Why Every Thought Leader Needs a Plan Before They Publish Writing a book isn’t just…
Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 56 – Dan Hawkins
In your first year of consulting, you might find yourself doing whatever it takes to pay the bills. But to build an evergreen career as a thought leader, you need to figure out your niche, find your strengths, and learn how to avoid your weaknesses. We can help!
Dan Hawkins, President of Summit Leadership Partners shares his experience helping companies and business leaders improve performance. He has authored and presented numerous topics on leadership, organization change, strategy, leading in global contexts, and strategic talent management.
In this episode, Peter and Dan discuss the importance of having a consistent and ongoing online presence, how not to go broke pitching against bigger firms, and why you need original tools for your clients. This is a great one!
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on our podcast today, Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, I’ve got Dan Hawkins with me. Dan is the founder and CEO summit leadership. He’s got a really impressive corporate career. He was a chief human resource officer, top talent and organization development executive, a global HR VP, other senior leadership roles with high performing companies and some pretty impressive brand name companies, Asurion, Ingersoll-Rand, Magnatech. and Hex Hellenese. Now he’s on the other side, running a really, really good consulting firm down in North Carolina. So welcome aboard, Dan. Thanks for joining us today.
Dan Hawkins Peter, thank you. I appreciate you speaking with me today.
Peter Winick So your story sort of in a nutshell is you leave the great corporate job, right? At a fortune 500 and make the plunge on your own to go out on your own and sort of stake a flag in the ground. What’s, what’s that been like and how has that evolved over the, what is it? Three years or so since you started the company?
Dan Hawkins Yeah, it’s been a little over three years, Peter, and it’s been exciting. I’m out of the scary phase. This is something that’s, ironically, this is something my father did probably over 40 years ago. He left big corporate America and started his own consulting business. and almost. almost at the exact same age I decided to do the same after two and a half decades of experience working as a you know working my way up in the corporate ladder up to a chief talent officer, chief human resource officer as you said and I just I got to a point where I got the itch and felt like I was in a position to do it and you know emotionally financially personally it was something I’ve always had a dream of doing. And yeah, it’s been great. It’s been right. The first year is scary because you wonder if you really can survive without the big system around you. And then when clients start to gravitate to you and actually start to listen to what you have to say as your confidence grows, honestly, I think then your business grows in due time. So it’s, it has been a lot of fun. When I look back at when I started three, three and a half years ago. my knowledge of this side of the industry is a hundred times greater than I ever thought it could be.
Peter Winick Got it. And yeah, right. Because you’ve been on the other side, right? You’ve been in the buy side. Now you’re on the sell side, basically, right here. You’re selling it to sort of. Yeah.
Dan Hawkins It’s funny, I’ve been a consumer far longer than I’ve been a deliverer of consulting work. And it’s funny when I try to do work on business development opportunities and people don’t return your calls or cancel your meetings and things like that. I feel like there’s some karma going on, because I was that guy when I was purchasing consulting. It’s alright.
Peter Winick The first tidbit there is if you’re a senior executive and people are pitching you content-based things, consulting and such, at least return their calls because payback’s a you-know-what.
Dan Hawkins Karma is alive. It used to be discouraging and now I get it. I wasn’t awful, but definitely if I had a conflict in my schedule and it’s a consultant calling me or an executive in I certainly would take the latter, not the former.
Peter Winick Well, it’s also I think your perception of time changes when you’re on the other side in terms of speed, right? When you’re the sell side, you’re ready to go, right. You’ve put it all together, you’ve got your proposal together, you’re to launch it. And working with large Fortune 500s, their cadence or their definition of quick might be sometime this quarter where yours might be some time this quarter.
