Tish Squillaro 0:00

Hi everyone, this is Tish Guilero. It's Candor with Tish. And as you know, I have some amazing guests that join me each week to talk about leadership and building and scaling teams and how they advise or are part of organizations where they're at impact. Today's guest is Ashish Basaria, an operating executive with over 30 years of record spanning six different industries. He's operating tracks include scaling businesses from 65 million to 400 million, which I can't wait to hear that story, and revenue from 2.2 billion to 4 billion and operating and sustaining a 35% EBITDA, which every company and every CEO is most worried about. You went from the big four consulting to running AI-driven operations, which I do think today is going to be a very good topic. Really excited to have Vashis here with me today, and I'm going to ask him to just give a little bit about himself that maybe I haven't shared, just to get our audience comfortable on your background.

Ashish Bisaria 0:56

Gush, thank you for having me. Outside of my professional resume, I'm an avid golfer. I have traveled to 117 countries in my life, and I still have the travel bug.

Tish Squillaro 1:12

Wow. Wow. I was going to say, is your passport got all the stamps? I always wonder if people get so stamped up they need a new one.

Ashish Bisaria 1:19

Yes, I've had to often get new copies done in those 10-year segments.

Tish Squillaro 1:24

And is your travel personal? Will you love to travel, or is that your business has taken you to all those different places?

Ashish Bisaria 1:31

I think I was very fortunate out of B-school. I joined KPMG, and for eight years I worked for them. Every year, they moved me to a new continent. So seven countries, five continents is where I operated. So I leveraged the time to discover all the countries in and around that part of the world. And I would say we do roughly two trips every year as a family to someplace that hasn't been on our travel list.

Tish Squillaro 2:03

On your bucket list. Something on your bucket list that's not twice. We kind of do a similar thing with our kids. Um, we try to hit the list. Well, excellent. So we'll get started. Have a couple of questions, and obviously you can add as much as you'd like or anything new that I've not addressed. And you know, our audiences are mainly CEOs and early founders and leaders that are scaling their business. Obviously, I work with many on the human-first leadership, which I loved that you mentioned because I work on people dynamics. You know, how do we have right people, right seats? Do we make the tough discussions with them when we have to? Are we engaging them to be aligned? So you talk about human-first leadership as a performance strategy, which I do think people lose evidence of that. They do think, especially now with this AI-driven sort of content in our world that, you know, human and people first still is really where you have to start. When in your career was that relevant to you? Because obviously at KPMG, when you were bouncing around, I would imagine people first is nice, but as a strategy, numbers and data always override. So when was that uh really truly something you believed in?

Ashish Bisaria 3:12

Yeah, Tish, I think you your sense is spot on. Consultants are rewarded for great strategy, buy-in and the C-suite, getting the approvals and then getting it done. That's why you hire Big Four Consulting Firm. The human factor, the human leadership, or living with your own decisions is not a product we consultants are used to. So right through my KPMG career, it was all about outputs, strategy, numbers, with little to no regard to people. And the transition from consulting to operations was a rude awakening to me. I will call her by name because I hold her in very high esteem. My boss was a lady called Brenda, and she could recognize very early that the transition from a consultant to a leader leading a team across multiple countries does not happen naturally. Not only did she coach me, she pulled me aside, had the tough conversations, made me understand the importance. And the net net is this is my choice of word. I can demand outputs, short-term results, and hit the quarterly performance, but that's a performance architecture. It's not healthy underneath. It's temporary and I'm borrowing from the future by burning people now. So, yes, this quarter, next quarter may look brilliant, but it's not a sustainable performance because behind that I'm losing people. It took me some hard lessons, it took me some years to figure that out. And fast forward, if I look at my last decade, I would see building a strong, robust team that can perform when I'm not in the room is far more important than demanding things out of people.

Tish Squillaro 5:13

Absolutely. I mean, I do always tell my CEOs, you don't want to be in the weeds. You don't want them to come to you to solve the problem. You want them to come with options and solutions because sometimes you need to be involved, but you shouldn't be the master plan of the answers. And I do agree that that's an important component. Now, when you're pulling a team together, I guess when you see that they're aligned, what is it that allows you to know that they actually are working on things that matter? Right? Because there are things that we can work on, and especially function leads of any executive team. They have their team-related work under their function, right, where they have a whole team. And then they step into the leadership role and be an executive for the business. When do you know, or what do you do to help, that they're working on the right stuff as that leadership team?

Ashish Bisaria 6:03

I think you said it. What goes up the chain to you reflects what kind of a leadership structure you've built. And if everything is going all the way up to you, you haven't delegated, you haven't given authority, accountabilities are unclear, nobody knows who's in charge. And that is a leadership failure. So the symptom is what gets to your table every morning if I'm making a number up, if 60%, 70% of things that should, in theory, have been managed, then you definitely have failed the leadership structure. Conversely, what's reaching you is exactly what my role expects me to make a decision on, then you've got the right balance. Now, every once in a while Teshwi gets surprised by an individual who rather escalate than make the decision on their own, not because they didn't have authority, but they rather not have the monkey on the back. But that's an individual problem, not a leadership problem.

