Episode 152: Strategic Versus Tactical: Strategy Is More Than The Technical Expertise And Vision You Have With Jonathan Gardner
In this episode, we interview Jonathan Gardner as he shares his journey from a small-town upbringing to becoming an "international dealmaker." Jonathan dives deep into his personal story, detailing the challenges and successes he faced while pursuing his goals. We explore the key distinctions between strategic versus tactical approaches in his career and how they shaped his path to success. Tune in to hear the valuable lessons Jonathan learned along the way and how his perspective on strategy evolved through his experiences.
---
Watch the video here
Listen to the podcast here
Strategic Versus Tactical: Strategy Is More Than The Technical Expertise And Vision You Have With Jonathan
Introduction And Jonathan's Background
Welcome to this episode where I interviewed Jonathan Gardner. He has experience with powerful brands like Starbucks, Dell Computers, Albertsons, and General Motors. He has brought that experience to mid-market and medium-sized companies and his new company as the Founder of J. Gardner Group. He leverages his insider knowledge as a former mega buyer to help mid-market companies land lucrative deals with Fortune 500 companies. He knows exactly what those giants are looking for and how to get deals pushed through.
During this interview, we discussed his background growing up in a small town and having the dream to be an international deal maker. Jonathan describes his personal journey, the ups and downs of obtaining his goals, and what he learned along the way. I think you're going to enjoy his story and relate to so many of the things that Jonathan is talking about his goals that he wanted to achieve and what reality means when you achieve those goals.
---
In this episode, I'm with Jonathan Gardner. Jonathan, do you want to give a little background on yourself before we get started?
I sure would like to. Thank you so much. I run my own boutique consultancy called the J. Gardner Group. I got to this point maybe by a path that's a bit unique in that when I finished my international MBA and law degree, I decided that I wanted to go into supply chain and strategic sourcing. I did that through several years at First General Motors, then Dell Computers, then Starbucks, and finally, Albertsons.
Along the way, I learned from the procurement side a lot about a variety of different industries, how deals get done, what things cost, etc. Right around the time of COVID, I found myself in a position where I had the opportunity to do this. It is forcing me to unlearn some things and learn some new tricks while hanging on to what made me successful up to this point.
That's a great lead into understanding your story. Why don't you start off telling me where you grew up and what your parents did for a living, a little bit about your family?
I grew up in a small town near Greenville, South Carolina. My father had a supply chain job with Westinghouse or one of their derivatives. That was in that small town of Mauldin, South Carolina until I went to college. I went to school at the University of South Carolina. My undergrad degree was in Political Science. By the time my junior and senior years rolled around, I had a job selling swimming pool chemicals and renovation work.
This was back in 1992, 1993, or somewhere in there. I thought I was the bomb because I think I was making $500 a week and that was a lot when you were worried about maybe a little bit of rent but a lot of going out on the weekend. As graduation approached, I realized that wasn't going to cut it so that decided me to evaluate where I wanted to be in life. At that time, I thought, “I want to be an international deal maker.”
I didn't know what that meant. It just sounded cool like James Bond with a laptop and no guns or that sort of thing. I applied for it and got into still at the University of South Carolina, the International Master of Business Program, which is highly rated, and then also the law program or the Juris Doctor, which is a four-year combined degree. That set me up for a bunch of things that were important.
Learning Through Experiences In Brazil
I think most critically about the story of my life and career, I learned Portuguese as part of my schooling. I did that partially at the university, but mostly in the big curt São Paulo, Brazil with language training and then during my internship at General Motors of Brazil. That combined experience of working for a big company, the language, and a giant for a small-town guy shook me up a bit and shaped some of my other experiences.
Let’s go back a little and talk about your dad. How were you involved with the things that he did and learned about the supply chain?
I wasn't involved. I was aware of what he did. I was aware that he worked long hard hours and there was always something going wrong. He worked to provide a way to live rather than living to work. I observed how that lack of strategic focus on career, what it does for you, and what it doesn't do for you. I am determined to spend my life differently.
In fact, when I was applying to the Honors College as an eighteen-year-old, “Young man, what do you want to do with your life?” I said, “I don't know, but I know what I don't want to do. I don't want to work as a material management guy in some giant corporation chasing parts.” It was funny because eight years later, I found myself at 2:00 AM at a supplier who literally crossed the highway from where he used to work.
