leading by example. That’s showing, “Hey, we’re not just gathering all these CEOs and teaching them; we’re actually learning from them. We’re actually taking what they’re doing, incorporating it into our business, and it’s helping Collective 54 grow and scale.”
So that’s the first thing—leading by example and doing things like that is amazing. Highlighting that to the membership gives us all that excitement level that, “Oh, we are making a difference in Collective 54, not just the other way around.” Then, I think utilizing the resources of this community—they are vast. I know you are finding more and more ways to do that and connect us together. I think you did a great job of that in the last retreat with one of the exercises you did when you had people talk to each other about how we can help each other and how we can even benefit each other. I thought that was fantastic.
Your website—this is maybe more to the members, but also to you—that should be the place for us to all go and connect with each other and get the resources. I once said, “Maybe you need to make it into an app.” No, you don’t need to do that because I can get everything I need on my phone with your website. You’ve done a great job at that, but I think continuing to build content there will draw more people—not only the internal people but also others looking for you that don’t know you yet.
And then, selfishly perhaps—and I know you’ve tried this before, maybe only in the North American or Western Hemisphere—but I think there’s room to grow globally, frankly. I know that’s a big lift to do that, especially with time zones, but I could see one day Collective 54 having hubs in different areas of the world. Your benefit goes beyond these borders, there’s no doubt in my mind. I might find myself one day living in one of those other hemispheres, and I want to be able to take advantage of that, even if I’m way across on the other side of the pond.
Greg Alexander: Interesting. All right. Well, those are my questions. You did a fantastic job providing us answers, modeling out how to get the most out of your membership. So, Don, as always, I can’t thank you enough for your contributions. Members like you make Collective 54 a great community for many, many years, and we’re all so lucky that you’re in our community.
Don Goldstein: Thank you, Greg. My pleasure.
Greg Alexander: Okay, all right, everybody. Well, that concludes our episode. I hope you got something out of it. Members, look for the Outlook invitation. We’re going to have a private Q&A session for you, where you’ll be able to ask Don your questions. Some of you might be trying to figure out what to do with this thing called Collective 54, and he’s the guy to answer. So let me end there. Until next time, I wish everybody the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firms.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.