IAM1581 – Strategist Helps Start-Up Techs Develop Future-Based Strategy

Amie Devero is the Founder and Managing Partner of Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching. Beyond Better works with the founders and leaders of high-growth technology start-ups to develop future-based strategies and to cultivate the leaders to fulfill those strategies. Amié has been a strategy consultant and executive coach for about 25 years. She was the Managing Director of iControl Mobile Payment which was acquired by British mobile parking pioneer RingGo under her leadership. Amié led RingGo’s expansion into North America and grew the company into over 50 major markets. Her bestselling book, Powered by Principle: Using Core Values to Build World-Class Organizations, is a research-based approach to strategy and organizational change —and is available worldwide in several editions.

• CEO Story: Having been in the startup world for about six years, Amie felt that there was energy, passion, and speed within that setting. Start-up is a very specific mode of operation. Having as much experience as a strategy expert and a people coach. To dive deep as a strategy consultant, she narrowed down and focused on Startup Technology, to which Amie is so committed to Strategy.
• Business Service: Coaching from a perspective of strategy. Leveraging the person to his capabilities, optimized version of themselves.
• Secret Sauce: Work with organizations to develop their strategies, not giving advice on a strategy. Methodology, future-based vision, and drives back to goals.
• CEO Hack: Everybody should be married to their calendar. Everything you intend to do should be in that calendar with an allotted time for a specific duration.
• CEO Nugget: Be clear about what your focus is, and be equally clear about what is not. Don’t allow yourself to be killed by opportunism.
• CEO Defined: Having a visceral connection to the value that the organization produces.

Website: beyondbetter.io , amiedevero

LinkedIn: amiedevero

Powered by Principle on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Powered-Principle-Values-World-Class-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00ANXVNQE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

“PLEASE NOTE – During the time of the interview, Amie Deverp had Bell's Palsy”

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:48 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Amié Devero of Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching. Amié, it's great to have you on the show.

00:57 – Amié Devero

Thanks for having me, Gresh. I'm delighted to be here.

00:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Amié so you can hear about all those awesome things Amié is the founder and Managing Partner of Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching. Beyond Better works with founders and leaders of high-growth technology startups to develop future-based strategies and to cultivate the leaders to fulfill those strategies.

Amié has been a strategy consultant and executive coach for about 25 years. She was the Managing Director of I Control Mobile Payment, which was acquired by British mobile parking pioneer Ringo. Under her leadership and Amié led Ringo's expansion into North America, grew the company into over 50 major markets. Her bestselling book, Powered by Principles Using Core Values to Build World-Class Organizations is a research-based approach to strategy and organizational change and is available worldwide in several different editions. Amié, great to have you on the show again. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:01 – Amié Devero

I'm ready when you are.

02:02 – Gresham Harkless

Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off. I know I touched it a little bit when I read your bio, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about what led you to get started with all the awesome things you're working on. What I like to call your CEO story.

02:13 – Amié Devero

When I left Ringo, well, I didn't leave Ringo. Ringo pulled out of the United States. It was an amazing organization. It still exists, but it was acquired, but only in the UK and Europe. The American enterprise was rolled up and we sold it off to Some competitors after that. Having been in the startup world at that point for about six years, I really found that there's an energy, passion, and speed within that setting that appeals to me.

I suppose I have a little bit of a commitment issue in business and, like people who are serially monogamous, I'm a serial entrepreneur in the sense that insofar as I've had jobs in my career and they've been scattered throughout my consulting career, I've never stayed at those jobs forever, obviously. The startup mode of operation is a very specific mode of operation. Having as much experience as I did as a strategy expert and as a people, I'll say a people coach because I've never worked in hr, but I have this very long history of having developed and cultivated leaders through coaching as part and parcel of change management.

When I was back on my own again, I thought, how can I narrow down who I'm going to work with? Because when you're a strategy consultant, conceivably you could work with any business, right? I could work with a dry cleaner as easily as I could work with Northrop Grumman, but that's. You can't market yourself that way. It also doesn't give you any sort of way to become a deeper expert in any aspect of any kind of either kind of business or kind of function or kind of phenomenon. The phenomenon of being a startup is really what I'm an expert in, specifically in technology.