The supplier I was visiting had some crisis. Their line went down, whatever. I'm banging out this report at 2:00 AM for what's going to happen to General Motors' network of factories. I look up and I'm looking at my dad's old office about 300 yards away. I went, “All that school and I'm doing what he did,” which is chase the parts.
It’s funny how life works out.
I accidentally fell into his career but what I've done differently and I'm going to share some things I wish I'd done in this program. I put a lot more emphasis on my career and life so that the economic flexibility that I would have later in life would be different than his. I got a lot of learnings out of my old man whether I intended to or not.
You weren't necessarily watching to be able to see that. What was it that triggered that? Was it that you were living in a small town or there were things that you wanted and you couldn't get or time spent with him? What was it that was making that goal in your head to not have the same type of life?
It was a real drive to accomplish things, to conquer something big and difficult, and the intellectual challenge of it. I think part of that challenge was coming from a town that at the time could be generously described as a mud puddle with a traffic light or two. I wanted to get out of that. I read about big business and I understood it from that perspective.
Where were you reading it? What were you reading that was giving you that view?
The Influence Of Ayn Rand
In high school, I would say I was reading normal high school stuff. I did get pulled into Ayn Rand, believe it or not. She was one of the authors who helped me appreciate hypercapitalism and long for a business elite that behaved as well as some of her heroes.
Which book was your favorite?
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I think I read both of them 2 or 3 times. I had this hyper-capitalist mentality. I suppose I wanted to be a captain of industry and I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded cool coming from Ayn Rand's pen.
How did you even get into Ayn Rand? I got it because my mom gave it to me to start reading when I was in junior high school. How did you get it? Was it an assignment in school? How did you even know about it?
I took a class as a sophomore in high school, which had some upperclassmen in it. A guy that I admired a lot said, “You need to read Ayn Rand.” He stood out as a smart guy that was with it. He was going somewhere on an academic scholarship. I was like, “If it's good enough for Marty, I'll give it a shot.” It did shape me. I had no idea that Alan Greenspan was her muse back in the day. I found that out later but just the story of Ayn Rand breaking out of Russia no matter what regime is there.
The thinking I think has always been damped down, but absorbing her messages and what she had to offer did inspire me. I always liked studying languages like Spanish in high school. I was always curious about the world beyond Mauldin, South Carolina. I think that curiosity and drive with a lot of fertilization and inspiration from Ayn Rand.
I feel the same way. I was given those books as an example of strong women in business. You weren't seeing that as much. Before her time with women being in this corporate environment running businesses and so forth. Those books gave me a visual of what a woman's possibility could be. It's interesting to you as a man and what you took from it as well. It is something that you don't realize how much these little things shape you as you go through life.
It's interesting to hear you express it that way. You mentioned what you got out of it versus what I got out of it, I suppose by luck of the draw, male, blonde hair, and blue-eyed that I haven't been exposed much to some of the pressures and obstacles that the people that look different and have different body parts have been exposed. For me, Ayn Rand was never about gender. It was always about what hyper-capitalism promoted and driven by people with good intent and the desire to do good in the world can and should do despite the obstacles.
I learned a bit more about the perspective you touched on over time. Frankly, when I lived in Brazil, I had an experience. I feel like I got 1/1,000,000th of a percent of the Rosa Parks experience when I got on a bus at some bus stop going from A to B in São Paulo, and I was the guy who looked different. The bus was empty when I got on. I sat down. The bus filled up. People are standing in the aisle. No one would sit beside me.
They're all looking at me like, “Who's the gringo? Who's the random white guy in the crowd? We don't see people like this on this bus.” Eventually, I gave up the seat for a lady who had a handful of bags and a child or something. When I stood up, people made space. At that moment, I went, “I got it.” I'm glad I only got 1/1,000,000th of that experience. I don't know how I would've dealt with the full meal deal. In some other things I learned in my eight months living in São Paulo, those were formative moments. Ayn Rand meets some humility and awareness that I'm not always going to get the run of the green were key moments in my life.
What's interesting is each person's perspective, but what that did for you versus me was you had never seen something beyond a small town so it was giving you that visual of shoes you haven't walked in before, and the same for me. Even the experience on the bus is shoes you haven't walked in before, trying to have that understanding and carry it with you. Was that why you wanted to go international or what was it about the international piece that was so important to you?
I wish I could give you a great answer. The best answer I can give you is there was something, fun, magical, and just exhilarating about studying Spanish. I took the normal high school Spanish classes anyone else did and I suppose I was a good enough student at it. It sure felt cool. When you take the Ayn Rand experience of reading those books in devouring, reading about history, recognizing that the world surely had to be larger than a town with three traffic lights and seven fast food joints, I just knew something was out there.
