Build, Empower, Exit: Georgi Feidler’s Growth & Succession Playbook for Legacy-Driven Founders

Freddy D: 00:02:06

Hey, superfan superstar Freddie D. Here.

In this episode 110, we're joined by Georgi Fidler, a powerhouse leader with more than two decades steering Fortune 500s, high growth startups and everything in between.

Georgie has Shepherd IPOs, mergers and capital raises, scaling organizations from scrappy teams to workforces of 68,000 with a rare blend of strategic vision and roll up your sleeves execution. She partners with executive teams to align people, process and systems for sustainable growth.

As founder of Hire Train Inspire, Georgie delivers fractional chief of staff magic, freeing CEOs from the day to day so they can focus on the big picture. Get ready to dive into her data driven playbook for building resilient cultures, boosting retention and turning bold visions into reality.

This is going to be an inspiring episode. Welcome Georgi, to the Business Superfans podcast. We're excited to have you here.

Georgi Feidler: 00:03:06

Thank you so much, Freddie D. I am excited to be here.

Freddy D: 00:03:10

Yeah, we had a good chat. Before we start recording, share with our listeners the backstory of what led you to come up with and create Hire Train and Inspire.

Georgi Feidler: 00:03:22

Yes. So at Hire Train Inspire we call ourselves hti.

We serve as the GPS for small to mid sized businesses, guiding founders through people, process and systems that help them turn tribal knowledge into transferable value. And my journey here to get to this was not straight path by any means. It was very much kind of pivoting a lot.

I think over the past decade in my career I've worked a lot with small to mid sized business owners and that's really created this passion for me with them.

I think that business owners and founders are the change makers and trailblazers who create freedom and impact in their communities and with the teams that they hire and the customers that they serve. And so I think they're the lifeblood of innovation and I love to be a partner with them. They're the heartbeat of the economy.

What really drew me to the work that I do with Hire Train Inspire is too many founders are stuck in the business instead of building for what's next. And it's a very lonely journey.

Any founder was being honest with you, they'd say they never felt lonelier than in that growth journey the way that I got started. I think there's two types of entrepreneurs. I think there's those that are born that way. They're always chasing ideas, working for themselves.

They probably make a really terrible employee. And there's those who become entrepreneurs often by accident. So I'm definitely the second type.

I spent the first 15 years of my Career in corporate and startup environments. My journey, like I said, not straight, very pivoting. I'm a generalist by nature, so my career's taken a very winding path.

I think most people climb one ladder and I've managed to build bridges between them. I think that flexibility and that generalist outlook has really become my superpower.

Over the years I stepped into roles that many wouldn't expect to connect. But together they've given me a really good 360 view of how businesses actually run.

So from recruiting and office management, business office and finance, to HR and people, to sales and marketing to business development and then operations and quality assurance. I've done that over a lot of different industries. Healthcare, SaaS, CPG call centers.

I think I've lived the rhythm of founder led businesses and fast moving startups and I've been able to see what works and what unravels at each stage of growth. That breadth has kind of become my edge. I would describe myself and some of my referral partners describe me as a T shaped executive.

So broad enough to see that entire business but deep enough to contribute meaningfully across some core areas.

I first got started in healthcare and joined a company that was about 4,800 employees and over about four years went through several mergers and acquisitions and became 68,000 employees. I got to play a hands on role in that post merger integration. Really early in my career I saw the power of that which was really exciting.

Later on after the healthcare became very corporate and red tape again.

Once the mergers and acquisitions were through, kind of got bored with that, moved into SaaS and helped scale the company from 18 million to 60 million in just four years. We led efforts to get national recognition as great places to work and most admired companies. In two years we onboarded about 556 people.

We went through two rounds of financing with Bain and Goldman Sachs during that period. I also saw the other side of it. When you get a lot of investment, sometimes you can get really stupid with your money.

And so that was great lessons as well that I now use in my practice coaching founders.

Freddy D: 00:07:07

Wow, what a story and what a background I can appreciate.

I've gone through a couple of acquisitions and mergers, not being involved in the transaction part, but working in a corporate environment and being caught up in it. And several of those times I did not end up on top of the equation because I was redundant.

Politics does come into play, especially with the acquirer doing the acquiring and you're the acquiree. You're in the wrong seat.

