Good morning, afternoon or evening, depending on what time you’re listening to this program. My name is Eric Nutting. This is another exciting, exciting edition of the SunLeaders podcast.

I call you Sun Listeners, and I’m glad you’re here today. I don’t know when this episode’s going to come out. I think it’s probably March, but I can tell you we’re recording right now.

In mid January, we had something rare and exciting. It was a little bit of a blizzard here in Florida, recording out of Neyman Creative Studios here in Central Florida. So we’re in Clearwater and by golly, if we didn’t have a few snow flurries.

So this life, this, it’s, this is getting real. I don’t know what’s going on. But speaking of real, we are here having a real conversation with a new good friend of mine.

I’m going to let him introduce himself and then we’re going to go ahead and take this conversation into places we don’t even know yet. So, Scott, welcome to the big show. Please tell the people what you want them to know about you and how you kind of introduce yourself to groups and to the world.

Well, thanks, Eric. I’m happy to be here. My name is Scott Perlstein and I work at a company called Alchemy Academy, and we do business to business consulting and coaching, whole range of features.

But we tend to focus on companies that maybe have a good strategic plan, but their workplace culture and their leadership, their leadership pipeline isn’t quite ready to support that or they have operational inefficiencies or most likely they have some communication and change management issues. And so we kind of work around all of those, including executive coaching. Okay, super.

Thank you. So you started this in Flagstaff, Arizona? We did. My wife, Janine started the company 15 years ago this year in Flagstaff, Arizona, utilizing her master’s in cultural anthropology and later turned that into business anthropology as she realized that all the same factors she studied and taught in higher education around cultures applies to any group of two or three or more people who are working together.

So using those same elements, that same framework can analyze, can support, can change and modify and lead through culture change. Okay, super. So that’s where the company originated.

You are now here in St. Petersburg, Florida, and you took a quick stop to Belize. Belize between Arizona and here? Correct. Let’s talk about what took you to Belize and let’s talk about Belize a little bit.

What’s that like? I’ve never been there. Great. So we were living at 7,000ft in Flagstaff, Arizona, in winter.

We met s ski instructors and Germany in the mountains. Yep, we met in Germany. Okay.

We, we moved to Flagstaff and lived in the mountains and taught skiing and had the mountain life. And we raised two boys there. Born and raised in Flagstaff.

And in Covid times, our two years apart children both went to college at the same time. Totally unexpected. Never saw that coming.

And we in the world shut down for Covid. And so we were working from home together in what had now become a very quiet house. After we sent two kids off to school and they went abroad to Europe, both of them to university.

And so we knew they weren’t coming home to do laundry and they weren’t going to show up on a weekend. And so. So we don’t need to be here.

That’s right. If they’re having an adventure, why don’t we have an adventure? So we also found ourselves more or less working virtually, because, of course, nobody was inviting you to come consult in their space in 2020. And we told each other a couple of times, you know, we’re virtually virtual.

We’re virtual. We’re virtually virtual. And then finally we said, you know, we’re actually totally virtual.

And so what do you want to do with that? So we had been there 27 years. Oh, we sold our home and we decided that we were going to go to the beach. We had spent all our lives in the mountains.

It was time to go to the beach. Okay. So we moved to an island off the coast of Belize, a Belizean island about 25 miles off the coast.

About 10,000 people live on a little island. How did this happen? Was it a dart throw at a map? How did police happen? No, we, no, we found a newsletter and we watched a video. We went to a seminar, a weekend seminar, remotely, that said, here’s places, here’s how you can live elsewhere as a nomad.

And we thought we were going to Europe because that’s where the boys were, but realized that neither of us really had the gumption to manage the time changes if all of our clients were in the US we’re getting up in the middle of the night. Is it 3 o’ clock in the morning or 4 o’ clock in the morning? Just. It just didn’t make sense.

So then we said, well, let’s look north, south and figure out where could we go? That’s exciting. But that lines up with our time zones, right? And it turns out that Belize is easy for that. You know, it was the only British colony And non Spanish speaking colony in Central America historically.

And so it is the main language. And, and because of that, and having a similar government structure because it’s based on the same laws as our laws are, it’s just super easy. So.

So are you telling me you’re not bilingual? Correct? Well, I, I’m sort of bilingual, but it’s not Spanish. Do you speak German? Yeah. Okay.

Okay, great. Great. How long were you in Germany? I was in Germany four years as a toddler.

I was in Germany. I was in Austria for a semester of study abroad and I lived in Germany for three and a half years. Wow.

