Leading The Old-Fashioned Way

Between 1979 to 1986, Ogilvy & Mather cast actor John Houseman in 18 Smith Barney ads, voicing the now-famous line, “They make money the old-fashioned way, they earn it.”

So what exactly is the old-fashioned way? Making your money work for you? Or, is it making your business acumen and superpower work for you, time and again?

I sat down with Jason Miller, founder of the Strategic Advisor Board (SAB), about what it takes to make a business successful and scalable. He should know. He has built and sold many successful companies over his career and is currently chair of 11 other companies in addition to SAB.

As an owner of multiple successful businesses, he joins the ranks of multi-business owners such as Elon Musk, who has owned many different businesses over the years, such as PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group controls more than 400 companies, and Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, whose website lists over 62 subsidiary companies, among them Duracell, See’s Candy, and Geico.

Here’s what Jason told me.

1. Be willing to do the hard work

“I grew up on a farm. Every morning at five o’clock I used to get up and my dad would give me a big scoop shovel and make me shovel around a ton of grain into all the feeders for the sheep,” said Jason. “And I often would look over and see a farm hand right there, one scoop done. And I didn't understand. This doesn't make any sense when you're nine years old. But then later on in life, looking back, I realize that was a valuable lesson in hard work and seeing it through. My dad’s drive morphed into me, and that's what forces me every day to get up jazzed about everything that I do.”

People want to build million-dollar businesses overnight and never work a day in their lives. That’s counter to the laws of nature that a farm exemplifies. There’s plenty of hard work to be done. And nothing happens without the preparatory work, the care and feeding, and the sowing at the proper time and season.

“My wife always says,” Miller continues, “that's one thing nobody can ever say about me is that I wasn’t willing to do the work. Take Elon Musk for example. People say he got lucky. He says if you consider working seven days a week, 160 hours a week for 10 years before I really made it, luck. Okay. But no, it's about putting in the work.

Does hard work always translate over to money? No, but we shouldn't expect it to. What we should expect it to do is create relationships. The relationships create the money. Because the relationships do the good work.”

2. The real work is in building relationships

“It takes a very long time of building a relationship with somebody. It takes hours and hours of conversations with Bob, let’s say, about what he does, the things he does, and what his superpowers are. And it's not just a feeling, it's getting to know somebody.

“It's like being on the golf course and getting to know people and bringing back the way it used to be where people had conversations and they talked and it wasn't just a 15-minute call on Zoom. You don't get authenticity through a 15-minute call on Zoom. You have to do the work.”

Miller’s 11 companies are the result of building relationships and putting the right people in the right place.

“It’s the result of a lot of hours talking to people,” Miller continues. “But it's what I love to do. When you love to do something, it's not work.

“When somebody comes to me and says, here's what I think my problems are. And then I get in there and say, well, actually that wasn't a problem, but you got four stacked up over here that you've been ignoring. Then I can go to one of my family trees of business that I have, and I can plug those in and fix all those problems. And there are a couple of really good things about that. Number one, I know the guy that owns them. That's helpful. Two, I know the job will get done right. So I can back that 100%.

“And that's really what I set out to do was to create this all-encompassing solution for any business owner, young, new, or established, and be able to go in there and say, look, here are some of the issues that you have. Let me plug these things into it, to help you fix those problems. And it truly is a one-stop shop with which I can take any business leader and fix all their problems to help them grow and scale their companies.”

3. Double down on your superpower

According to Miller, each of us has only two to three superpowers. The sooner we realize it, the better. Once you know your superpowers, delegate the rest. Miller’s superpowers, in his own words, are hyper-growth/hyper-scale, strategic and operational implementation, and micro-pivots.

In forming the Strategic Advisor Board (SAB), he selected nine other people with superpowers complementary to, though different from, his. The combination of superpowers is the backbone and strength of SAB, much like the Avengers of the business world.

“For example, if you're very operational minded and you're trying to be the visionary for the company, that's probably not the right fit,” explains Miller. “And that's okay if you own the company. Step down, take a chair role and put a CEO in place who is a visionary who can take the company where it needs to go.

“Get out of your own and the company’s way and work in your zone of genius. Perhaps you are more of a product person. Then you need to be in the hands-on development part. Be good at that. And then bring somebody else in to run the company itself. They're two very different roles for sure.

“When you can bring all the right players to the table, it just creates magic.”

4. Employ the military formula

“I joined the military at 17. I spent 23 years in the military, serving other people. And the military really gave me the formula, the leadership, those things that one really needs to understand operationally how to function in business — not by working in it, but in working on it, operationally speaking. And it really took me down the path to become a collector of businesses and be able to raise them and bring them to where I wanted them to be.”

I asked Jason what formula the military taught him. Here’s what he said.

“Well, it's complicated, because not everybody is the same. And when you ask most military leaders, why don't you treat Jim the same as you do Sally as you do Bob as you do Bill, they’ll tell you it’s because we're all different people. So when you look at this mix of different people, nothing is ever the same.

“The formula is fluid. It's getting to know people. People will tell you everything they need and what they're missing just that by having a conversation.

“While there is a specific formula that we take into a company, it's the people that influence all of that internally that doesn’t make it cookie cutter. One company does it this way, whereas another does it that way. Not one of my companies operates the same because there are people involved.”

“Every business, everybody has their challenges. So it's finding out how to best serve that client in the best way, based off of their talent, based off of their challenges and based off of their personality type.”

“What I love the most,” concludes Miller, “is being able to serve people and serve them as long as it takes, and give value for as long as it takes. And I think if we do that as leaders, as business owners, and as people, the world will be a better place. Because the truth is we live in a kind of an angry world right now, and kindness is free. It doesn't cost anything. So we can use all that we have as business people, as leaders, and as people, and use that as a vessel to do a lot of good.”