Strategic Versus Tactical: The world is bigger than the small towns we come from. Sometimes, it's not about knowing what you want but knowing you want more.
I've always been a fan of movies and whatnot. Like they all said, literally watching James Bond, this glamorous and well-dressed guy gallivant around the world, I was like, “I don't want to do that. That's not even real but maybe I can take my attraction to commerce, intellectual underpinnings, if you will, from Ayn Rand and good hyper-capitalism. This growing love for languages. Maybe I can do something with that and get out of this town.”
One other person you brought up was Marty. What was it that you thought was something to strive for? Why did he make a mark in your head?
He was cool, organized, and going somewhere but he wasn't over the top about it. You know some people are going to be politicians because their hair is perfect and they're beautiful, this, that, and the other. He was a real guy. I think he was a wrestler so he was fit. He probably went to one of the Southern Ivys like Davidson, Emory, or something like that but he got a ride to a school that I had heard of but didn't understand. He was really intelligent and he challenged me in some ways.
In this one class, I can remember, I knew nothing. I was fifteen. He was 17 or 18. He mentioned something like, “The Reagan administration has been the most imperialist administration since whatever.” I'm like, “I don't even know what that means. That sounded cool. I want to know what that means.” When he later said, “Go read Ayn Rand.” I'm like, “This guy knows some stuff that I don't know. He's put together an organized in a way that I'm not yet.” I've never talked to him since. It's not like a lifelong friendship but that's one guy at age seventeen.
It's always amazing how he doesn't know he left a mark on you and you've left a mark on people. It's those little things that we pepper along the way that we forget is our quilt that is how we're made up.
It is. You said something there at the end. Yes, people make marks on us, and we can feel those marks. We do make marks on other people and sometimes we're fortunate enough to get feedback from them as to what they liked and what they didn't. If it's an intimate relationship, hopefully, they're giving you that.
There are many other cases where I've gathered or maybe heard over time where the mark I made was positive and inspiring, and in other cases, it probably wasn't. I may have said something in a brusque manner not thinking much that hurt someone's feelings. As you get, get older, you recognize that the inspiration from unlikely sources runs both ways and we should take care.
You were at General Motors in Brazil. How did you navigate an organization like that coming from South Carolina?
It totally blew my mind. I had no idea what a giant company meant. I worked all through high school and college. I've been working pretty much without breaks since I was thirteen years old but for me, the small companies I worked for literally were, “Unload the delivery truck, stack boxes, reload the truck, deliver to the site, get a signature, and move on,” etc.
I would observe the owners doing their things, but it was to sell the project and project manage it. For me, you had to do it all. You drop into General Motors and even in a subsidiary like GM Brazil, there's a department for everything. There is a process and a procedure for everything. There are steps to follow. There are people at every level that can help you. You have to be at the right level to get there.
I saw this world of intense and dense administration and sometimes all the way to bureaucracy. I didn't learn until I got out of General Motors and landed at Dell how important knowing how to work a big administration or big bureaucracy is. I took it for granted. I had this shock and awe and while I was there, I never learned how to work it. I never learned those skills. Once it was gone, I was like, “I should have learned that.”
How did you learn it at Dell?
Navigating Big Corporations: General Motors And Dell
The hard way. I left General Motors, I left a career track. I'd been recruited and got moved around all these jobs. I had mentors and the whole nine yards but I gave up a career in exchange for a job. The job paid better. It was in Austin instead of Detroit, which sounded better. It was in a growth company as opposed to a company managing for attrition. However, at Dell, I didn't have the connections. They didn't come pre-wired for me. I didn't know how to get things done strategically in an organization.
Also, related to that, I didn't know how to negotiate with my own company for my benefit. I knew how to negotiate with suppliers, but not for me. I made a couple of mistakes that I don't think cost the company any money, but they cost me some internal political credibility. It took me a while to climb out of that. Eventually, I did with some help, but it was not knowing how to do it, banging my head against the wall, and realizing, “I've got a problem. I've got to do something to address this problem if I want to do what I set out to do, which is to become an international deal maker.”
We talk a lot about this concept of 100% responsibility and I think when you get in those situations and many people do in their careers where they're blaming the outside for what's not working, instead of stepping back and saying, “What's my 100% responsibility? What can I shift?” That's where it sounds like you were heading. How did you get the help, and what things did you learn to shift to turn it around?
