Episode 137: What if the key to transforming your business lies not in adding more resources, but in simply understanding how your employees move through their workspace? In this eye-opening conversation with Service Physics co-founders Brian Reece and Steve Crowley, we uncover the hidden costs of inefficient processes that might be quietly draining your profits and customer satisfaction.
Website: www.servicephysics.com
Service Physics app download: Apple Store
Service Physics app download: Android
Brian Reece: LinkedIn
Steve Crowley: LinkedIn
Brian and Steve's journey began at Starbucks during the financial crisis, where they witnessed firsthand how applying lean principles transformed a struggling company into a global powerhouse. After further refining their approach at Anheuser-Busch, they founded Service Physics with a mission to make these powerful techniques accessible to businesses of all sizes. Their unique consulting approach—which they playfully describe as "doing consulting wrong"—focuses on being physically present in the workspace, collecting real data, and experimenting with improvements rather than simply delivering recommendations.
One of their most powerful revelations? The true cost of motion. Through simple techniques like "spaghetti diagrams" that track worker movements, they demonstrate how activities that look like work but add no value (like walking) can represent 10% of labor costs—translating to millions in opportunity costs for mid-sized companies. Even more striking is their finding that most service businesses already have sufficient equipment capacity; they're simply not using it efficiently.
What sets Service Physics apart is their focus on driving top-line growth rather than merely cutting costs. By helping businesses understand leading indicators (like customer queue length or transaction time) rather than just lagging metrics (like sales), they enable proactive improvements that capture previously unmet customer demand. Their entrepreneurial journey offers valuable lessons in bootstrapping a business, building systems that don't rely solely on founders, and creating clarity through effective communication—including innovative approaches like using AI to transform quarterly updates into podcasts.
Ready to discover how much hidden capacity your business already has? Download the Service Physics app, visit servicephysics.com, or catch them at upcoming industry events to learn how making work more joyful for employees creates better customer experiences and stronger financial results.
Please connect with me on:
1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii
For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy: financeleaderacademy.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Stephen McLain (00:05):
This week, I am sharing an interview with the co
founders of service physics,Brian Reese and Steve Crowley.
Service physics is dedicated tohelping corporate leaders and
business owners in transformingtheir companies without
sacrificing employeesatisfaction, they show you, not
(00:26):
only with data, but visibleevidence that your processes may
be costing you. Brian and Stevealso share valuable startup
business advice in how theyutilize their finance teams to
make better decisions for theirown business. Please enjoy the
episode. Welcome to the financeleader podcast where leadership
is bigger than the numbers. I amyour host. Stephen McLain, this
(00:49):
is the podcast for developingleaders in finance and
accounting. Please considerfollowing me on Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram andLinkedIn. My usernames and the
links are in this episode's shownotes. Thank you. This is
episode number 137, now let'sget right to the discussion with
Brian and Steve. Please enjoyboth Brian and Steve had
(01:12):
previously led teams atStarbucks and in Heiser bush
with a focus of applying leanprinciples to foster
transformation with the end goalof better customer experiences.
Brian and Steve, thank you forjoining me today. We want to
hear more about you, so pleasetell us about yourself. Brian,
you can start. Yeah,
Brian Reece (01:31):
thanks a lot.
Stephen, great to be on thepodcast today. Thanks for having
us. Yeah, as you said, cofounder and principal consultant
with service physics here, alongwith Steve, we've been doing
this together as service physicsfor about six years. But
actually, you know, ourrelationship goes back over 10
years ago to Starbucks. As youmentioned, I'm based in upstate
New York. I've got twodaughters, six and four. Just
(01:54):
love being in the outdoors andconsulting with service
businesses.
Stephen McLain (02:00):
Awesome. Steve,
Steve Crowly (02:03):
yeah. Stephen, thanks for having us on the
podcast. Really great to behere. Steve Crowley, based in
Des Moines, Iowa, though I'velived all over the country over
the course of this journey.