Georgi Feidler: 00:07:37

Yeah, it's A tough place to be.

Freddy D: 00:07:39

Yeah. So experienced that a couple times. So I can appreciate your background and the things that you do.

So let's talk a little bit about what are the services that you bring to the table with your company.

Georgi Feidler: 00:07:51

What I do right now as a fractional expert is really focus on small to mid sized businesses across a variety of industries. They are typically one of two type of ways that these folks are coming or the similar problems that they have.

So I would say the first is baby boomer business owners needing a succession plan. This I actually happened upon by accident probably about three years ago.

But I've had four or five of those clients so far and have really, really enjoyed that process of helping that baby boomer business owner let go, prepare for retirement, but make sure that their legacy stays intact. That's been a lot of what that work is. It's transitioning their business or retirement or sale, figuring out what that needs to look like.

Is that a sell to a PE firm, another owner? Is that a sell to the employees themselves?

We've done a lot of different options there and then helping them secure their legacy and feeling good about letting go, but ensuring that there are structure in place, governance in place, that they continue on in an advisory capacity to ensure the business is set up for success right in the future. The second I would say is founders that are trying to transition from that lifestyle business. Right. To a true growth oriented business.

What comes with that is a lot of family and friend dynamics. So we guide founders scaling with family or friends to overcome that relational complexity.

So you don't want to burn bridges with people that are in your life.

But sometimes the path you're going, when you say hey, that's my target up there, that mountain, the people you originally brought on don't want to make that climb with you. So we have to build a clear, durable structure for growth.

I'd say those are really the two types of folks that come with me are the most common problems that I get. When we first started Hire, Train, Inspire, it was a one stop shop for a lot of things.

But over the last nine years as we've gotten clearer, it's really involved into a trusted strategy and enablement partner that supports these founder led businesses or second gen business owners through that messy middle right where they are and where they want to be.

Freddy D: 00:09:57

Sure.

One of the things that I've realized working with multitude of different businesses, especially when you talk about the boomers, a lot of them don't plan for the exit strategy if something happens in their life. And God forbids they pass. They're not prepared.

I know for a fact because I was working with an interpreting and translation company recently and the goal was really to me to run the company and they were going to retire and travel the world. They love to go traveling. Husband and wife.

Well, unfortunately he had an unexpected heart attack and it was over and they were not prepared, had nothing in place. So I ended up stepping in and taking over running the company.

We put things in place, got things cleaned up because it was a husband and wife team and got a position for sale and it ended up getting sold. So she ended up having some money out of this whole situation.

What you're doing is basically helping people be proactive versus in this case, reactive. Fortunately, I was already working with them as operations and doing some GM stuff.

Had I not been there, that business would have probably, it would have probably gone under in 90 days.

Georgi Feidler: 00:11:15

Yeah, yeah. Freddy D. That is such a great point.

Like the reality of it is, if we're talking about boomers, we've got over 50% of small to mid sized businesses owned by baby boomers. 10,000 boomers are retiring daily and over 60% of them have no succession plan.

They don't even realize that's what they're supposed to be working on until they're already there or it's already too late. And so I really am passionate about spreading that aware because their legacy doesn't have to die, the business doesn't have to die.

There can be a next stage that feels good to them and to who it's handed off to. I'm really passionate about that. Thank goodness they had you. A lot of people don't have that.

And I love that you brought up that hit by the bus situation. Most founders and business owners, they're stuck, right? They can't delegate, they can't scale, they can't step away. They're so in the details.

And the business lives inside their head with no systems and no playbook that by the time they get out of it, they're ready to retire. They're ready for what's next. Right. To sell the business, scale the business, whatever that is.

They are in a mode of reactive leadership and they are at burnout.

And so that's what I'm trying to avoid is how do we create awareness of that problem and start the plan when there's still enough gas in the tank to get there in a meaningful and successful way.

Freddy D: 00:12:33

Yeah. But it becomes challenging because some of those don't want to change. This is how I'VE done it.

And I've run into situations where it's a family business. Brother works there, the brother's son works there, the owner's daughter works there. And this is how we've been doing it.

And I look at that as a train wreck waiting to happen. I know this for a fact because I was involved with the company and I walked away from it because they were not willing to make the changes.