Not hard to put those two together because most startups are technological, most VC-funded startups, I should say. That's how I oriented my sort of next iteration of a coaching and consulting business. So that's what I do. I am very committed to the strategy, which differentiates me from a lot of other people who are startup advisors because I firmly believe that once you're past, you figure out your business model and what your product is or what your service is.

Even whether you're again, a restaurant, a dry cleaner, or a tech platform, at that point you need to develop an actual strategy. Strategy is the most misunderstood, misdefined, ill-described, poorly executed thing we do in business. That's a really huge focus of mine.

05:23 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I truly appreciate you sharing your journey and even having the passion be able to have that passion come out through the organizations that you work with. I really love that people coach aspect because I say so often we forget about the human aspect of business and I even feel as if you hear a lot of. I think people come in a little bit more to that realization that when you start to recognize the people, you start to understand that and you start to be that People coach, for lack of a better term, you start to really see tremendous growth, not just on a superficial level, but on a deep level within organizations.

05:58 – Amié Devero

Yeah, I mean, coaching people is first of all, again, I think it's another thing that is often done badly because advice is not the same as coaching. Coaching is not giving advice. Coaching is not telling what to do. Coaching is actually having the capacity to listen and direct a conversation in such a way that the person you're talking to recognizes something. They see something, they notice something. They become able to try on some new way of thinking, some new way of communicating, some new behavior, or design a new practice ritual, or habit behavior that they can test so they can wear it around for a few weeks and see.

Does this amplify my message? Does this enhance my leadership? Does this get better results from my team? I think you can't really develop a startup organization if you don't pay a lot of attention to developing your people. There's a very specific way in which we set up our leaders, incoming leaders, to fail by not giving them coaching, which is that most times people end up in management roles because they were really good at doing something.

They were really good at sales, they were really good at marketing, they were really good at email or really great at writing code or whatever it is, and we take that success and then we extrapolate from that this idea that by virtue of being an excellent functional executor, the same person is going to be an excellent leader of others to do the same thing and that's a completely flawed assumption. There is no connection between being a great salesperson and being a great sales manager. None and yet we do that.

07:52 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, and that's so powerful. So I know you touched a little bit upon, like, how you work with your clients. I wanted to make sure that you didn't miss you, cover everything that you do there. But also, too, what you feel is kind of like your secret sauce, and the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique as a coach.

08:08 – Amié Devero

Given that I have this background in strategy, I am always coaching from a perspective of strategy, but I'm really coaching from the perspective of how can we leverage this person's innate capabilities to build them into the most optimized version of themselves and as a result, accelerate this organization's strategy. So I'm working with the person to internalize the strategy, to begin to understand the direct and indirect relationships between their team, their area, and the organization's strategy so that they think like a strategist and they think like a founder.

Because no founder or CEO has any higher goal than to have a team full of people who think as well as them about the future of the organization. You want your people to be in the mindset of fulfilling a vision and not just working in their little piece and their little silo on their little goal. Because that is the way that you end up with mediocre results. I'm always out to produce breakthrough results. So I think that's kind of distinct about the way that I approach my work.

09:22 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you so much for sharing that because I know you mentioned a little before that there's such a misconception around strategy. So do you think that being able to kind of have that approach to strategy?

[00:09:32.86] – Amié Devero

I work with organizations to develop their strategy. I never advise a strategy. So what I really have strategy is I have a methodology and I have an uncanny ability. Along with my former partner, who also still drives and does strategy work with me. His name is Francis Wade and I used to be a partner in his firm and we continue to work together. So we have an approach and a particular skill. We have an approach to facilitating strategy and a methodology to doing it that starts with a future-based vision and drives back to goals that are connected to that vision and derived from that vision.