And then you met your once and future wife there in Germany. Correct. Okay.

How long you been married? That’s a question. 26. 26 years.

Okay, great. And you have been in business. Is this the first time you’ve been in business together with Janine? No, no, we’ve always had a side business, even when we both were employees or I was an employee.

Um, we, we’ve been pretty entrepreneurial since we got married, since before we got married. You know, this is one of the places that I have a passion for. I love working with couples in business.

So talk to me about some of the challenges and some of the awesomeness of working with your spouse and a business. Yeah, well, my off the cuff quip is typically, it doesn’t take less communication, but it has been an evolution. And, and it is interesting for us.

It works out great. We have modified over the years sort of spaces. There were times where we were sharing a space that’s too much.

We decided that’s too close. So now we have a house where we’re spread out from one another. I think probably the best thing I could say about it that works for us is that you have both the advantage of no boundaries and the chaos of no boundaries.

And so you have to establish those boundaries. So we have to. It took us a while to learn this, but we have to take time to say, tonight we’re going on a date.

We’re not going to talk about work. And other times we say, I’d like to ask you a question about work. And the answer can be yes or no.

But we, we, we learned to kind of introduce that topic. Okay. Because otherwise you could find that there’s so much blending.

Yes. Of the two worlds, the personal world and the. And the business world, that you are overwhelmed by both all the time.

Understood. That doesn’t work. That didn’t work for us anyway.

Otherwise it’s great. I think we’re good. Compliments for each other and what we do.

Like I said, Janine’s a cultural anthropologist and loves the soft side of culture change and creation and stuff. My background was in actual management. I had a team of 350 people at a higher education university.

And so levels of bureaucracy and leadership and ownership and kind of flipped back and forth between entrepreneurship and employment. And entrepreneurship, employment. And so I have a good contrast to that.

So I started off with a pretty broad perspective and now after years of consulting, we’ve just been able to dip in to so many different industries and situations that it really gives us such a great background for us. Well, let’s dig into that a little bit. A facility specialist.

That’s on your resume. It’s how you identify a lot of what you do. What is that exactly? And how do you bring that to what you currently do? Sure.

So I worked for university, 20,000 student university, and I was the operations director, which is in charge of all the trade, so all the buildings, the physical structures. Gotcha. Including landscaping and fleets and computer systems and stuff like that.

But for the most part it’s the. I didn’t teach anybody anything. But we kept.

We made sure that when students showed up that there was Internet connection and electricity and heat and cooling and carpet and that kind of thing. So led the trades that, that maintained the facilities. Okay, and you, you bring that to the work you do now, right? Do you? Yes.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Millions of lessons from that for sure.

For sure. But the, the big advantage for me to that was reaching a level where I didn’t know how to do the things that the people who work for me do. But I could still lead the people who could do the things that I didn’t know how to do.

And that’s an important threshold you have to get past if you want to continue to evolve up. You have to be able to manage things that you don’t know more than the employees, you don’t know more than the workers doing the job about that job. But you have to be able to make informed decisions about what direction they should go or the process of that or the evolution of it and how they develop the people to fill those spaces.

Right. And so it was great for me. So I had maybe nine, nine different leaders under me, managers of different divisions, different groups.

The lock shop and the paint shop and the fleet. So a pretty big world. Pre alchemy.

Right. And now we have a more controlled environment. It’s not.

We’re not in charge of a bunch of people and a bunch of facilities. Is that a difficult shift? Yes. I mean, and you’re technically the COO of alchemy.

Correct. So what is it like going, what is it like shrinking your world to kind of where you’re at now? It’s an interesting process of trying to boil down the lessons and the structures that I learned and apply them. When there are only two or three or four of us, there are times when we team up with other consulting groups that have the specialties.

And so sometimes we’ve had bigger projects, bigger teams, where you had a project manager, you had somebody sort of managing that, which is typically my role. But in general, it was a significant change from just the everyday culture of walking down the hallway and talking to people and knowing people’s lives and what’s going on to really spending a lot of time marketing and literally. And doing the work, you know, doing the assessments, writing the reports, making the relationships.

And so it was a. It was a shift. I think that my.

My philosophy and my application of that role was fairly entrepreneurial. You know, that was my silo, my group. And I felt like I had to do pr, I had to do marketing, I had to do leadership development.

I had to do all the elements. Even though everybody there worked for the state and it was really a state organization, I didn’t feel that way. I felt like, this is my baby.