Strategic Versus Tactical: A Leadership Lesson
You are spot on, and I do have an excellent answer for this one. I was on my second team at Dell and I was learning a lot about the work. I still hadn't gotten to work on the relationships and the organization. My boss heard my frustration and my ambition. He suggested that I do a 360-degree review and I did. Twenty-two people responded. There was one question like, “Is Jonathan strategic or tactical?” Twenty-one people wrote strategically. One person wrote tactically.
I could tell based on the responses of the one person who said tactical was my boss. I sat down to review that with him and put this on the table. There's a gap here. I was thinking you've got a gap in your awareness of how strategic. That was the tape I was playing in my mind. He said, “Let's talk about this. Take out your phone.” It was a flip phone at the time. “Show me the numbers of all the VPs here at Dell that you can call that will pick up the phone or call you right back.” Crickets.
I said, “You know so and so.” “What about those that you don't work with every single day?” What happens if there is a big project? You have a problem to solve and you need John or Jane VP of whatever. How are you going to approach the problem? I said, |I'll get on their calendar. I'll prepare a deck. I'll explain it.” “You'll wait until you have a tactical problem to establish a relationship.”
Also, do it in a tactical way.
I said, “I don't want to waste their time.” He says, “That's why you're tactical and you will never be anything but tactical until you change your perspective.” I think it took me a year before my ego was ready to do something with that feedback, but I did something eventually. That was back in 2006 or 2007 maybe. I spoke with the administrator or the consultant who helps you interpret the 360s. I talk through the problem.
She asked me, “Are you willing to do whatever it takes to address this?” With a deep breath, I said, “Yes, because I'm not getting anywhere.” She gave me the name and number of a person that I subsequently worked with for seven years. This lady was fantastic. I think her academic credentials were a licensed clinical social worker. She wasn't a psychologist, but her practice was around helping people. Sometimes these were kids in rough situations.
Other times, she had an Olympic pole vaulter that she coached through success visualization. It's a wide range and most people were just boring guys like me in the middle that wanted to get better at stuff. I started working with her and literally, I had to rewire the way I react to certain environments so that I could show up in a way that would help me be more effective for my company and eventually calm down the monkey mind that some of us have chattering away as background noise at all time. Also, get past that so that I could be an effective professional at the level that I wanted to play.
I got to tell you, Amy, it was hard. We dug up stuff from when you were a little kid. It always goes back to mama. At GM, I was promoted because there was an infrastructure that I was hired into. At Dell, it was a blood sport. It was results-oriented. Had I not made that move and beat my head against the wall a dozen times, gotten the tough feedback, and then eventually done something with it, I never would've gotten out of that rut that I was in. It goes back to what you touched on which is this victim mindset that we can find ourselves in sometimes.
There are so many good things there. Again, people that make an impact on you, this boss that took the time to explain the strategy in a different way than most people explain it. I've never heard that before. That is something I'm going to remember. When you think strategy, you think strategy on a deck and business strategy. That's why other people were saying, “Yes, you're strategic. You're coming up with a strategy for the work you do.”
I find it fascinating how we can have the same word but interpret it in different ways where he interprets it, “Yes, you build a strategy, but you execute it tactically instead of going out and making relationships.” This to me is one of the things I see over and over in the coaching that I do people resist building relationships. They don't want to take the time away from the work but it is the work. You just don't realize it's the work.
Strategic Versus Tactical: Sometimes, the simplest thing holding us back isn’t skill, it’s our resistance to building relationships.
Shifting Mindsets And The Importance Of Relationships
I don't know if some of your clients, patients, friends, or however you think of them, I don't know how it goes for them, but I can tell you for me, there was real deep-seated anxiety and sometimes even fear of creating those new relationships. I noticed in the feedback tracked with it that I did well in business one-on-one and big group settings.
I could always give a speech in front of 500 people and it wouldn't bother me but it was that medium-sized setting, which is below twenty where it's small enough to be intimate, but there are a lot of opinions in the room. There's a whole lot of who's watching who. Those situations, and depending upon the title in the room, the differences in express authority would lead me to experience anxiety and clam up.
When I would clam up, I would either say nothing or say it way too abruptly or bombastically. This person, Carol, who worked with me all those years helped me develop new synopses and new pathways so that when events would occur in the environment, instead of claiming up or becoming an angry guy, I could navigate effectively in the middle. It's been a long time since I've been working on this, but nevertheless, those situations are what helped me get through this and develop some skills that without all this help I wouldn't have been able to get to on my own. That's for sure.
