Strategic Leadership for Business Growth with Tony Harris

Strategic Leadership for Business Growth with Tony Harris

Sean: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Sean here, aka Mr. CEO at 22. And today we have a special guest and his name is Tony Harris. Tony Harris had the pleasure of spending over three decades working in advertising and some of the world’s most famous advertising agencies.

And he’s handled some of the world’s most famous brands and right now he set up a new venture on his own. Its name is Stray Rhino. It’s a business mentoring service that helps businesses, brands, teams, and individuals all over the world maximize their potential.

That could be you, you just have to hit him up later. I’ll give you the links after our show. Tony has also written a book Leadership 101, which we are excited to brush through today. Tony, thank you so much for being here on the show.

Tony: Thank you and hello everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sean: Tony, the first thing that we usually are super curious about and ask our guests is what brought you to the entrepreneurial journey. You had 30 years working in the advertising industry in the pre-show. I felt how much you enjoyed that and what made you say, okay, this is as far as I go and it’s time for me to move on.

Tony: Situation and circumstances, which would be what a lot of people I think would say. All I’d ever wanted to do was to go and work in advertising and I joined it back in 19, a long time ago. And then all I ever wanted was to rise to run an advertising business, which I had the very great fortune to do in the UK.

But then I came, funnily enough, here to the Philippines and ran an agency here called BBDO Guerrero. I then was sent to by BBDO to open an office in Japan and then to Hong Kong. And I loved it. But the world has changed rather dramatically, and sometimes the music stops and there isn’t a chair.

And I was watching this happening and thought, Well, I’m probably going to have to prepare myself for something else. So I did. I made a conscious decision not to find more work. I’d been displaced, so I’d had to go back to England because of the pandemic.

We were all if you were traveling, all of us were in the wrong place, and all of this. And I had to go back to England and I decided that I wasn’t going to end up going for another advertising role. They were quite difficult to get.

It wasn’t a great time and I decided I would start my endeavor and I wasn’t entirely sure what it was. It’s that term consultant. What’s a consultant? I’ll be honest. My father had been a consultant and I’d never really known to this day what he’d done.

He certainly worked, I know that. But I didn’t know what that meant. And so I need to be a little bit more purposeful than that. I thought I would beta test what my offering would be with a lot of different people whom I went to work with and see how I could help them.

And what became very apparent was people were coming to me not for my advertising, they were much more interested in my strategic skills, in running businesses, and in being a leader and helping people become a leader and managing management teams and all of that.

So that’s really what I now do. So I will help businesses or teams or individuals kind of find their way to become comfortable with the next phase of their development, be it personal or commercial.

Sean: And this transcends personal because we discussed earlier that you work with a lot of business owners, maybe startup business owners on the way to scaling up or companies that are already scaling up but hit a plateau in their journey.

So 30 years, right? 30 years with the advertising industry, what are some leadership principles that you learned there that you still practice today and you teach it from time to time with some people that you mentor?

Tony: Well, interestingly in the book a lot of it is quite nuanced. There’s a lot of overlap between some of the observations. There are 101 of them, but there are some overriding themes, and those are things that I kind of keep coming back to.

The first of them is always remember that you are more often than not 99% of the time you’re a leader on merit. Somebody somewhere thought you could handle the responsibility or the situation demanded that you were the best person. But whatever it was, you’re there on merit. And a lot of you may think that you’re not right about that.

A lot of people have doubts. Churchill used to talk about his black dog because, you know, he became angry and doubted things Lincoln did, lots of great leaders do. And actually, one of the first things is if you’re not having doubts, that’s when your problems start.

That’s a theme that I kind of keep going back to. You’re there on merit, and even if you doubt it, remind yourself somebody thought you were good enough. The other one is really about protecting the team dynamic. The team dynamic is important, there is a difference between culture and team. You have to make sure you have to protect your culture but you have to protect your team as well.

That means you need to listen a lot more than you might. A lot of leaders think that their job is to talk all the time. It’s not. It’s to listen to what’s not being said. You then need to do that and involve people.

So make sure that the team always feels that you’re bringing them into play. You know, there’s an old phrase, why have a dog and bark yourself? You don’t. You brought people in to be experts. Let them do their job. Keep checking in and keep listening.

Take the sting out of confrontations. That’s another major one to do. And if you have to, you have to remove difficult participants, however skilled they may be. If they’re not helping the team, they had better be doing something incredible and I doubt they ever are. Those are the kind of things that I sort of keep going back to. So the one about doubt listening to the team, it’s all interrelated.