This is my unit. And so going back to entrepreneurship after that was a little easier for me because I’d always felt in my head like I was being an entrepreneur in my unit. Right, right, right.

So that back and forth was easier. It was less complex, and I had to ask fewer people for help. Help or for support or for permission, I guess, when you’re an entrepreneur.

But you also have the ultimate responsibility, and it’s your money you’re spending. You define yourself as an introvert or extrovert. Oh, I’m an extrovert.

You’re an extrovert. Yes. So you need people.

I need people. I’m definitely energized by interactions. And that can probably.

Probably be a little tricky sometimes in a smaller company. But you’re always out with people either networking or looking for problems to solve. Right.

And that’s how you. Yeah, for the most part. Most days I’m out at some point with somebody.

If I spend more than a day or two just in the office, then it shows. You go a little squirrely. Yeah, that’s probably.

Probably. I would assume Covid was tricky for you, then. Yeah, tricky.

It was. It absolutely was. I think the godsend for me in Covid was that we lived surrounded by national forest that never closed.

Oh. And so as a hiker, runner, mountain biker, living, you know, a block and a half from Access. Yeah, we were out in the woods all the time and that was the salvation.

So pretty active outdoors and everything. How’s that? And now in St. Pete, Florida, do you still find those activities? Are you able to do all those? Is it different? It’s, it’s a little different, but we’ve both adapted pretty well. I’m a cyclist, kind of, that’s my main sport.

And I used to be kind of a 50, 50 mountain biker, road biker, but. But it’s around here there’s a lot of road biking and it’s a little bit of a drive to mountain biking. So we don’t have mountains.

Yeah. Or mountainless. We have bridges.

You can be a bridge climber, but you can’t be a mountain climber. And there’s a great program here, lots of people into it. Easy to find people, so easy community to make.

And Janine is an open water swimmer, so same thing. There’s just, there’s somebody meeting six days a week if you want to join an open water swim group. Crazy.

Get out and swim. So that part has been pretty easy. What open water do we swim in here? We got a ton of open water, but what.

I can’t even picture doing that. Oh, we just. Any of the beaches.

Really. Yeah, any of the beaches and then around the pier in St. Pete. And you don’t have to be on water swim.

Yeah, I go there sometimes. Okay, well, that’s impressive. All right, well, I feel like an underperformer so I want to get back to work a little bit.

We talk about consulting and coaching for our listeners. Define what the difference is between those two things. Okay.

Coaching is often a one on one relationship and you may or may not have an agenda or a direction of skills that you’re teaching. But more supporting guiding. Letting somebody have a place to reveal their insecurities, their issues, their frustrations, their opportunities, and help with guidance and strategy around that.

The coaching part’s fun. I mean, we certainly have some, some elements and some tendencies that we regularly coach in a. And teach and a lot of in the executive coaching, a lot of it is based on the goals of the client.

What are the, what are they looking for out of that? And that’s often a pretty close one on one relationship. Consulting is usually more with an organization. So we typically work with teams of, we say five to 30.

OK, that could be everybody that’s in the company or that could be one piece of a company. So we’ve worked at General Motors, we’ve worked at Citizens bank, we’ve worked at some big places, but with a small group that works in that bank, in that area. So one leader, you know, one group within a university says, we want to fix this one project and we need help with that.

And they bring somebody from the outside. Both of those consulting and coaching have the structural benefit of perspective and what we can provide that is so valuable. And it’s the same when you go see your physician.

It’s the same when you talk to a therapist. And you know, it’s the same, same structural setup that somebody who’s not living your every, every minute, day to day can see from a different perspective from the outside looking in the. The joke is that it’s.

It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. You know, like, it’s hard to figure out what’s next and what’s the main thing if you’re ins work. And so both consulting and coaching benefit from having somebody who can hear what you say and play it back to you or from a different perspective and say, and be able to offer that perspective as well as somebody who’s not on the same payroll as the rest of the company or the person and be able to ask the, well, why do you do it that way? Why
are you doing that at all? Is that the right thing to do? As opposed to the sacred cow lifestyle that most people have where here’s our problems, how do we tweak the problems to make them manageable and not have somebody come in and say, is that really our problem? Or can we move that problem somewhere else? Right.

Okay, so talk to me about through that lens, whether it be coaching or consulting. Talk to me about difficult clients. What makes a difficult client and how do we break through to them? That’s a great question.

I would say for us, difficult clients are usually a dynamic within the team. Somebody who hires you directly for themselves. Typically, it’s their money, they’ve made the decision and they’re going to get out of it what they put into it.