They talked the talk, but they didn't walk the walk. And unfortunately, there's a lot of those that something's going to happen or something unfortunate happens. The business cycle changes.

There's a lot of dynamics going on right now in this country. You could be in business today, but tomorrow you're out of business because of circumstances beyond your control.

And if you're not prepared, you're toast.

Georgi Feidler: 00:13:28

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Especially with the founders navigating family and friend dynamics, I really start to see motivation when they are trying to prepare for what's next. Right. They're at an inflection point where something different needs to happen than what's been happening.

That gives them this motivation to start seeing things in a clear way. Sometimes that's going to a PE firm and getting kind of laughed out of the room. They're like, you don't have a business. You have a job.

There is no business without you. You're the single point of failure. That level of honesty and awareness really starts to incentivize that change.

The key things with the founders navigating those family and friend dynamics is the role clarity, reset. We need to realign everyone based on strengths, capacity, and what the business needs right now, not just who's always done what.

We have to have alliance conversations. Right?

We have to facilitate really honest, structured dialogue that resets expectations and yet still preserves the relationships that are there, but makes it really clear that this is the vision that we're building towards a future with less dramatic and more direction. And then I would say the third really key piece of that is the founder themselves has to have that lens shift.

They've got to move from hero single point of failure. Everything in my head to guide right delegating and getting things done through others.

So their team is empowered with structure and they're not stuck on relying on reactive leadership. I think those are the key points.

Freddy D: 00:15:05

I like your single point of failure. I'm gonna have to use that term. It's true. When you stop and think about it, you're the linchpin of failure.

Because something happens, especially if you got the whole business in your head, it's the business is gone. Just like that.

Georgi Feidler: 00:15:22

Just like that. Right. And they're often not the only ones that are the single points of failure. Again with these family friend dynamics.

They brought a lot of heroes on with them. These people thrive in the chaos. They really enjoy that. They like doing a bunch of different stuff.

They don't really like it when there's measures in place that kind of is real icky to them. So you've got a lot of heroes everywhere. Therefore, you end up with multiple single points of failure.

That's a lot of what we do in that audit and assessment period when we're first bringing in a new client, mapping those out, where do those live? Where are the issues? What are those gaps? I think that's.

Freddy D: 00:15:54

Where are the landmines that you don't step on them or. Because they're there.

Georgi Feidler: 00:16:00

Yeah. And it's really hard because there's such a level of complexity because of the deep relationships that are there.

I had a founder, we had to coach him through letting his mom go. That's a lot. And she was there for like 14 years. That's a really task to do.

It's getting them to that level of clarity and yet honoring the contributions that these people make. They wouldn't be where they are now if they didn't have these folks. There's a level of complexity there which I enjoy helping them navigate through.

On the baby boomer side, with business owners that need succession planning, dealing with a similar thing, it's the opposite side of the coin. They're looking at succession strategy, building a plan for how the business transitions.

And so many of them, again, not even aware that that needs to happen until they go to, oh, you know, I'm ready to retire. And they think they're going to hand it off to their kid. And their kid's like, I don't want that business.

They want to go be an influencer or something, or they're trying to sell it on the business website. It's not an attractive sales piece because the stuff that needs to be in place to make it a real business and not a job. Right.

People don't want to buy a job, they want to buy a business. It's just not there for them.

It's about that tribal knowledge transfer, documenting all the key know hows, decisions, relationships, responsibilities, and then getting a general operational tune up, making sure we've got frameworks in place, we've audited the systems, the people, the processes to make sure the business can run without that founder Intervention.

Freddy D: 00:17:24

Right.

A lot of good stuff there and a lot of great insights that I think people, especially founders or startups, really need to listen to that because they need to plan.

Even if you're a startup, you should still invest in putting that all in place because of the fact something unfortunate could happen and your business could be gone tomorrow. You put a lot of work and effort into getting it started.

So you know, George, share the story of an actual company that you don't need to know the company name or any of the details, but of somebody that you helped transform and became a super fan of yours and they've promoted you to where you've attracted more business to grow your company over the last nine years.

Georgi Feidler: 00:18:11

Yeah. I'll give a family friend example and a baby boomer example as well.