Dan Hawkins Absolutely. I mean, when you’re a consultant, you ask a series of questions, you think you know what they need and you’re ready, you’ve got some solutions. And quite frankly, that’s one of the things that I love about what I do is when I hear problems with clients that we work with, I get really excited and I’m ready to jump in immediately and at solving problems today. You know, frankly, I have to remember that, you know, with clients, I’m sure we’ll talk about my market in a few minutes, but the larger clients, certainly they take their time, they weigh their options, there’s more stakeholders involved to get on board. So yeah, I think I’m certainly learning to develop some patience on the side of the fence here. Yes. Whether you…
Peter Winick whether you like it or not. So let’s talk a little bit about sort of your evolution as an organization. So you start the firm and you’ve got obviously some wonderful reputation. You know what you’re doing. You’ve got some great contacts. So at first it’s sort of, hey, there’s lots of things I can do and that’s what you did. Talk to me about sort of how you sort of found your niche, if you will, or your space relative to what you want to be doing. Well, my…
Dan Hawkins Well, my last job I had, Peter, before I started the firm is I was the head of HR for Asurion, and Asurian is owned by six or seven different private equity investors. And I honestly had no experience in private equity until that point. I was a big Fortune 500 public company guy. But as I got to get to understand the private equity market and industry, I quickly learn that there are a lot of mid-market … mid-size companies owned by private equity that had tons of human capital needs, issues, challenges that they’re facing as they’re all trying to scale, albeit the time period is different. They’re usually in a four to five year investment period where they want to flip the investment. And so I literally put together a business case that I could launch a leadership in human capital consultancy focused on the mid-market, which when I say mid- market, I’m in. roughly $500 million to about $3 or $4 billion in revenue, and primarily using private equity as a channel. So I felt like that was the place to go because it was an underserved market. The big guys like McKinsey and Deloitte and Cornferry, all of that, I think they’re really pretty well saturated in the Fortune 500.
Peter Winick And that’s not, you know, logically speaking, you’re not gonna have the resources to fairly compete.
Dan Hawkins Right. When I was in those companies, I was looking partially for expertise, but partially I was looking for capacity with those big consulting firms. So at my business case and my thought process, I’m like, all right, mid-market’s the way to go. I launched Summit Leadership Partners, and you start with your Rolodex and start telling friends, families, and colleagues that you’re a business. my Rolodex was far deeper in Fortune 500. So I called my first year my slutty year of consulting where I did anything for anybody in the Fortune 500 world. And it was great because I learned what I want to do. I learned what I didn’t want to. It really helped me sharpen the sphere of I thought you know myself and summit would add the most value and
Peter Winick So that was basically the will consult for food phase. That was for college folks.
Dan Hawkins I did anything that had, you know, under the sun in HR, you know, including the health and turnaround HR departments and stuff like that. And then I you know and through that, you know, I got more confident in what I was doing. But I also recognize that I don’t want to be an HR consultant. I want I really want to work as a consultant for the board for the CEO for the C suite around executive development around organizational design and growth.
Peter Winick So let me stop you there for a second, because there’s a lot of different channels here, a lot a different sort of branches. So one is private equity. So that was one piece that you said, that’s interesting. The size of the firm, 500 to 3 billion, that interesting. And then the last state you made is pretty big. I didn’t want to work with HR. So it’s more at the C-suite strategic. So each of these to me, gets you narrower and narrower and laser focused to be sort of in your lane and be able to speak in a. different language to a very specific group that, as you mentioned earlier, has a very different time horizon. They’re not playing the quarterly game. They made an investment. They want to exit that investment at some multiple in whatever, three, five, six years or whatever. So was this intentional or some of this was listening to the market reacting? How did you, that’s a very niche, right? I mean, not super narrow niche, but it’s targeted.
Dan Hawkins I think it was intentional, but I had a lot to learn. Look, I think I was a little bit of a square peg in a round hole as an HR executive. I mean, I have degrees in organization psychology. That’s what I was trying to do. But you know, I just I wasn’t, honestly, I didn’t love being an HR guy. I loved being, you know, working, you’re coaching executives, I love business, so I definitely personally gravitated towards the C-suite, the CEOs, etc. And I also know that if you’re really going to make a meaningful impact, you really have to start at the top. and that is with the CEO. or the CHRO, frankly, but when you go below that, you’re really dealing with gatekeepers, quite frankly. And so, A, yes, that’s where my personal gravitational pull was, but then, as you pointed out, Peter, I learned a lot and I recognize that a couple of things when you’re working with, A the top of the house and then B with private equity. Top of the House, as I tell my team all the time, they always have money to spend. So, if there’s a business need… And we can solve it. I don’t care what their financial position is. I don’t know what their budget constraints. They’re going to find a way to grow their business.