And they feel that it’s different with companies and teams because oftentimes somebody is signing up and paying for their group, their employees, the people who report to them to learn something, do something, change something. And that’s where it can get sticky for the outsider because you don’t really have any power. You don’t have the ability to say, hey, you have to be here at this time and you have to do this homework.

It’s like gifting a loved one like a workout club for the holidays. It can be very much like, oh, thank you so much. It’s, it can be very much like that.

And so the challenge can be getting buy in from the rest of the team. They’re there to learn that they want to do a better job, that they care about the same outcomes that the person who hired you and has the ability to raise the money for it to bring you on to do. And it also can be an issue that the person who made that decision turns out in a lot of ways is creating the havoc that they’re hiring you to solve.

And working with the team doesn’t necessarily solve it. Right. So that’s what that, that’s definitely one of the tricks that we run into pretty often that, that can be difficult.

All right, well, how do we solve it? Well, there are multiple approaches. You know, sometimes the best you can do is make it as good as you can for the team. That there are elements of the leadership that’s in place that are not going to change.

They are not open to change, they’re not accessible, they’re not engaged in the process. They expect you to change the team, fix them. Yes.

And so you work to support them and figure out strategies and tactics for them to be able to do the best they can and understand where they are. The ideal situation is that you have a heart to heart with the decision maker and somehow coach them along to. Here are the impacts here, here’s.

We, we’ve interviewed, we’ve done qualitative, anal, we understand what’s going on with your team, we’ve followed the lines back to the source and we need to have a conversation and then hopefully help them along too. If you do this, it makes it easier for them to. This and all that couched in.

We know what your objectives and your outcomes are going to be. Here’s the best way we can get there. Here’s the fastest path to the objectives you’re looking for.

We need you to participate. Do you have, and you don’t have to name the client, but do you have one particular case study that you go, oh man, we’re not going to get anywhere with these people. And we were able to kind of turn around into a great success.

Anything that you think, oh, shoot, I don’t know if this is the right project. I don’t think we should have taken this one on. Yeah, definitely.

And it was a larger corporate situation. And yes, those. The different levels are always interesting in the corporate ladders.

So there was a manager of a team who was pretty new to the place and had been hired recently and had a vision, and the people above him had already decided to engage us for this change. Okay. And so he wasn’t sure he liked the direction that the change was being directed, but he didn’t have a choice because he just got hired there and, and felt like it might be in his best interest to push back a little bit and offer a different solution.

And so it was quite a challenge. It took a combination of helping the team, like I said, figure out good ways to respond and to react and to manage their world. And frankly, to go over his head and have the direct conversation with his supervisors that, you know, we’re here to do what you asked us to do.

Here’s the biggest obstacle in that being a success. If you’re engaged in this solution, if this is what you want, then you’re going to have to join us in solving this problem. If that.

If you don’t care, you just wanted to check the box that you brought somebody in and made an effort at it, that’s fine. We get paid the same either way. Right.

But it sure feels better for us when we’ve reached the goal and we’ve made the changes. And a lack of engagement by a leader is usually the success or failure. I mean, really, there are very few changes that we make that if it’s not shown, demonstrated, supported by the team leader, it’s not going to stick.

Right. And we have a couple of pretty sad stories of learning six and eight months later that all that work you did last year, nobody, you know, they put it on the shelf, the book’s on the shelf, they’ve gone back to their old practices and it’s like it didn’t even happen. So this situation that you’re speaking of, that you’re referencing, there’s a happy ending, there’s a, yeah, this one.

Happily ever after. Yep. There was a, There was a team kind of come together meeting with the middle manager.

And I think they, they brought in a VP to scare him a little bit and say, yeah, know, your wedding’s coming up. This is a new career for you. You’ve been here for a couple of months.

We’ve been working on this for a long time. We’re investing a lot of time and energy and money into it. This is the direction we’re going.

You have a choice. And so when he made his shift, you know, the team we helped the team with the change management and figure out what their strategies were. But eventually he made the shift and it in the end we found in our follow up that it stuck.

He decided that was not. I was not the sword he was going to die on. And so he was mostly just offended that they had a plan that wasn’t his plan and didn’t ask him.

Right, right, right. You know, it’s funny, I looked at your website and you have a now I’m in charge. What does that mean? Program? Is that kind of one of the things that we would run that individual through is.

Is that the situation that matches up there? Exactly. Okay, talk to us about that program then. Yeah, so we, we.