My family friend is a health brand that I've worked with for about four years now. They were the carbon definition of what it means to build your business around family and friends.

We had a ton of people who were legacy team, very rooted in. This is how we've always done it. So this is how we're going to do it.

With that there's kind of that undercurrent of complacency and just resistance to change. We had to do a lot of work to overturn that mindset. We started by calling out a mission that really mattered to everybody.

The vision of the founder was in their head and they had articulated it clearly multiple times. But as we did teammate interviews, that was not the consensus.

So we needed to partner with the founder and the exec team to articulate that compelling vision, really define a unifying purpose, clear values.

So this is how we're going to behave and what that looks like in terms of aligned behaviors and then the mission that really matters and what are the measures of success? Right. This served as guardrails to help the team navigate priorities and stay focused.

Especially as we started building that leadership bench and that next evolution of growth minded people that were ready to move the business forward. Because there was so much tribal knowledge, having that as a guardrail for people to measure against was really important.

One of the things I'm really proud of and what we did here is as people moved on, as the legacy team started to move on, it wasn't this icky secret thing. It was alliance conversations.

One of the great things that is a superpower of the friends and family dynamics is that they have those relationships that are deep seated and so you can start and really truly have an alliance conversation. Like what are you hoping to get where are you going? Here's what the vision is. Is that something you want to be a part of?

And when we had those really honest conversations, so many of them, I think we overturned all but two of the leadership team and the executive team. It's like, no, I don't want that. I'm not interested in that next step. That doesn't sound fun to me at all.

Freddy D: 00:20:24

Yeah, because you guys had that conversation and all of a sudden they stopped and say, wait a minute, this is not really where I want to go in my life. I got my own aspirations. You gave a moment for everybody to stop and go, huh?

And the other thing that you did that I want to really emphasize, and I call it getting people in a racing rowboat team in line. Because if you think of an eight person racing rowboat, they have, you got eight people.

So you got to get everybody in synchronization, because otherwise that boat's going no place. It's not even going in a circle. It's because you got eight different individual oars.

And so if everybody's going their own direction, the boat's going like this and it's not even moving. A circle would even be better. And it can't go in a circle.

You got the whole company to understand the mission and so everybody sees the direction you're getting. Everybody in the rowboat. It's my easy example, because everybody can visualize it.

And now you got everybody rowing in synchronization towards the goal the company wants to go to.

Georgi Feidler: 00:21:30

Yeah, absolutely. That was the very first step with anything. And it makes those conversations much easier.

Once there was that acknowledgement, we did a really intentional transition and handoff because that was the other piece. There was so much tribal knowledge and there was such this niche creation of how they acquired and delivered to customers.

We couldn't just say, oh, we're just going to replace that and find that there had to be partnerships and transitions that were documented every single meeting. And the on ramping for this new person. We're going to, we're going to video it. We're going to capture all of that knowledge.

We're going to make sure that we have all of that. So I think that was a first key step.

And then the other thing is in trying to get to growth, I think the founder saw, oh, if I just add more people, it will mean more growth. But that's not really always how scale works, especially when you don't have the foundation to support that. Right.

If you build on a really crappy foundation, it's just going to sink further into the ground, which was what was happening. A lot of what we did initially was putting KPIs to ensure that we're growing in a healthy, profitable way.

Because they're bootstrapped, they don't have any venture money or PE money. They were profitable and we wanted to make sure that that stayed that way.

So as we transitioned out, legacy people filled gaps and brought in new people, we put into place a measure of gross profit per labor dollar. So just again making sure that stayed in a good healthy spot. When I first started with them, it was 54 cents, which that's not good. And so over.

Yeah, over the last couple of years, as we've worked towards that, we are now at $2.74 with them. So that means we're getting more profit for all the labor dollars that we're spending. Right.

That's all about workforce realignment, performance measurement, accountability, alignment to the vision and goals. To your point. Right, that rowboat. And then we did a lot of work around automating some manual processes.

I think we saved about 8,400 hours per year because of what they do. And the offer, it requires a call center type environment to field those customer service calls.

And so there was so much opportunity there for not only cost savings, but revenue enhancing. You can make a call center more profitable, which is what we did. I think we just looked at our data the other day and we have the ROI by department.