Just knowing what triggers you have so that you can mentally prepare before going into a room like that. Do you think any of it had to do with confidence or imposter syndrome coming from a small town where you felt like you were in a bigger environment than your family had ever seen? They might figure that out at one point as well because there was something in your head young thinking bigger was better and something was wrong with being small just in the way that you processed. You just kept going and putting yourself in these huge environments but it's interesting.
An imposter syndrome is an interesting way to put it or lack of confidence relative to that. For sure, there's something there. Maudlin, my hometown, if you will is a working-class suburb of a small city in a small poor state. It's small stacked and stacked. There certainly was something there. I could tell you something else on a more personal level and I was able to recognize the impact once I became a parent.
Strategic Versus Tactical: You can be strategic, but if you’re executing it tactically, are you really being strategic?
It’s when you get good grades and you're the golden boy and you're being raised by a single parent, you have a lot of people or I have a lot of people around me praising me for getting good grades and for being smart. If you praise a kid for getting good grades or having good outcomes on their projects, they can become afraid to take on bigger things because they might not get a good grade.
The self-worth in mommy, daddy, teacher, or coach's eyes is going to drop if I go for Calculus II Honors and only get a C in it. There was something there. I heard, “You're special all going along,” and I didn't ever want to not be special. As I said, this was only when I was trying to learn how to become a better parent that I realized, “Not only am I doing things wrong as a parent.” We've learned a lot as a society since I was a kid. I think those experiences as a kid as well as small town probably did add up to a chip on the shoulder and a little bit of an underdog syndrome.
I was also wondering about the titles thing since it bothered you being in a room like that. Did anything from being a GM drive that? It’s because I know that's probably a more level status-driven place where maybe you don't speak to certain levels or aren't in a room with certain levels or you hadn't been in a room with certain levels at the GM job.
I think it was more Dell. I was too naive to get it at GM. That's probably where I should have learned those skills but I didn't. When I got to Dell, as I mentioned, I gave up a career for a better-paying job and got everything that I'd hoped and feared. More money, growth company, better climate, but not a career. I saw some peers moving up. I felt like I had some political and communication missteps that cost me an opportunity early on and I became frustrated, perhaps even bitter about that.
It was right there. It's like, “I was at a certain level I thought I would be. I'm not. I'm stuck.” As time went on and Dell was shifting jobs to China, cutting jobs in the US, this next-level job was always out of touch. A great bonus modifier, great stock options, and all that stuff but I couldn't get the next title. That just wore on me after a while and eventually, it became a thing.
Strategic Versus Tactical: When you take on bigger things, you might not get a good grade, but that’s okay.
It's replaying in your head all the time. I was in a conversation with some managers talking and he had more of a military background. He was talking about a staff person who worked for him who wanted to get to the next level, and he could not understand why there was such a driver, a focus to get to the next level. It's like, “Just take your time,” or whatever. I'm like, “But if you're driven that way like someone like you or someone like me, you've got to have forward motion. Even if it's not a title where you still give someone the responsibility to know you see them as something special.
As you told that story, something else came up out of the past and I'll label the following as arrogance on my part although I was probably not wise enough to call it arrogance at the time. When I've worked for people who don't get it, then my sky-high expectations that I project on everyone, myself, my dog, my wife, my son, my employees, and clients, you name it.
Those sky-high expectations, when I would work for someone and inevitably you do that just doesn't get it or they don't know how to do what you know how to do. They know how to do something that you don't but you can't see it. I would get frustrated when the boss was dumb. That was not healthy. I internalized that with, “I've at least got to get to that level because that wit can do it.”
I'm not describing anything healthy on that side. I'm just being raw with you in that. There was an arrogance element to it. There was a book that I read along the way right around the time I was figuring out how to overcome these foibles. It was called The Other End of the Leash. It was about dogs, except it was also about people.
There was a little clip in there that I'll recall. “Dogs like primates, therefore, like people, some need to be the alpha and will fight to the death to get there. Some don't want to be alpha and they're fine being the low dog on the totem pole, and there are other dogs that just need to be in the middle.” It went on and offered some metaphors for political life and company life. I went, “That's me. I don't need to be alpha, but I sure as heck can't be this guy.”