If we hit it from two sides, there’s the element of who are the you that’s the leader? How do you feel in your own shoes? What’s your confidence level? Who do you want to be? Who, what are your values? What are, what are like, what’s your human being status? You cannot rise up and lead people. And I hate the vertical of that, but that’s the words we use. You can’t rise within an organization and step into a leadership role without owning that you are now the leader.

And in the bigger organizations, it’s almost always that the leader is somebody who was part of the team and rose and got promoted. They showed some potential and they got promoted. And so they are now the leader of what used to be their peers.

And that’s a difficult situation for sure. I mean, that’s most of the hassles we had in high school. Right, right.

With a little bit of a leadership role and trying to tell their peers what to do. And it’s hard, it’s challenging. So there’s a different person when you step into leadership.

You have to step into a different version of yourself and you have to be willing to make that transition. And sometimes that means you’re losing some of the friends that you spend a lot of time and energy with and hung out with. The other side of that is that there are skills and traits and tactics that you can utilize to be effective as a leader and even if they were used to be your peers.

And so we try to hit that from both sides. So that program you’re talking about is a combination of how do we raise you up and make you feel good about who you are, what you’ve accomplished, how you can move on. And we’re going to do some skill building along the way so that you have some better communication skills, some better having difficult conversation Skills, some different.

How to stand in front of people and talk and know what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable in your new role, kinds of things. So some clear skills that are takeaways that you can use and build on for the role, as well as some human development to make sure that you’re up for that role. So is there a formal assessment that you put people through or do you just kind of feel it out and do a kind of more of an organic interview? I would say it’s a hybrid.

We do a little of both. Okay. We do a.

Because of the anthropology background, we. We have a unique access to qualitative interview and being able to make assessments based on that and to quantify and get some measurements and figure out where things are strong and where things are weak. And we do some basic assessment from our own watching of the behaviors or seeing them and knowing that we have a checklist of things that we know are going to help you in this role, that these are the kinds of things you should be able to do and then
learn and figure out what they already know how to do and what they need help with.

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What does that really mean to you as a coach and as a consultant? Because I think it’s remarkably unique. I don’t hear people defining themselves as such and I think it’s powerful. So talk to me about that.

Great. Well, there was a time, I guess when I was in college that the term human capital was a. Hmm, talking point.

And in an organization, in a group, in a team, in an organization, particularly in business, it is absolutely the largest expense and the most impact you can have is the humans that work there. And because we come at it from a cultural perspective, from an anthropological perspective, we are very much focused on the people doing the work, not so much the pathway of the work. We do make some suggestions sometimes about efficiencies.

And this would make More sense kinds of things. But we’re really come at it from the. I’m going to fall back on a sports metaphor and say that I’m a cyclist.

And back in the day when doping was a big thing, they would say you could get maybe 2% bump, maybe 3% bump with a really effective doping impact. Right, right, right. And that could be the difference between 30th place and first place in the Tour de France or whatever you’re doing that.

That 1 or 2% could make all the difference amongst the top hundred riders. Okay. But you also could have a bad day, you could have a stomachache, you could have too much travel, I didn’t sleep well last night, kind of frustration.

And have a day where Your performance is 20 or 30% below what it normally is. And those guys are measuring every statistic there is out there. And so they know my heart rate wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be and my wattage wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be.

And So I got 30th place instead of first place. So to me, the human that shows up can have a much bigger effect than most of the tools and the strategies and the performance enhancing drugs could impact. You’ve got to already be at the very top edge of that for that to work.

And any one day somebody has a bad game, I mean, every Monday there’s a bunch of armchair quarterbacks saying so and so had a bad day or lost a game they should have done better in. I think the same thing happens with humans, but we have to think more in terms of our careers as 30, 40 years of work. Yeah.

And so day in and day out, what is a level of performance you can maintain and still be effective? And so our perspective coming in from this anthropological side of kind of the human skills is that you can have a huge impact over time on your outcomes and your solutions and your metrics by getting the best out of the people who are there. And getting the best out of them means that they are engaged, they are happy, they’re connected to the why, why they’re there every day, what’s the mission?
That they’re not just there for the paycheck. The paycheck is like the bare minimum survival thing.

And if that’s all you focus on from a leadership standpoint, and that’s what your culture focuses on, you will never have a high performing team. Right, right. Because it’s never enough.

The teams that are high performing, the people who go above and beyond, the people who love what they do and identify with what they do are tied in to the mission and the vision and the identity of the work that they do. And so if you focus on those things, you can develop that within a team. You can develop a vision of where they want to be, you can develop an identity of how they want to operate.