Tish Squillaro 7:10

Well, it could be a team problem too. I have seen it in my work where there's a fear factor. You know, being wrong, or not to use the word fail, but to fail the the way to do it the correct way is would be so bad, so disastrous that they would not want to attempt to even put their toe in the water with an answer. And I do think that stifles a leadership team if they're afraid. I mean, not everyone's going to get it right. And I do think you are allowed to get it wrong or fail once, just not twice on the same thing, because that's not a learning, right? Because failure is equal to learning. When you step in and you see teams, where is it usually that you can see, okay, this is the biggest issue? Like in your, you know, you've worked with tons of industries and you've worked with all levels. You worked as an operator and also as a consultant. But kind of when you walk in and see a team, even maybe the one you built yourself, what is that one thing that you see consistently has been a big problem for executive teams to perform?

Ashish Bisaria 8:12

Accountability without authority.

Tish Squillaro 8:17

So who's taking the authority? Meaning they don't feel they have the authority, or leadership doesn't give anyone authority because everything has to be rung up the flagpole and leadership makes all the decisions?

Ashish Bisaria 8:29

Depends upon that particular company. I'm gonna make a generic statement. Founder-led companies struggle giving authority. A founder is really good at wearing multiple hats. They've been in the trenches building it. And it's tough for founders to let go that authority. Second problem in that stereotypical is you're good from zero to one by wearing multiple hats. You can't go from one to infinity wearing multiple hats. That scale gets in the way of letting go. And founders hold on to, oh, I could do it over the weekend. I it took me two days to build that. I can pick up the phone and call it.

Tish Squillaro 9:17

And they probably can, funny enough, but um, you know, it's that founder syndrome. There's a phrase that's been created for just that because founders are so bought into what they created that they they one, they probably can do everything, but that's not scalable, right? When they've raised capital or built a team, doing everything yourself is probably not going to produce the most outcomes and doesn't leave that founder room to be that that important being leading the business the way they want to. Instead, it puts them back in the weeds on the day-to-day. And, you know, sometimes, as she's I have found that that's where a founder's best. And that's okay as long as it's addressed and they have that conversation that I love being in the day-to-day. I don't necessarily want, but you have to have that conversation and then choose someone to be that leader if it's not you. But trying to really do both, like you had said, is going to produce a very not scalable or people will leave your business. I mean, no one wants to be in a business where they can't make decisions or have authority with responsibility because why would I want the responsibility if I can't own it?

Ashish Bisaria 10:32

Exactly. So you can see the failure on either side. It could be an organization failure where accountability is there but no authority. Or there is all the authority, but the individual does not want to be accountable, right? So we see both flavors, but the common denominator of a poor leadership structure, what gets in the way of explosive growth is everything gets concentrated into few individuals. Growing a company from 60 to 400 does not happen by my presence in every group. It's letting the leaders know their lanes, letting them understand what success looks like, letting them make those decisions at pace. I think we all can look at our weekly calendar and categorize it, and you can quickly sense how much time you're spending making decisions on behalf of your team based upon the meetings, versus what shows up on a calendar is more about statuses, approvals of authority that does not exist down there, or alignment meetings. Five people working, and again, we all get 24 hours in a day. That doesn't mean we work 24 hours, but my point is all of us have a finite minutes in the day. Nobody can change that. I'd rather have five people using 24 hours than me using 24 hours as an individual.

Tish Squillaro 12:01

No, of course. And I and I look, I do think working with so many different stages of organizations, you know, there's a time where the founder can't delegate too much because there is the other side where they delegate everything out and they've lost sight of what's happening. So that's one element. It's more rare than the founder syndrome, but you know, I just want to put it out there since we're gonna have listeners that are on both sides. There's a fine balance, like you said, of knowing how much involvement, where you're more of a teacher, not the teller or the oversider, but the teacher. And then the key is to pick the right people. The only time I've watched founders or CEOs struggle where they had to get involved is they don't have the right people right seats. So now let's think about that for a minute. When you're in an organization, would you say right people write seats is the first thing you try to evaluate, or is there something before that?

Ashish Bisaria 13:01

Yes. And to underscore what you said, I'm not painting broad brush on all founders. I've worked for three different founders in my career, and I've had both bookends. I have those who know how to trust, how to leverage an executive team and build. And I've also worked for founders that have to be in every minute detail underlining the leadership team. So that's true. To your question, I think this is the part of leadership that is most uncomfortable, especially when you're coming from outside in. There is this halo statement that you do not know my business, my company, what I do. And when you come from outside, you're undermining everything that I've built or everything I've done. And I'm not talking from that talking about individual leaders. There are also people who come from the outside and then they bring an army of friends that they've always worked with, regardless of understanding the capability of the individuals already there. But I, in my personal experience, the first 90 days, I'm a student of the business, but I'm closely watching the leaders in the seat that they are. The questions I'm asking, do you know your business? How do I know that? Can you tell me how work is done in your in your lane? And if you cannot recite every step, you are not into details. Can you recite your KPIs in your sleep? I I joke about this. You wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me my company's performance. I will answer the numbers plus minus 5% accuracy.