I worked too hard to be stuck where I am. I realized, “This is yet another signal,” and concurrent with that book on dogs, I was still playing soccer at the very amateur level. The Austin O30 B Division men's team type deal. I would play against guys who no matter what I did, were just better than me. They were faster and quicker.
I couldn't touch them on a field. I was looking at work going, “There are people in this organization making $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million a year, and I was stuck in low six figures. They probably have something. It's just not as easy to see as foot speed is on a soccer field.” These things, the 360, the book about dogs, and the awareness on the soccer field came together we're like, Dude, you've got some blind spots. We need to figure them out and do something with them.”
It can be the simplest thing like making relationships. I'm saying it's not simple, but it's not the technical skill all the time that gets you to that next rung. Maybe you can give us a little background of how you got to where you are and what you're doing now.
I mentioned General Motors and Dell. After Dell, I went to Starbucks. In Starbucks, I got relationships. Think of process, results orientation, and people orientation. Fortunately, Dell made me aware of blind spots, and even more fortunately, at Starbucks, for about a 5 or 6-year period, I worked for two leaders. They're both executives and I moved up a little by then. They prided themselves on, and I believe are world-class developers of talent.
They took a liking to me. They helped me along. They gave me positive and constructive feedback that I needed to hear and that was great. That helped prepare me and enabled me to be a good executive. Things are going great. I've been at Starbucks for about nine years and then life happened. Allow me to gloss over the life event and that it became important in my mind for our entire family to leave Seattle and the anything-goes situation that's there with some extracurricular activities. I needed to get us out of Seattle.
At the same time, I got introduced to the then-new CEO of a big company in Boise, Idaho. We used the same words to describe what we wanted from the strategic sourcing function. It turns out we meant different things like hardcore results versus relationships. How much of the preferred consultancy do we use versus hire? That disagreement ended the way that disagreements with CEOs usually do and I was invited to move on. That was fine because the head owners were still calling me.
Building A Consulting Business During COVID
I took the package and took time to be a father, a husband, and a man again, and then COVID hit. Everybody quit calling. At that point, I'm like, “I have to start networking with real intent and not sell anything. Just see what's out there. I have to stay sharp.” I called and started talking to people I'd done business with. I talked to one guy who, when I was at Starbucks, was the VP of sales at a big supplier. He'd moved on to a privately held company that had some goals. They said, “You know how procurement people think. Can you help us behind the curtain anticipate what these big customers are going to say in this negotiation and help us out?” “Sure.”
I'm helping them out and having fun. I got my brain back in the game. About three months later, “Do you want to get paid?” “That would be cool.” I wasn't worried about money at that time. I said, “How about X or $10,000 or whatever?” I said, “You need to send us an invoice.” “What do you mean? You need to form a company. Go to LegalZoom then invoices.” I did that. I sweated about which bank to use for two weeks until I finally got on with it. “This isn't that hard.”
That was my first gig. It went well. From there I picked up some contract work here or there with people that I used to work for here or there who knew me. About two and a half years into it, I had three proposals out. I needed one to keep the lights on. I wanted two to get ahead, but I got all three. When I got all three, I went, “Now, I need help. It is not just a one-man band anymore.” I reached into the network. I found some other people who needed half or two-thirds time work. We decided that we could make a go of this thing.
Through a lot of trial and error and trying to hone our message, we realized, “People will look at our resumes and hire us for procurement stuff like cost savings, architecture, supply base, and so on.” All those good things that I know inside and out but I'm having a lot of fun helping sales teams at mid-market and medium-sized companies sell to the big guys. The reason that's so much fun for me is that in all those years as the big guy, I was doing great things for my company, but I could tell that a lot of value was being destroyed on Main Street when you can crush people with cost savings demand.
Helping Mid-Market Sales Teams
I realized, “This is my chance to give back.” To catch up to now, I help my clients improve their profits through better outcomes of their negotiations. I've done personally 250 or maybe 300 deals across a variety of industries. Most are on the buy side, but I've signed in as an executive and other 200 or 300. I've now helped on the client side as well as selling my own services on maybe 40 or 50 occasions.
I've gotten to use more tools in the toolbox and apply them in different ways. That's what I'm doing today and there are some adjacencies that I won't bore you with on this show but the net of all that is I got to a point where I've got something to give. I can help executive, sales teams, and procurement teams at companies that are overworked, and swamped by the tactical.
They don't have time to pull back and understand what their leverage is. How do we increase it, how do exploit it, and all those others that feel a bit more academic, but make a huge difference? I'm putting maybe $50,000 or $100,000 in fees $1 million or $2 million annually back in people's pockets and that feels good. I'm an international deal maker and they're selling that talent as a service. I made it.