And in doing that, you raise the performance level of the entire team. And so that’s sort of our approach, that’s our philosophy. So two major things that really identify your brand would be in my, from my viewpoint would be anthropology and alchemy.

It’s in your name. Alchemy would be what the process of changing things on the chemical level or changing. Right.

So talk to me about why alchemy and how alchemy and anthropology connect. Okay, well, the alchemy part is the little bit of magical potiony. Right, right, right.

Turning straw into gold thing. But it’s also a matter of how teams operate together. There’s a chemistry.

Yeah. There’s a working together. There’s a shared vocabulary, there’s ways to communicate well.

There’s knowing what motivates people and doesn’t motivate people. I think I had a unique perspective when I was working at the university. So I’m a state employee in a facilities which is a, you know, kind of a blue collar tradespeople kind of organization and talk about culture.

Right. Yeah. I got the job and I knew that there was not a single thing I could do myself.

There was not a single thing I could fix myself. There was not a single. If there was a moment where I had a tool in my hand, so many things went wrong, it would be amazing.

So I went in there knowing that the only tool I had, the only levers I could pull were the people, the team. How do I help the team be effective? How do I help the team work well? How do I help the team grow and be trained and understand the crazy technology changes that are happening in, in the world and that it’s going faster. And so my perspective going into it was this is all about the people.

I have to focus on the people. So my, my closest connection immediately was who’s, what’s the HR process? What is our hiring process? And I am going to bring my chair up next to your desk and we are now. And I can’t do anything without people.

That’s all I have to manage the rest of this stuff. I don’t care as much about the tools. They sort that out.

But I’ve got people and that’s where that Focus needed to be. So the alchemy in it is that the difference between high performance and low performance, between turnover and absenteeism and calling in sick and a team that gets the work done and grows and strives and expands is that alchemy of managing, of finding individual motivations, of bringing the team together to focus on common goals and having missions that are bigger than coming to work every day. Yes.

You spell alchemy differently, don’t you? I do, yes. What was that? Why? I think that was a website name. Like it had already been taken.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Alchemyacademy.com but spelled it I. E.

You brought it. But I know it’s as you talked about alchemy and how it kind of pertains to your identity. You mentioned HR thing.

And I find this in the, in the work I do. The. In the work you and I do.

It’s. We’re noticing and particularly at the entrepreneurial level, small company level, we don’t have HR departments. Right.

In the bigger companies, we’re starting to see budget cuts hit there and HR departments really aren’t HR departments all the time anymore. How do you deal with that problem? Yeah, it’s definitely been tricky. There are elements of what we do that some HR people with a broad perspective find us competition.

They feel like we have already provided a leadership program for our organization and we have a one hour course. You sit down in front of the computer and you get credit for it. And so why would we pay you for leadership training? And so we’ve run into a little bit of conflict there.

We’ve run into some people who really want to evolve their teams. They want people to be successful and so they love the extra help. I mean, I started off by saying one of the best things we provide is perspective.

The other thing we provide is we’re a temporary labor source. We provide leaders the ability to start another project and not have to take all the time from the people who are already overworked. So everybody has 50 hours of work they need to get done in 40 hours and now they want to try this new thing.

How am I going to get that done? How could I possibly squeeze out the time? How are these people going to be able to focus on this project when they’re already not getting everything I’ve asked them to do done? And so we come in as the helping labor. They’re paying for our time, we have the expertise, we’re guiding it, but we’re also able to focus on a project over a time span. You know, a six month project or a three month project or a year project and the additional labor to help move that
forward so they don’t have to spend the time managing it.

They just get updates and the leaders that are running that program get to be involved in it, but don’t have to have the expertise. There are a lot of things that we do that. There is a fantastic best selling book that explains to you exactly what that is.

But to read a book and be able to engage it, to have not have the experience to have or done it before. Right, right. And get those outcomes is really difficult.

And the biggest situ like the. The. What is a large factor in that is to create the time.

How do you carve out the time for this change, for this new project, for this unlearning of the old way and reinforcing of the new way without adding labor, without adding somebody to do that, to provide that time and effort? And that’s a thing that the consultants are a huge benefit for. Yeah. It seems like a great way to explain it because we’re not adding payroll forever.

That’s right. It’s just a temporary investment that we want to return on. Yeah.

It’s like a fractional employee. Yep. So our time is winding down and I want to talk about just a few more things.