Peter Winick Well, and contrast that with the HR world of RFPs and budget and having the way, compare the two, because I think it’s a massive difference in terms of business need, find the budget versus HR and having to go through processes and lack of authority and such.
Dan Hawkins Yeah, and I think, you know, I knew that as a big corporate guy, but also what my first big project that we got, we were, you know, my joke is we were put in the gladiator pit with Deloitte and Korn Ferry and PWC, and we had to duke it out and had like seven levels of review. And, you know, we got the RFP simply because I had a connection in the company, you know, nothing, we weren’t, we by far, I wouldn’t have picked us, but we but they did. And it’s just a brutal place to be. And for a small company, it doesn’t have the capacity to generate 25-page RFPs. It’s not a good place to spend our time. And often, they’re going to go with if the expertise is good, if all that you have, the expertise is the baseline to get you in the door. then they’re really going to, they’re going to try to drive cost. And that’s not a play that, that we, you know, we typically play. And so, and then, and the decision maker, honestly, when you’re, when you are working with corporate America, if you’re dealing with a head of leadership, a head of talent, sometimes the head of the CHRO, they’re, they are coming from more of a constraints mindset. Like here’s what I can afford. Can you do this in my, in my bucket? Whereas when we talk to board CEOs, and honestly, most CHROs, when they have a business need, they’re going to find a way to pay for it if they think it will help the business. And that’s a great partnership. And most consultants don’t like to be treated like vendors, they want to be treated like partners. And that was really important to us. I think the other learning that you asked me if it was intentional, which I really had to get sharp on is the. the time horizon in private equity from making the investment to exiting the investment, you’re running a five-year race and you’re in corporate America. They’re thinking about next generation leaders. I mean, they’re looking at 10 to 20 years of. you know, organizational development benefits, things like that. And so I definitely the good thing is I’m impatient as hell. And I do move fast, probably, you know sometimes to the frustration of the big companies. But I definitely learned how to I learned we learned how to change our language and private equity speak around from investment period to exit period, so that our solutions, our recommendations where we advise around leadership and organization matters. We know that they want real-time. directly P&L impacting solutions, not these long-tailed programs that maybe may work, may not.
Peter Winick Well, they’re not looking all the way down the talent change of recruiting and retention and you know, it’s a bit of a renter’s mentality versus a buyer and owner’s mentality. Let me ask you a couple of things because there’s a lot of information coming back and forth in a good way. You mentioned that you were in the sort of the gladiator pet with the big boys. Now, sometimes while that could be flattering, you could go broke pitching business because the Deloitte’s and such are set up to be pitching business and long-term cycles and all that sort of stuff. You know, with a small firm, when you’re starting out, if you’re involved in two or three pitches at that level, without live engagements coming in, that could be a four month to 14 month process until dollars come in the door. So how do you balance sort of the long sales cycle with sort of cashflow demands of having to pay your bills and keep the doors open and hire people and grow?