You found your running fast. What was the little thing that made you unique or different? It's not a supply chain. It's the experience of how to sell into these companies and not lose your shirt. That's one of those things where a lot of times we go toward the most complicated or the hardest thing but that's the simple thing for you. You understand this backwards and forwards that a lot of people don't understand that we just pass over as like, “Yeah, I know that,” but it's like, “No. That's a thing.”
It is. In big companies in procurement, we hear that your sales counterpart has way more training than you do. We would hear how much better-prepared sales would always be. In order to negotiate effectively, we have to get better too. We learned all of this procurement strategy, negotiation strategy, what leverages, who your stakeholders are, how to look at the value chain between dirt and dumpster, reverse logistics, the whole nine yards, we got good at that.
I also learned how to teach teams of increasingly large size even of a hundred where your average talent is average and then maybe they don't have a lot of experience to learn how to get the whole team up to B and B-plus level work. What I've found now working with medium centers down to mid-market clients is they don't get the training. That was a fallacy that we told ourselves.
They're just out there trying to get it done. Sales say, “Yes,” pulls a pin, tosses a grenade into the S&OP process, and then everybody else is expected to scramble. Sometimes when I look at compensation systems, sales will be comped on revenue and not profit. They won't have any focus on, “Are you selling the stuff we know how to make or are you selling the stuff we're going to have to figure out how to make?
When I noticed that, I was like, “They need help.” They may not know it, but I can help leadership and the sales guy go in way more prepared, understand how to do the backdoor selling, how to get the information that the buyer doesn't want you to have, and how to do something with it. I have to tell you. I'm having the time of my life with it.
Thank you so much for sharing all these stories. I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You can pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Money, because that is most important.
It's been consistent. Things are actions I don't have that I want to have as far as money.
What I'm struggling with right now is how to become an effective salesperson because if I can't communicate on the front end, then I can't help them make more money and value doesn't flow to me. Right now, there's a personal capability gap that I'm trying to fill.
You know the other kind so well but the entrepreneurial selling is different. I'm with you. Things or actions I do have that I want to keep as far as money.
I'm a conservative guy when it comes to money. I want to keep that on a personal level, but I have to get better at taking risks in a small business because if you don't spend money, if you don't make the investment, which might feel like a bet, then you're never going to grow. I've got all the decision-making paradigms. You could want to manage a portfolio of companies and/or products or business units, but when it comes to this individual, when do I spend that $20,000 on X, Y, Z, that's going to help me out, I'm not very good at that. That’s a money-related thing that I'm working through and learning right now.
I think you answered the next one too. I don't have that I don't want. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as money.
I sweat the small stuff too much. That's probably the best way to say that.
Is there anything we didn't cover today that you want to make sure the audience walks away with or something you want to emphasize?
Yes, and it comes back to money. I picked money intentionally because I learned late in life and the hard way that money is a tool. You need it to survive but avoid letting money become the end all be all for why you wake up in the morning and why you go to work. Avoid letting money be the determinant for why you do certain family things. We all love money, but what I've found is once you reach a certain point, the only thing that more money makes you want is even more money and it's a slippery slope into unhappiness. Be careful what you wish for.
I think that's great advice. Thank you so much for being on and sharing your story. I look forward to sharing this with our readers.
Amy, thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.
---
Now, for my Mindful Moments with this interview with Jonathan Gardner. There are so many things to pluck out of this great interview and so many things for us to take those moments and think about in ourselves where we were influenced in our lives. We talked about Jonathan coming from a small town, knowing he wanted a different life and not having that example directly in his life, but looking for all of the things around him that were going to show him the way of having a different life.
Part of what we talked about was understanding the world through books. Sometimes, we don't think about the books that influenced us, and the books he brought up like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand highly influenced me as well. We forget how far the world has come in a short time period where I don't even realize the years that have gone by that when I was younger, there just wasn't this look into the world and understanding before the internet and social media.
All of the things that exist make our children more worldly and many of you that have grown up with it. However, we never had that perspective except what we saw on the news and reading books like these when I was younger and I always thought Ayn Rand was way beyond her years as an author. She envisioned women as powerful women in business and there were not many examples of that when I was younger.