Hiring for FIT program. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

So that goes back to the working hand in hand with hr. But in smaller entrepreneurial areas where people are hiring their own people, it is most common that we’re evaluating a resume and interview. Questions regarding skills based.

Do you know how to do this job? Are you gonna. Can I hand you a bunch of stuff and walk away and know you’re gonna be good? But a high performing team is a balance of chemistry of people. So hiring for FIT is focusing within that the bare minimum is they’re skilled and they know how to do the job.

But within that there are people who will disrupt the team you currently have and there are people that will augment the team you have. And figuring out what is the culture of our team. How do we work? What do we do when someone makes a mistake, what you think do? What do we do when somebody scores a, you know, a touchdown? What are our ways of supporting each other and finding people who are going to add to that mix.

And it’s a perspective that a lot of people do not think about at all when they’re hiring. They want to know how skilled are you, how many times have you done this before and can I trust you to Go do your work. And so hiring Fit for Fit starts at understanding what is your culture, documenting your culture so that you can communicate your culture.

Communicating the culture from the beginning of the request that I have a position open all the way through the end of onboarding and having them in your company. So it’s not just the way you approach the interview, but you’re communicating up front in a way that is showing the culture of people. And people will self select in and people will self select out.

So if you are clear and honest about what your culture is, there are people who will say, that sounds awful to me. I would never want to work there. And that helps you because you’re not wasting your time interviewing people that you know are not going to be successful once they’re there.

The flip side is some people will opt in based on that language. And that makes it easy for you because now they’re a good fit for the team and you’re moving forward. How does an employer articulate culture? Or is it just known? We’ve got mission statements, we got vision statements, we got statements everywhere.

Yeah, yeah. Do we have culture statements? Some people do. And sometimes it’s mixed right in.

Sometimes it’s mixed right in with the, like you said, the mission vision values. But we usually take people through what we call a culture map. We have a whole bunch of different categories of things and questions they have to answer.

And it helps you. You know, the way you describe yourself and the examples and stories you tell is indicative of the culture you have and the culture you have, not necessarily the culture you want. Correct.

So there are two elements there, and it’s a. It’s a great point. So there is the idea of capturing what is your culture so that you can communicate it to employees.

There’s also the element of that is the culture we have. I realize what I’d really like to have is the culture. And there’s a gap, and I don’t know what to do with the gap.

So that’s another place where it’s a great fit for us to come in and help them change the culture. Somebody is guiding your culture. It’s not necessarily the person with the title.

It very well could be the magnanimous person with the big personality who wants to work the least and wants to slow everything down. And we’ve seen teams and groups where the person who had the most authority within the community didn’t have the authority within the structure of the company, but was having the biggest impact on their culture and their productivity. That’s interesting.

So, you know, you and I are in this Sun Leaders group, and both you and I like the idea of helping people be as effective as they can be in leadership. Is everybody. Does everybody have the tools to be a leader? I think everybody has the potential to be a leader.

They don’t all have the tools. Some people grow up with the tools, and some people. That’s a great way to say I’ve never seen the tools before.

So everybody has the potential in here? I think so. Okay. Not.

Not. We don’t all have the potential to reach the highest level of leadership, but we’re all leading something. Right.

You know, we’re sometimes reading our. Leading our social group or our book club or our family or our kids or the couple of friends we hang out with. I think we all step in and out of leadership positions and hopefully ourselves.

Yeah, yeah, right. Hopefully some people are cognizant of it and support, you know, and recognize that and develop and build it, and other people are. Feel less empowered by it and it’s not their thing.

But I find it’s been interesting at this level to really dig in somewhat in how people were raised, and you find a lot of lessons in that. Some people were raised to be leaders, and some people were raised to be followers and not ask questions. And kids are to be seen, not heard, and that’s their life perspective.

Kids are to be seen, but not heard. Yeah, that’s the generation I came from, for sure. Yeah.

Interesting. All right, so with just the last few minutes we have, what else would you like the listeners to know about you and Alchemy Academy that we’ve not covered? I would say that we are very flexible in figuring out exactly what a company’s needs are or a person’s needs or a team’s needs. And we can customize solving the small problem or introducing the bigger problem or coming in and scaling up for larger stuff.

So we had some flexibility. We love to get a. To offer an introductory conversation where we typically, it’s.

Janine comes in and does like a staff meeting, guest speaker, talk a little bit on culture and shared language. And here are the. Here are the elements that you could look for in your workspace, in your efficiency, in your leadership, in your culture, and start a conversation within your team.