So the departments that are the highest roi. We've seen customer service go from being one of the bottom in the company to number three or four.

Now I think people's first, then finance and then customer service.

We've seen the power of automation, the power of processes and the power of really understanding utilization, utilization of your teammates and how that's a leading indicator to gross profit per teammate.

Freddy D: 00:24:21

It's important to get the team in line with it and more importantly, get the team motivated. Because the culture of the company is really the heart and soul of the company.

One of the quotes in my book is people crawl through broken glass for appreciation, recognition.

If you don't provide, you can have all the systems in place, all the AI tools that you want, but if you don't motivate and get everybody in the right direction and express some gratitude and appreciation, it don't mean anything.

Georgi Feidler: 00:24:52

Yeah, I love that you brought that up because some of the qualitative measures that we do are around employee retention rate. We do something called enps. So many of you might have heard of NPS Net promoter score.

We do the internal version of that employee Net promoter score, which is based on a scale of 1 to 10. Would you recommend us as an employer to your family and friends as we put those measures into place?

As we scaled up the leadership bench, as we put a vision into place, we saw the employee retention get up to 83%. I think that was our last measure that there.

Which considering there's a call center component, which is a large part of the workforce, which typically burnout turnover. Yeah. I mean 50% is typically that turnover rate. So to have that right is huge.

And then we saw our ENPs jump 270% in just two quarters by doing one simple thing. Launching a monthly all hands meeting before the founder worked very closely with a small group of people and they knew everything.

But there was a huge disconnect between that and how it got disseminated down into the business to the second layer of leaders, to the team leads to the people on the front line. They didn't have any knowledge about the bigger things that were going on.

Freddy D: 00:26:04

Right. And that's where a lot of businesses make mistakes because that's the front line.

It's like when I was working with the interpreting company and we did the same thing. We started Monday morning meetings and we started having goals and we had mission statement and all that stuff.

Georgi Feidler: 00:26:19

Yep.

Freddy D: 00:26:19

But the thing that it really burned into everybody's head was that we were working with contractors. These are independent interpreters going to hospitals. Their mindset at the company at the time was they should be grateful we're giving them a job.

And I'm going like, you're missing this by a galaxy. Because that's the front line that's representing the company, that's going to a banner Health or some other type of facility.

Even though they're an independent contractor, they're representing the company. So if they don't have a good feeling about the company, that's going to transcend to how their engagement is with the customer.

It's the same thing if someone's disgruntled. That tonality comes across on the phone. You can't hide it.

Georgi Feidler: 00:27:09

You can't have raving fans as customers if you don't have raving fans as employees or teammates.

Freddy D: 00:27:14

First it starts with the leadership and then transcends down to everything else.

So you're starting with the leadership, getting their minds into the right position and then you're working with them to get, okay, now the next tier of people, the next tier. A lot of companies say, okay, we've got the management teams online, and we don't need to worry about all the other people. And the reality is.

No, they're the most important component.

Georgi Feidler: 00:27:40

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:27:41

Because a good leader is not somebody that directs people. It's somebody that empowers people. You know, your job as a leader is to facilitate your team so that they can be successful.

If they're successful, because of your facilitation, you'd have to worry about yourself. It's taken care of automatically.

Georgi Feidler: 00:28:01

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think, unfortunately, a lot of small business owners and founders who just started in a garage or started doing everything on their own miss that, because that's the reality of scale. Right. You empower and delegate through others. I think that there's definitely education that happens around that and coaching.

The founders and leaders who get it do really well. The ones who don't, don't do as well.

Freddy D: 00:28:24

And you don't want to be the smartest guy in the room. You want to be the dumbest guy in the room.

Georgi Feidler: 00:28:28

Yeah. You want to hire themselves so they can tell you.

Freddy D: 00:28:30

Everybody that's smarter than you, that helps propel. That's the secret.

Georgi Feidler: 00:28:35

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think the other piece of that is, as the company grows and scales, the owner, the founder, they get further and further removed from the action. And so every layer creates a potential miss.

And so you have to be intentional about putting feedback loops into place, employee engagement surveys, pulse checks, things like that, which is so much of what we've done here. And the nuggets that we get from the front line. Right.

They have to be given directly to leadership so that it can shape the strategy and the decisions that are going forward. Because we all know a company or a situation.