A lot of times, I probably don't even realize when I'm thinking of those characters and how they had confidence in rooms of all men and that is the shoes that I walk in. I thought it was so interesting what he got out of it coming from a small town seeing commerce in a big way, how that works, and so forth when we had nowhere else to envision that from. I think those moments where we look at what impacted us are so fascinating and even more fascinating the whole reason he read it was because of another student that was in his class that was a couple of years older than he thought knew how things worked and seemed cool.
He started modeling himself after looking at the things that the guy did in order to be able to accomplish what he wanted in his life. That guy had recommended these books. Again, I find these things fascinating, and these stories that we get to uncover on this show that a lot of times there are these people that come into our lives for whatever reason and make the biggest impact on us. They never know. He's moved on. His friend Marty has moved on in his life and Jonathan's moved on.
It's those moments of remembering who has impacted you and pivoted your life's path. There was some reason that you were put together in order to learn those lessons. That made him curious about the world where he wanted to be in international business and went and got his MBA. He understood international business from that perspective. He learned Spanish. He had a love for Spanish and the language. He took one of his first jobs in Brazil, which is Portuguese, which he learned as a language as well.
However, instead of doing things in a small way, he went to a huge company and learned how a big company works and the bureaucracy around it. However, where he had grown up in a small business and had small business jobs where everybody does everything when you're learning how to silo jobs and how you've got to connect with others in order to do that.
Now his next job at Dell, we spent a good amount of time on, and I think what stuck was his 360 where they assessed whether he was a strategic thinker versus a tactical thinker. I know I do this too, and probably many of you do. He had everybody except one person say he was strategic, but he focused on the one person who said something different because it bothered him. Why was there that outlier?
That boss that he had was another person who shifted his path and pivoted it to change his perspective on what strategic thinking means. Strategic thinking is not just the work that we do. It is also the relationships that we make so that the work that we do can happen. Without those relationships, we often get frustrated with people. There's a lack of communication. I see this all of the time in my coaching clients that it takes a conversation or getting to know someone outside of the actual work where it's just to go to lunch or to go for a coffee or ask them to go to an event so that you get to know people personally.
The reason that this becomes important is that when you personally know somebody, when there are opportunities or things that you need or things that they're looking for, they look at you differently because you now have a relationship where you know that you know each other at a human level and it is more caring. When people feel they are seen, they're more apt to be able to help you when you need it, and you're able to help them because you want to help them as well. You understand them in a different way. Even when you're having those frustrating days, your level of being triggered by that person may be different because you understand them at a different level.
I think it's important to understand the importance of relationships in our lives and at work in order to accomplish things. We can be the most technically sound subject matter expert but without those relationships, it's very hard to push through to the next level and that is strategic thinking. It isn't tactical. It's that you have those relationships for when you do need it. I thought that was really the first time I had heard that explained in that way, and it was such a great thing to think about.
I hope you took some things away from this episode and his story here. He was so transparent and helped us to understand his journey of when things were going great and when things weren't going so great and what he learned from that. Also, how that's brought him to now, the work that he does, and finding that thing that he does well but he didn't even realize that it was something that was an expertise.
Many of us have these things that we are experts in that we don't give credit to that other people need. Take that as inspiration and figure out maybe 1 or 2 people to reach out to. Also, what is that thing that you might be ignoring that's your expertise but it is? These are the things that we do during our coaching sessions at the B3 Method Institute.
If you haven't looked into them yet, definitely go to BusinessBalanceBliss.com. There is information right on there about it. On our website, you will see discount codes for group coaching just for our audience. During this group coaching, we help you uncover these blind spots so that you can be able to push through and get to the goals that you want to be able to accomplish. Not only do we help you, but you have a community of support in these groups as well.
I hope that you'll look into it. Be inspired by Jonathan's story and look out for our next episode when it comes out with other life lessons that may help you as well. Make sure to share and subscribe to this show. It helps our show as well as other people to be able to learn these lessons as well. Just remember that when we are intentional about the energy that we create, we give a gift to everybody around us.
Important Links
About Jonathan Gardner
Jonathan Gardner brings his experience from powerful brands like Starbucks, Dell Computers, Albertsons, and General Motors to mid-market and medium-sized companies.
Much of Jonathan's career was spent in strategic sourcing and adjacent supply chain functions. Along the way, he personally negotiated over 250 contracts and signed a couple hundred more as an executive.
Now, as the founder of J. Gardner Group, he leverages his insider knowledge as a former mega-buyer to help mid-market companies land lucrative deals with Fortune 500 companies. He knows exactly what those giants are looking for and how to get deals pushed through.