How Do Experts Build Their Confidence?

How Do Experts Build Their Confidence?

Sean: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today we have Mr. Alan Berrey and he’s all the way from the US. I’m so happy we have him here. He’s done it all like he’s been to where I want to be someday. He’s a solution engineer, a sales consultant, and a subject matter expert. He’s founded multiple technology companies and has been able to sell them as well. He’s been through the ups, he’s been through the downs. He’s a marketing and business development executive, a researcher, a teacher, an author, father, you name it. Alan, I’m so happy to have you here and honored as well. We’re excited to learn from you.

Alan: Oh, Sean, thank you very much. It’s a very kind introduction. It’s terrific to be with you. Look 5 a.m. is perfect for me. That’s the way things should start every day.

Sean: That’s awesome. At 5 a.m., my brain’s like half where somewhere in the universe, it’s definitely not the same for, you know, we got more and more night owls nowadays because of technology, cell phone and, you know, early birds are becoming rarer and rarer. And so what you got going on that’s already very – is something that a lot of people rarely find nowadays, and that’s a very good thing.

Sean: You wrote a book Alan, that is about expertise and you recently published it. It’s on Amazon. The name is “Beyond Expertise.” And I’m wondering, so this is something that I usually ask at the very beginning of the podcast recordings, and I want to know what your entrepreneurial journey was like.

Sean: And we could start from your first companies and how you finally hit the bump on the road and realized, I want to be an expert or a student, or an eternal student on the subject of expertise.

Alan: Like, I tell the story and actually share it in the book, right. That many years ago, I was a software development manager at Ford Motor Company in Michigan, and I was assigned a strategic project from the company where we were at the time, moving all technology onto the web. All communications with suppliers was being moved to the web, right? No more fax, no more phone calls, no more paper like let’s move everything onto the internet. And that became my job. My life, right, it was this transition.

Alan: And it was a pretty strategic project for Ford Motor Company. You can imagine they’ve got a hundred thousand plus suppliers in the supply chain. I was going to affect all of them, right? And so I was on a very visible project. One day my director who’s several levels up from me, she came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got an executive briefing. I want you to present for the team.’ I thought, no problem, right? I was young. You know, I had my MBA. I thought I was it, right, so I prepared this presentation, she said ‘Now be ready. We’ve got five minutes, but it can be cut short. It can go long. Just be ready. No problem.’

Alan: So I went to the Ford executive headquarters. I went to this big board meeting and I started presenting on this and I started getting questions that I had no capacity to answer, right? They were asking me. I was thinking about database locking and, you know, server up time and, you know, all these things that technologists think about. And they were asking me questions about, you know, which suppliers are going to be the most resistant to this change? How will you replicate this in Asia? We’ve got a patent battle in Germany. How will this impact that case and, you know, on and on.

Alan: I just had no capacity that to respond in my director. She jumped in and she rescued me multiple times in that meeting, and I left the meeting with this sense that I wasn’t an expert on this subject, even though I felt like I knew the most about this project more than my director certainly, yet she was the one that came across as influential, powerful expert on the project. And so from that time, Sean, to today, I‘ve been a student of expertise through my startup companies through, you know, my pursuit of different customers in different industries. I’ve always had this passion for what makes someone really expert and influential in their field versus some that don’t, right? And so that’s what brought me here today. I kept notes for decades. Eventually, I’d summarize it, and formalize it into a book, right? And put it out there for someone to consume if they’re if they’re interested. But that’s part of the path, that’s a quick intro to the path that I’m on.

Sean: That’s amazing, and I want to delve a little bit deeper into that story. What is it now that you are able to look back and connect the dots because you got a lot of notes from subject matter experts, mentors who have shown you the way?

Sean: What was it that your director had during that time you were missing? You mentioned earlier that you were the expert, you knew the ins and outs of the system that you were proposing, and yet she saved you; she came out as influential. I’m assuming she does not have the same in-depth knowledge that you had with the system. And yet you used the word she was influential. What happened there?

Alan: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it really comes down to – well, let me back up and say that there is no question that that director at that time was a skilled individual. She was great. She was great director. She was a tremendous leader.

Alan: And so I don’t mean to diminish her expertise, she became the chief information officer for the state of California. She became a chief information officer for the United States Department of Defense. She was a skilled information technology leader, right? So there, so nothing I’m saying here should be diminished of her accomplishments, right? But at that time in my career, I didn’t realize that there are a handful of attributes that experts should possess that people look to where I expect. And I was really thrilled years ago when I found a research paper on this subject that really helped synthesize it for me.

Alan: At the time, there were some researchers out of Cal State University, and they were engaged by the United States military to determine what is it that makes someone expert in a field. And they studied airplane pilots, and linguists and, you know, different areas, and they distilled it down to five principles that determine if someone is expert or not.