Dan Hawkins Yeah, well, I think the first, the easy answer is we don’t participate in those anymore. I mean, so we don’t participate in that long RFP cycles. Would we work with the large companies? Of course, you know, they have deep pockets, big needs, they’re great. We learn a lot from them just as much as they learn from us, but it’s not a target market for us. So, you know, if you ask me. I spent probably 50% of my personal time on business development activity. I would say 0% of it is, quite frankly, doing business development with Fortune 500. It’s all with more mid-sized companies. And so they typically are not putting us in the gladiator pit with other firms. You develop this long-term relationship. They know what you’re good at. I know that you’re not. and it’s typically, you know, it’s something that you’ve done enough, you know, relationship building and, you know, quite frankly, we do a lot of freebies. We do a lot of, hey, we give them suggestions, we give them advice, and then they, you know, our clients trust us to know, hey, if we want to hire these guys. Right. I would say that would be the answer to the whole long tail RFP. We haven’t done one of those in a year. Excellent. And we haven’t done it in a year, and guess what? We didn’t get it. They gave it to some other So I I swear myself
Peter Winick My recommendation would be, it doesn’t have to be binary, do it or not do it, but when you do it be thoughtful and mindful around the actual cost. So if you’re spending 50% of your time on business development, you wouldn’t be doing that if you weren’t getting a logical return on that, right? If that was, if you kept freaking out you’d find something else to do. So when you look at those RFPs and measure it against your other activity and say, geez, that was a man month of labor, right, against that, and I did that five times and struck out. Okay, well what else could I have done with those resources?
Dan Hawkins Right. There is a good news story in this RFP we didn’t get because this one, this client was in our target market frankly. It was about a $4 billion company and they put us in, they did throw us in the heat with some others. But the reason, we purposely committed to do the RFP because we thought this would get us in-the-door. So frankly we could show our stuff to the client, the potential client. So the good news is we didn’t get the RFP for this big project, but they gave us so much work afterward, it was probably five times the value of the RFPs that we got. It’s probably our highest revenue generating client that we have today.
Peter Winick So that’s brilliant because you didn’t have to do RFPs for that work. It was a way for them to be exposed to who you are and what you’re about and impress some others in the room with their own budget. I want to shift a little bit here to the content. So here’s what I, I’d like to talk about for a minute. So you’ve developed now on the consulting side, your own processes, methodologies, and frameworks. That’s number one. And number two, you’re in the process and have started. using content and thought leadership as a marketing tool. Sort of walk me through sort of that path for you.
Dan Hawkins This is where even though I kind of stuck my nose at the big companies, this is what I gained from the big company is you can’t scale growth unless you build a little bit of structure, some process, some repeatability. I tell my team we’ve got to turn this snowflake into a blizzard, which means when we have a new, novel, great idea that works with one client, how can we make it repeatable? So over the last year, we’ve worked our butts off. We’ve got a bunch of interns working here underneath the consulting team. We’ve worked out butts off in documenting all of our processes, our procedures. We created an online organization diagnostic that clients love that now has benchmark data. We’re starting to write articles on it. We just got it copyrighted. So I just, we recognize that, you know, and I’ll tell you the financial benefit in a minute. So we now have tools and processes that are in place and data and benchmarks. that we can repeat at any given time, we can hire other consultants and they can use the summit playbook, so to speak. When we work with a, you know, a three or four billion dollar client and they, you, know, and we’re working in different parts of the world, they’re all getting a similar high touch summit experience. So I think from a consistency standpoint, now from a financial perspective, two great benefits. One is we’re more efficient. So improved margin. improved margins on the service that we deliver. So we’re just getting more efficient. It takes us less time and less labor to do certain things than ever before. The other thing which is more for the long-term is, you know, 10, 15 years from now, if we decide to sell Summit Leadership Partners or we get bought by a strategic buyer, being a pure play consulting house where we’re a bunch of consultants that work on projects. has a much lower multiple to sell, as opposed to if we actually have our own IP, our own data, our own tools and processes that are quite frankly unique and different from everyone else, so.
Peter Winick And although the documenting to the level that you do may feel overkill early on, it’s got huge long-term benefits, as you say, in terms of efficacy, efficiency, being able to scale, being able grow. And to your point, I learned a long time ago, any dumb dumb can get into business, it takes a smart person to get out. But the fact that you’re thinking about an exit and increasing your valuation because you’re documenting processes and have proprietary IP. It’s always good to be thinking in those ways, and it’s got short-term operational benefits and long-term benefits relative to valuation.