10:17 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an App or book or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:30 – Amié Devero

This is really tactics, like pure tactics. But I tell all my clients to do this, particularly my small business clients, and I don't even let them vote on it. Everybody should be married to their calendar. Now what do I mean by that? I mean you should have one. You shouldn't use to do to-do lists. You should not let your day get determined by what shows up. You should have every single thing you mean to do on one list, and they're only on that list long enough to go from there to your calendar. Every single thing you intend to do should be on your calendar with an allotted time and a specific duration of time.

If something happens and it displaces that, you shouldn't get rid of that you should move it somewhere else and you need it. There's a whole bunch of other skills that go along with that. But if you do that, if you put everything you mean to do in your calendar with a time and a duration and you leave enough gaps and enough air for all the other reactive stuff you have to do, you will accelerate your productivity, productivity to a point beyond recognition. But it means you have to, like, be married to your calendar. When it says do X, you say how hard and for how long and you do it. That's my single best productivity hack.

11:49 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that hack. So what would you consider to be what I like to call more of a CEO nugget? So this could be a little bit more words of wisdom or a piece of advice. You might have already touched on this, but it's something you might tell your favorite client something from your book, or potentially you might tell your younger business self if you hopped into a time machine.

[00:12:07.26] – Amié Devero

Be clear about what your focus is and be equally clear about what it isn't. I mean, that's really the underlying axiom that you don't get pulled by seeming opportunities if they're not already within the scope of your strategy. Don't allow your strategy to get killed by opportunism. I do think that's really. I think every business falls into that trap. I've never met a CEO yet who doesn't.

12:37 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. It's so important to do that. So absolutely appreciate that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're open to different quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:50 – Amié Devero

Oh, this is a tough one. I feel like I have to come up with something pithy and memorable. I don't know that I have that in me. I think what makes somebody a CEO, apart from just the title, is that they feel a visceral connection to the value that the organization produces. That value is not just revenue. It's also the value of the brand.

It's also the value to the shareholder. It's also the value to the employees, the customers, and the community. Only the CEO really has that visceral relationship with all of those stakeholder communities and the degree to which the organization provides them with value.

13:35 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. That is a phenomenal definition. So I know you had it in you, so I truly appreciate that. Yeah.

13:42 – Amié Devero

By virtue of having all of the stakeholder communities connected in your mind anyway, or in your spirit, or wherever one thinks they're connected. You can also see the trade-offs that you're making, and that's sometimes difficult to see from any one silo of the organization. Employees may see a sacrifice being made to satisfy a certain client and think it's a mistake not understanding that the trade-off has a greater payoff to the investor community. That's going to mean the next round is going to be easier to raise.

14:16 – Gresham Harkless

Well, truly appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. Of course, how best people can get a hold of you to find out about all the awesome things your team is working on?

14:33 – Amié Devero

Well, thanks. So I have a couple of things to say. One is I have a if anybody listening is a technology leader, not necessarily a CEO, but a CTO, head of engineering, and is interested in joining a mastermind group of others that are technology leaders, I have one starting in January. So that's something that you might want to just have in your back pocket. If you're interested in participating, it will be limited, and can only take up to 12 people in each group. So whether I have one group or three groups, that's the max. There will be information about that on my website. Not yet, but it will be there.

The way to find out that information would probably be to subscribe to my newsletter. So go to my website, which is beyondbetter.io, and subscribe to the newsletter. It is not a sales letter. You will only find out about this because it will be a banner on a newsletter that contains a single article on a single subject. It's about a 1500-word article, so it's a deep, well-researched piece. Comes out every couple of weeks. I hope you'll subscribe and talk about all the things we talked about today. No fluff, no nonsense.

15:42 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. To make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can subscribe to the newsletter, get a copy of your book, find out about the Mastermind, and any other awesome things that you're working on. But truly appreciate all the awesome work that you do.

In the course of time that you took today, I think there's so much for looking at things in a different way and sometimes getting those aha moments. So I appreciate you providing that and being able to look at strategy in a way that I think provides more opportunity to succeed. Thank you so much for doing that and sharing that today and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

16:14 – Amié Devero

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Gresh had a terrific conversation. You're pretty good at this.

16:19 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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