We all have that time in our mind where somebody did something at the executive or leadership level, they made a decision, and it was just the dumbest decision ever. And you're thinking, if they just would have talked to the front line.

But the further they're removed from the action become very poor proxies for reality. So you have to make sure that you are tapped into the pulse and of what's happening on the front lines. That stuff is gold.

Freddy D: 00:29:33

That's where you look at a guy like Sir Richard Branson. How can he be hanging out on his island?

He's playing flight attendant, one of his airlines, or he's goofing off on the ship, but he's dealing with the customers, he's dealing with the people. So he sees what's happening to worry about anything else because he's Empowered.

Those people, they don't have to ask dad or mom for permission on doing anything. They have the right to make the decisions themselves.

Most of the successful companies empower their team to solve problems, and 9 out of 10 times, they're gonna make better decision because they're already engaging with that individual.

Georgi Feidler: 00:30:10

Yep. Yeah. As long as they have the right framework and decision threshold and vision in place. Right.

If you've done the work on the front end to build the foundation and build the alignment, then you can create that decision framework and then give ownership and let go.

I think what a lot of the founders struggle with is because they're so used to being in the wee, they don't just want to control the what, they want to control the how. And that's what's just like soul crushing. That crushes a team faster than anything.

Freddy D: 00:30:37

Or it destroys people's esteem because it's like, wait a minute, I could have made that decision. What, you don't trust me? And right off the bat, soon as you get that into your head as a team member, your attitude's just shifted.

Georgi Feidler: 00:30:51

Yep.

Freddy D: 00:30:52

And then that can become contagious because now you feel a little slated and you're talking to your coworker going, can you believe this crap that took place? And they go, yeah, I noticed that. I've seen it happen. We've had a dynamic company, and then all of a sudden, what happened? Everything changed.

Some bad management created. The tidal wave of the changes. Starts out as a ripple, but becomes a tidal wave.

Georgi Feidler: 00:31:17

It does. And leaders are a huge component of how your team experiences the culture of the organization.

So if you hire a leader that is not aligned with your vision and values and what you're trying to create, you're going to be at constant odds. And that's how disengagement happens. Right. The last check with Gallup was 78% of the workforce has engagement issues. Right. Is disengaged.

Of that 78%, about 26% is actively disengaged. That means they're not only not engaged, they're disgruntled and actively trying to take you down, which is a little scary. Right.

That costs $550 billion a year in time loss, productivity loss, rehires. That have to be done. So it's not just a culture problem. There's real strategic and financial impact.

Freddy D: 00:32:00

Oh, you can lose customers. You can lose customers. I've seen it where team members are bad mouthing the company to customers. It happens.

I mean, you know, let's not ignore the elephant in the room, it does take place. And then people wonder, all of a sudden our revenue is going down from these people. Why? What happened?

Yeah, there's a reason for it didn't come out of the blue sky.

Georgi Feidler: 00:32:22

Right.

Freddy D: 00:32:25

So great conversation and good insights on really what's important for businesses to not only position themselves for retirement, next generation, or getting started in the right direction, but just in business in general. As we talked, things can change very quickly and if you don't have stuff in place, you've got a problem.

Georgi Feidler: 00:32:51

Yeah. And then the other example, I wanted to talk about this on the baby boomer business owner side, and this is one of my favorites.

I started working with a baby boomer business owner, 2nd gen. His father started the business and ran it for about 35 years. When he retired, he split the locations and gave one to the daughter, one to the son.

I started working with the son first. And in our very first intake call, right, what are your goals? What do you want to achieve? He was very non committal.

My wife is kind of on me to retire. Maybe in the next five years I can start retiring from the business. That was his desire.

So we worked with him for about 18 months and in that time he had grown the company from where his dad had it through a couple of acquisitions. But everything was running kind of like on its own. So we built a shared services model.

So for him, covering all of repeatable things like hr, finance, it, purchasing, marketing, and that really allowed us to reduce the operational overhead and all the duplicated systems created an immediate lift for centralizing those critical functions. Then we started to build a leadership bench.

He had a bunch of employees who'd been there for a really long time that had this depth of knowledge but had not yet been empowered to make decisions to run and own their piece of the company. And so we put that into place where he had 38 people reporting to him.