And it’s really designed for all levels of employees in a mixture. Everybody comes out feeling good about where they are, what they can provide and contribute. And it gets sort of a starting place for people to come together and realize that just by assigning people their roles is not the same thing as building a productive team.

And that there needs to be some consciousness to it, some intent on creating that, and there are some tools and applications you can put in place to develop that and to reinforce it so that you can be more effective. So we offer this free talk. It can be scaled from kind of 20 minutes to an hour and some great time for Q and A, because that’s always the most interesting part of it, where it can be virtual or it can be live.

And we either show up or zoom up and take care of a team, give them some information, give them a place to open up some questions, and by the end of that, you absolutely have some ideas of what things are really working well and what things are causing your problems. Yeah, I love that approach. So we’re really minimum.

Asking for 20 minutes of your time because when decision makers are always worried about the cost of something. Right. But we’re offering this for free.

Yep. So the cost would be taking labor off the floor, out of production, or whatever the case may be. Correct.

Which I know that a lot of people are intimidated by that number, but it seems like a relatively small investment, doesn’t it, to engage something that could be hugely helpful in the long run. Yeah. And I think there’s power from the perspective of somebody from outside.

There’s power from a guest speaker. I mean, as a leader, you benefit from having different messages told by different voices, because sometimes people get used to your voice, and they for sure don’t listen to your voice anymore. And so it can be very effective to change it up, to have a new format and a new style and a new voice and a new energy, bringing in new information, and you’ll get better.

Better impact from that than you reading the book and going in the next day and saying, here’s what I learned last night. Let me tell you all about it. Right.

Well, speaking of reading the book, I do want to just mention the book that your company has that Janine wrote, Finding your Lighthouse, a Leadership Guide to Navigating Change, written by Janine, your wife. And this is a really great introduction to kind of your philosophies of the company. Right? It is.

This is a book she wrote a couple years ago, really based around a program called Stand in youn Strength Strategies. Okay. That we offer.

And it’s typically an individualized program. Okay. So it’s not a teams and companies kind of thing, but it’s.

But definitely a leader. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. It’s finding your own strength, standing in your strength, figuring out again who. Who are you and how developing your, your confidence to step into those roles into, into the, the person you would like to be, not not certainly the person you are now.

Right. It’s a combination of some, some psychological psychology. There’s a lot of brain science behind it.

There’s definitely some exercises and, and things to, to shed light on what you’re doing as well as again, some skills in how to apply and, and utilize the teachings in public. So it’s, it’s based on, it’s sort of an individual journey, the finding your lighthouse. And it’s of course using the analogy of, of the light in the storm that wherever you are, if you figure out where your lighthouse is, if you can be course correcting daily, but you’re always headed the same direction towards whatever it
is that you’re heart desires or your soul desires or your dreams are.

Well, this went awfully fast. I can tell listeners out there that we are covering Finding youg Lighthouse in our sun readers program through SunLeaders. And Scott, if you would be kind enough to tell people how they can get the book, how they can get in touch with you and then we’ll say our farewells to tell the people once again who you are and, and your company and how they can get in contact with you.

Great. Well, Finding your Lighthouse is available on Amazon. Okay.

Finding your Lighthouse by Janine Pearlstein. And easiest ways to get a hold of us is probably through the website. Okay, so our company is Alchemy Academy and it’s Alchemy A L C H E m I e academy.com and I’m scottchemyacademy.com and she’s janine@alchemyacademy.com has our email addresses and so we are easy to get a hold of.

We love to have conversations. We’re quick to let you know how much we can help in what ways and we’re quick to tell you that we’re not the right fit for what you’re looking for. And here’s who we can refer you to.

So we’re pretty engaged and have been for decades in a larger group and know what our strengths and weaknesses are and what friends we have that specialize in whatever your issue is. So we’re always happy to talk to somebody, spend a few minutes on the phone, get a feel for what they’re looking for, where they’re at at the moment where they’re hoping to go to, and then see how we can help. Awesome.

Well, I appreciate you spending time with me today, listeners. I encourage you to take advantage of this, make that call or reach out to Alchemy Academy. And it’s just a 20 minute investment of time and I think it would be delightful.

Scott and Janine have quickly become one of my favorite couples, and I’m glad that they’ve come into my life and into our Sun Leaders community here. So, dear sun listeners, it’s always nice to have a chance to speak with you. I always encourage your comments.

I have heard from some of you and I appreciate it very much. Until next time, we are here, the Sun Leaders of St. Pete, Florida. Sam.