Alan: One of those principles is an idea called the perception of context. It’s like, what is the world I’m operating in? And that’s the principle of expertise that I was missing in that meeting at Ford Motor Company. What was the context that these executives were operating with? I had a very little perception of the world that they operated in, and that’s something that leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts have to grapple with when you’re meeting with a new person and maybe with a large audience. What is the context that you’re operating with and how can you bring your skill to value in that context?

Sean: Got it. You mentioned that there were a handful of things that you were missing. So aside from the perception of context, which, by the way, is an amazing insight and could suddenly shift the negotiation table towards your favor, if you have it. What are some of the other things that you would say you were missing at that time? And your director, she just had it.

Alan: Yeah, yeah. So the other dimensions of expertise that come to play a lot, of course, are some of the obvious ones, right? Knowledge, you’ve got to know your stuff, right? That’s kind of a given right. Another dimension, of course, is the skill to be able to execute in an environment, right? It’s one thing to say I want to do a podcast. It’s another thing to actually have a skill to actually execute on. I’m sure you’ve learned things over the course of the last two years. New skills that you didn’t have before. Right?

Alan: Another dimension that’s really important is simply your attitude about it. Right people. People feed off attitude more than they do knowledge and skill. Right. And so those are those two of them. And then finally, another one that comes up a lot, but we don’t think about it is our ability to cope with the complexities around us, right? Some people in leadership and expertise get stifled by the complexities. They don’t know how to operate within these complexities, and those are key differentiators to experts and leaders that are out there.

Sean: Got it. Now, let’s try to move it a little bit. So this was your experience way back. Was it after this experience with your director presenting to the Ford Motor Company that you started a couple of ventures?

Alan: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It was a few years later that I decided it was time to leave Ford Motor Company, and I went out and did work in consulting practice, and that was where I thought I always knew I was kind of entrepreneurial-minded. You know, I studied entrepreneurship with my MBA, and so I joined a small boutique consulting company, and I ran around selling custom development web work. Right? That was, I became a subject matter expert in is building web things right? And so I liked that a lot. And ultimately, the company was sold to a large IT consultancy out of Great Britain. And then after working there for a while, that’s when I actually started my first business right down. Turn in notice, right? Pulled somebody out the account, hire some developers, and build a text messaging business after the consulting time,

Sean: Okay, let’s pause there a little bit. So you knew you had the entrepreneurial spirit that’s what you mentioned earlier. Now, how does expertise play into the entire journey of risking – you mentioned, you know, you pulled out some money from your account and the French word for entrepreneur is entreprendre, which means risk taker or adventurer, literally. So you were taking risks, but you were taking calculated risks because you have and you knew your expertise. How weighty was it that you knew what your expertise was? You knew that you were an expert in this, this, this, and that, so much so that you deciding on risking some of your hard-earned money seemed like the best thing to do.

Alan: Yeah. What is that about entrepreneurs, right? Sean? I mean, why would someone do this? It’s kind of masochistic, really. Right? It’s really you don’t know how much pain you’re going to be inflicting on yourself when you do these things. And part of it is, I mean, candidly, it’s somewhat naive, right? But I mean, in answer to your question, right? One of the attributes that people really hope to see in experts is the same thing that drives people into expertise. And it’s this exuberance or confidence and your ability to change things, right? To do things a little bit differently and better. Right. And so that’s really what it came down to, right? Experts are effective and influential if they’re confident, and entrepreneurs will just absolutely fail if they’re not confident, right? So I had some confidence. Maybe false, not well-placed confidence at the time, right? Because I learned a lot of things, right, but confident nonetheless.

Sean: Okay, another thing that I’m wondering about because when you’re an entrepreneur, you got to be good at selling. If you can’t sell, there’s no business, no customers, no business. Now it’s from being an IT expert, in-depth you know it up and down. You mentioned database server time, that’s like, I’m a geek, right? I’m a geek. I know a geek, when I hear one, we’re both geeks and we geek out in what we know, we’re experts that stuff. But when was it when you decided “I got to learn how to sell and I need to sell and I got to be good at it? I got to be an expert at it”? When was that time and how did you hone your sales skills?

Alan: Well, it actually came to me, right? So I mentioned I was at Ford Motor Company and at that time, well, I mentioned this to you, maybe I should highlight this a little bit more. I was on the supplier’s face of the business. I was communicating with suppliers and they were pitching to Ford Motor Company constantly, right. That they were selling to me, they were selling to Ford. And so I was able to observe all of these suppliers one after another sort of come in and talk about their solutions. And sometimes it’s, you know, nuts and bolts and wheels. But sometimes it’s, you know, consulting and, you know, a whole bunch of really strategic items. So I observed it from the buyer’s side. But then when I went to the consulting company, I was on the selling side, right? I was pitching to large organizations for custom development, and I followed salespeople around for five years, helping pitch our solutions to large customers. And so that two-dimensional perspective on the selling process, as the buyer, and as the seller really opened this world or this idea of selling and producing revenue for me. It helped a lot.

Sean: For sure, for sure.