We put that leadership bench into place and then we started looking for a successor and put a succession plan into place because we knew that was going to take the longest amount of time. Meanwhile, as we're doing this right, he's starting to pull back from the business more. About 22 months in.

We had our monthly coaching call in January and he goes, well, I think this is the year I'm showing up at the business once a week. There's not really a lot for me to do. So I think I'm going to retire this year. Fast forward one quarter later, he has two to three meetings a week.

He's retired at his beach House, living there almost full time with his wife. In the next quarter, that will move to one meeting a month and the governance board meetings each quarter.

The sister sees this and she's like, oh man, I want a piece of that. She had grown her entity very differently. Not a lot of infrastructure. Her and her husband kind of did everything and they were the business.

As she was looking at retiring, one of the things that we had talked about was do we merge the entities? Do we not? There were some tax things there.

We ultimately decided to use the Brothers infrastructure for the sisters organization where they would pay them a management fee so they would get to take advantage of the shared services model of some of the infrastructure that was there. And then we worked on a system integration, aligning the ERP systems and the dashboards.

We're about 90% of the way through, which will create cross entity visibility. And then she's part of the governance board as well.

Well, what it really allowed her to do is within six months of us working through this, she was able to take her first vacation ever without being interrupted. Literally being able to turn off and go like that had never happened before. Since then, she proved to herself she could do it.

So I think she's taken like four more. She's well on her way as well.

Part of that is we've just launched the corporate governance board that creates and mitigates the risk for the successors. Right.

The GM that we put in place for her, the president that we put in place for him, creates a delegation of authority framework that make sure the successor is empowered without overreach. So you get the advisory and the mentorship from both of the founders.

They're committed in a structured way that still allows them to retire and infuse the business with all of that knowledge. I think the realized gains there are the first founder fully stepping back two years ahead of what he said he wanted to do.

Second founder is on track to exit in the next two quarters. I think that'll be 21 months total. Even in all of this transition, because we put an operational framework into place with clear priorities. Right.

And communicated to the team what we were trying to do.

We were able to still increase revenue, historic backlog bookings, streamlining warehouse workflows, improving inventory turn, there was just a lot more cross entity synergy. And I think that created some wins across the business. Still preserving the legacy.

What we chose to do with this situation in particular is they didn't want to do an outright sale. They didn't need to. I noticed with a lot of Baby boomers, their team is really important to them and making sure their team is taken care of.

So a lot of them don't want to go with a PE sale because they're pretty sure and they have their right to believe this, that their team could be dismantled and that the business is going to be dismantled. Yeah. So we ended up doing a Popeye plan for them. A Popeye plan is very similar to an esop. It has a few different pieces to it.

But at the end of this vesting period, the ownership will be transferred to the very people that built the business. I just love that full circle and how we're changing this next generation of lives as a result of that.

Freddy D: 00:37:44

So you could quantifically. Quantif. I can't even say the word right now.

Georgi Feidler: 00:37:49

Quantifiably.

Freddy D: 00:37:50

There you go.

Georgi Feidler: 00:37:51

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:37:52

Those super fans of you, that whole family. Yeah. The founders that started it, then the brother and sister that took it over.

So you've really created super fans out of that whole group of people of how you've transformed their lives really and their business, but their lives personally to where they actually have a life and still have their hands into the business without having their hands in the business.

Georgi Feidler: 00:38:18

Yeah. And that would be my hope for all of those baby boomer business owners out there that are just at their wits end. They don't see another way.

They're almost forced to make a decision that they don't want to make. There is another way. There are options. You do have options and that's my hope that people would realize that and.

Freddy D: 00:38:34

See that it's been a great conversation. Georgie. And how can people find you?

Georgi Feidler: 00:38:40

So if you're a founder executive feeling stuck, you can reach out either on our website hiretraininspired.com or we are on LinkedIn as well.

Freddy D: 00:38:48

Okay, well definitely make sure that's in the show notes. Great conversation, great insight for our listeners and we look forward to having you on the show again.

Georgi Feidler: 00:38:58

Thank you so much, Freddie D. I loved it. It was great.

Freddy D: 00:39:02

Hey, superfan superstar Freddy D.

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