Tish Squillaro 14:42

That's a tough act to follow. I'm not sure everyone is gonna have that skill, but it's nice to know you do.

Ashish Bisaria 14:47

Yeah. So uh I'm looking for people to know their numbers. I really care about making sure that they know their numbers.

Tish Squillaro 14:53

Well, it's the commitment to the business, right? I mean, I think if they don't, that means they're not sharing it with their teams, which means we have a lot more than just one person who doesn't know what they're supposed to be doing or what our business does, which trickles from the top down because it is supposed to be led, vision led through the leadership. But if your leaders are not aware as clear on what is the vision, mission, what am I doing, what is my team responsible for, what am I supposed to get done, you know that whole team doesn't know.

Ashish Bisaria 15:24

Agreed. I say that what you said is complexity that no one was brave enough to simplify.

Tish Squillaro 15:32

Well, speak about simplify. You've worked a lot with AI. And I know it's on everybody's mind. I know organizations of every industry, every stage of their growth is really heavily concentrated on integrating and implementing AI throughout their business. And I think AI is, you know, a very important component of our evolution as a world, as companies and as individuals. I use it a lot from a content generator. I use it a lot to kind of give me a framework if I haven't been able to put all my ideas into a framework, but I don't have an answer or solve my problems. So give me your, you know, your thoughts a little bit on how you have a human first for performance, but yet you also help organizations implement AI. And some would say AI is decreasing the human element and not increasing it. So how have you balanced it so that there is a real, you know, joining of the human and the AI so we're not having to replace one or the other?

Ashish Bisaria 16:34

I think you just said in your profession, you use AI to organize things. Said very simply, you're using AI as an operating capability, not as a software. And that's step one. When people start making AI a product or a software, you've missed the point. It is an operating capability that can be improved, enhanced, sped up using AI. Second question is what part of your operating model can be run using technology versus what requires human touch. We work with the disabled population. So a huge part of going through your disability journey is the human-to-human touch. It's the empathy, it's the discussion, it's telling that story that is very painful to our clients to talk about. I am not trying to break AI in that space. Now, at the same time, I want to be honest that there are engineered phrases that allows you to connect. Knowing when to say the right thing at the right time can deepen the human bond. And we are careful of representing those engineered phrases to our team members just to build better trust and connection. So that's my starting point. I'm not looking at AI towards everything. But on the flip side, there are hundreds of things we do in our business model day in, day out, that I can optimize. Let's take almost every business today uses social media to go find clients. Gone are the days when I can I need three weeks to create one ad using a team of five people to launch. I can create 10 different lead magnets overnight using AI and let clients find me in different, different forums. I can take the whole onboarding intake of a client and manage both the compliance aspect, because there are certain businesses where you cannot do certain things for certain clients based upon the business unit, or enhancing and making it frictionless. So, yes, um the summary is use AI as an operating capability. Second, don't deploy it on broken pro uh processes. The good time to pause and ask what would be the ideal way if I had a blank canvas, and then let the machine serve the mission, not define it.

Tish Squillaro 19:10

Right. Listen, I I I love that you use it as an operating model. I don't know if everyone has that same mindset. I think sometimes people think it's an actual performance metrics. Yeah. And I do think an operating model is a nice way to talk about AI, and I'm going to start to use that. Thank you very much. Because I do think it allows still the human-first mentality, because humans will use an operating model, just like a business wants operating models. And if it's broken, don't assume that AI is the fix. If it's broken, why don't we uncover the root cause of why it's broken? One, maybe it's not necessary. Two, we have the wrong data. Three, the wrong person's managing it. I mean, there's so many things that we can look at. And I do like that the use of it is to complement growth, not diminish growth, right? I mean, I do think we get lost sometimes because I work with also young professionals, and many of them are scared that their jobs will become obsolete or like even to integrate it into their business. They're afraid it means they're just basically getting themselves out of a job. And I constantly tell them that is not the case, but I'm not leadership of those companies. So I'm not sure if that is their idea, right? So I do think the education or communication from leadership to their teams about using it as an operating model is a much safer and more effective way to get people to embrace the use of the operating model like any other model we would have had before, any framework. This one just happens to be, you know, more accessible and easier to have a lot of information than some others, right? It's not as limited, but it doesn't replace. And so I do appreciate that. That's an important element that I think our audiences will really take note on how to integrate it, because I think the biggest issue I'm seeing across my clients is how are they talking about AI? How are they showing that they want AI to integrate into the organization? And then what is the roadmap to get there? You gave a good roadmap of how it could get into that. So that much I appreciate. And as you know, our time is up, so I do think today was extremely knowledgeable. Ashish, Ashish Basaria, you have been terrific. I am very interested in learning more about some of the things you've done. We didn't just have enough time today. Everyone else, uh, if you have questions or you want to learn some more, we can always put you in touch with our speakers because they're fabulous and our and our folks coming on board with us. Thank you so much. And I look forward to hearing more great things about what you're doing across the board.

Ashish Bisaria 21:47

Thank you, Dish.