Dan Hawkins Absolutely and it is it’s a grind we’re not natural process a kind of people but it’s something we do invest a good bit of time and money to make it make it happen so it’ll be beneficial
Peter Winick brushing your teeth and flossing right you got it you got to do it absolutely
Dan Hawkins Absolutely.
Peter Winick So touch a little bit on the use of content on the other side. So that, that’s sort of the direct monetization of using your frameworks and processes and methodologies and client engagements. How are you using content to get those that aren’t evolved enough yet to be a client to become one?
Dan Hawkins Yeah, a few things I would say is, first of all, thanks to your help, Peter, we got our act together on what is our content and where do we feel like we have an opportunity to be a thought leader. And then we’ve advanced that and have built an editorial calendar and we’ve amped up digital marketing efforts and our LinkedIn or Facebook and all of that are kind of living and breathing. We’re publishing something twice a week material out there. Some of it, I think our goal is to have two or three things uniquely ours each month that were like blogs and articles to demonstrate that some thought leadership, the others were actually kind of just tacking on to other important material and put our two cents on it.
Peter Winick But it’s consistent and ongoing and now it is evolving into a capability of the firm and it’s a pretty cost effective way.
Dan Hawkins Correct, so we’re starting to be, some people have heard of us even though they haven’t really heard of it. And that’s because they don’t know but it might have popped up on LinkedIn. We’re also starting to publish some of our work online with like Middle Market Growth Magazine and. HR strategy journal magazine and some other places just to kind of get it out there in front of different audiences The other thing that we’re doing is we hope because we’ve you know We’ve been around the we’ve been at this for a few a few years, and we’ve collected some data as we’re actually introducing new tools to our clients that are not out there in the marketplace, such as this organ diagnostic that I mentioned. We do this kind of exhaustive project where we, for six to eight weeks, we come in and we assess a company’s structure, culture, talent, leadership, et cetera, against its strategy and give recommendations, et cetera. And we built an online assessment that can get at that very, very quickly by just administering a survey, if you will, to all employees to give a client an initial diagnostic on where there may be strengths and gaps in their organization before we even come into it. And so that’s considered kind of new and novel, and we’ve got data and some benchmarks that we can compare to other.
Peter Winick And it’s, and it’s proprietary. So you’re not administering a tool than anybody else could do. So it gives a differentiator and it shows that even though they might not know who you are, and maybe you’re relatively new, that you have a perspective and a proprietary methodology that could extract insight for them. That’s great stuff, Dan. As we’re wrapping up here, knowing what you know now, what would you say to, you know, Dan minus four years, there’s another Dan out there right now or someone that is about to embark on the journey that you’ve had. What would you tell them?
Dan Hawkins I would say allow yourself to be agile in the markets you target and how you serve those markets because you’re going to learn more in the first two years than you can ever imagine. The second thing I’d probably say is keep in mind that the first year, even if you’ve got an incredible Rolodex, it is the year of insecurity and did I make the right thing. or did I make the right decision or do the right thing. So know that that trough, even if business is good, you still question yourself. It’s a normal emotional reaction until you start getting your legs under you and you really find what your true value is to the marketplace. And I’d say the third thing is just surround yourself with great people. I mean, we’ve got a team of about 10 of us and. They’re smart as heck and great at what they do. But more importantly, I love being around them. They’re fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. That makes it all worthwhile. When you’re with large companies, sometimes you have to work with the people that are around you because you can’t pick all. And so just surround yourself with great talent and people that you enjoy spending time with.
Peter Winick Great advice. And finally, where do people find you? How do they get in touch with you?
Dan Hawkins Well, I think there’s two ways, please check out our website www.summitleadership.com or they can call me directly in the office at 704-237-4677 and I guess lastly my email address is dan.hawkins.com. Any one of those three would be great.
Peter Winick Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your transparency and sharing the journey, the good, the bad, the ugly. And it looks like it’s smooth sailing from here, knock wood, right? It’s going well.
Dan Hawkins I hope so, I think it will be. Future’s bright.
Peter Winick Great. Well, thanks for sharing today, Dan. Thank you, Peter. Great talking with you. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtledershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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