Sean: Amazing, I remember another saying. If you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together.

Right now, you started up just recently with this program that you do with mentoring startup founders, and entrepreneurs. I wonder what were some challenges that you faced at the get-go and how were you able to get through that hurdle?

Tony: Well, I mean, the challenges are still challenging all the time. It doesn’t go away, which is often people don’t realize they need you until you tell them what it is you do. Many people don’t want to admit they need you because they think that being a leader is about welcoming to the Lonely Club.

And it is but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to people. One of the most important things you can do if you want to be a leader is be prepared to mentor people and be prepared to be mentored, because we all do.

And as I ascended the greasy pole, I always had people who I could talk to and who would just go, and tell me what to do. I have a wonderful friend back in London who had ended up in the same situation as me, but about five years before, who had a marvelous consultancy.

And he was really good. And I went to him and he taught me through some of the pitfalls, some of the things that were there and said, do this. He didn’t go without tea and sympathy. It was all just good sound advice and you need that.

So the big challenge is getting people to admit that they could do it with help from somebody who may not kind of seem like they’re certainly not a mirror image of them and nor should they be. But that actually might just be able to give them sound advice because some of this stuff you never come across before.

Particularly if you’ve been an entrepreneur or a founder of a company and you’ve tended to have like-minded people all around you. And then you get to a point, where suddenly there are people in that you don’t know everybody in the business anymore. You didn’t hire everybody. Things are going on and you can feel a bit isolated or a bit lost. They just need a bit of help with that feeling relevant, and being able to make better decisions. And that’s what I’ll try and help.

Sean: That’s good! Thank you for sharing.

We’re going to jump off a little bit and move on to how you help these entrepreneurs. I wonder when someone approaches you and says, Tony, I have a problem with my business, I feel like we’re stuck.

We’re not moving forward. We cannot hit our growth targets for the year after., What are the first things that you want to find out?

Tony: Well, I do virtually the same thing I’ve done everywhere I worked myself is I talk to as many people as possible because the answer is often there. I don’t have a template that I follow because I have certain tricks of the trade that are sort of personal to me that I like using, but only if it’s relevant.

The real problem is getting them to define what they’re in the business of. Often people lose sight of it. They sort of know why they set up and they know the widget they make or what they produce or what they do, but they perhaps lost sight of what their competition is or what are the challenges in the marketplace.

Because the real problem that everybody finds, it’s the issue of prioritizing the important. They prioritize the urgent over the important and a lot of those important things vision, mission, development, training, all of those things can get lost because, crikey, we’ve got a bottleneck, which means we don’t do that.

We won’t make this month’s numbers and it’s trying to get them to refocus on the important things because they may well go, No, no, no, we got that in hand and this is all done. And then actually you scratch a bit at it and realize there has been a bit of a dip in culture or there hasn’t been so much time spent on reputation management or who’s dealing with the growth pipeline. And those are the things that really as a leader, you should be thinking about all the time. But you’re sucked into the bathrooms leaking. I exaggerate to make a point, but that’s the real thing that I try to do, is to get them to refocus on the things that, you know if you’re in business and are at the head of a business, you have to be thinking about, which is sustainability, culture.

 What’s the state of play of your reputation? What’s the state of play of your growth? How are you doing? Talent, attracting it, and retaining it, are the things you should be thinking about. If your meeting isn’t about one of those things, you probably shouldn’t be in it.

I have a phrase that I’ve used with a company I’m working with in Dubai. I’ve used it several times, which is that often you feel you should be everywhere all the time. And I kind of think that with clients, particularly if you’ve developed your team, you should be there when there is something.

Things have gone very, very well, very, very badly, or you’ve got something very new to talk about because if it’s gone very well, you should be there to accept the success of it and go out with your imprint on even if all you did was not get involved and leave other people to do it.

You are the founder of the company. You should be prepared to succeed. You share it with the team. I mean, I’m not saying you take all the success rates, but you should be prepared to do that. You should go when it is a real emergency and I mean a real emergency, not a late invoice. 

There are people you are paying a lot of money probably to be doing that for you and always go for something very new because you never know where that might lead you because I love it when clients have something completely new to talk to you about, because every day is a school day.

I saw this in one of your podcasts, which talked about staying curious and it should be everything. And if I’ve got something that’s new that you haven’t done before, go along, that’s fine. I mean, you’re just showing that you’re interested.

Nobody’s going to be upset with that. You kind of need to try and fix your moments in that and you check in along the way and all of those things, but that’s really how you should be dealing with your clients. You’ve got other people who are dealing with the day-to-day for you.