Other co founder service physicsprincipal consultant, aka Brian,
better half and chiefStoryteller here in the company.
I also am here with my family. Ihave two boys to counter.
(02:24):
Brian's two girls. They're 10and three, and they keep me
busy. All
Stephen McLain (02:30):
right, awesome.
We definitely want to hear moreabout service physics, and
please highlight the servicethat you provide and then how it
benefits your customers.
Steve Crowly (02:40):
Yeah, I might start by telling a little bit of
a story about how we ended uphere. And so Brian and I met
working at Starbucks, CoffeeCompany, around the time of the
great financial crisis, whenStarbucks was in a bit of hot
water that, you know, the stockprice was in a position where,
had there been any liquidity inthe market, it certainly would
(03:00):
have been acquired, and duringthat time, had been
experimenting with leanmanufacturing principles in the
roasting plants at the company.
And when the economy started toshift and operations started to
feel the pressure, the sort oflike chief strategist of the
company moved that function andall those learnings from the
roasting facility intooperations, and that's where
(03:22):
Brian and I were exposed to itfor the first time, really
taking a good hard look at theway that people were doing the
work to brew the coffee, toserve the customers, identifying
where waste was, and thendesigning better ways, which we
eventually cobbled together intoa full service delivery system
that helped transform thatcompany out of a time of great
peril into a time of greatfortune. And so at that point in
(03:45):
Starbucks history, they were inthe single digit 1000s, and
today, Star sand at about 40,000locations across the globe. So
that would have been possiblewithout that transformation
having been exposed to that,Brian and I found ourselves
working together again, buildinga hospitality business from the
ground up. So over five years,we built a business with
(04:08):
Anheuser Busch in Bev of about550 bars and restaurants across
the globe, and really got ourfirst experience in a more of a
consulting role. And during thattime, had come on to this idea
that Lean thinking and theprinciples and techniques
associated with it were prettybroad and prevented a lot of
organizations from applying themfully and transforming and we
(04:31):
came up with this concept of aminimum effective dose of Lean
thinking that you could give toa restaurant operator and in a
very short period of time watchthem start to solve real
problems and drive that businessforward. It was during that time
together, Brian and I were onthe road with a training that we
had developed called servicephysics, which was about a 90
(04:51):
minute workshop training that wewould conduct in like kitchens
or back offices of restaurantsthat. Culminated with running
experiments in the restaurantduring peak periods, where to
bring that team through,collecting some data, forming
some hypothesis about how we canmake things better, taking a few
loops through the Plan, Do,Check, Act cycle, and then sort
(05:12):
of watching their blinders comeoff. And during one of these
experiences, actually, on theside of a mountain in a national
park in Patagonia, Argentina,came to the conclusion that this
was too good to be reserved forthe biggest beer company in the
galaxy and the biggest CoffeeCompany in the galaxy when 90
plus percent of the industry issmall and medium sized business.
(05:33):
Mom and pops are reallysuffering and having challenges
making that equation between lowmargins, low wages and poor
customer experiences lookdifferently. And so we decided
to flip the script on that bygoing back to New York, starting
a company that was six yearsago, and now we are supporting a
lot of companies who peopleinteract with every day, some
(05:53):
fortune 500 players in bothhealthcare and hospitality.
We've got a team of about 20folks working in some capacity
around the country and someother parts of the world, and
we're starting to see the seedsof transformation for the
industry take hold. Oh,
Stephen McLain (06:10):
very nice. So I'm very curious, that 90 minute
workshop, when you were with anHeiser bullish, is that correct?
That's correct. So going fromthat 90 minute workshop you did,
what do you do in servicephysics? How did you expand
that? What are you offering?
Steve Crowly (06:27):
Now, we don't like to use the C word consulting,
because working in those bigcompanies, we had exposure to a
lot of consulting firms thatwe're just not joyful to work
with. We like to often say thatwe do consulting wrong. Okay, we
are not dropping PowerPointdecks and walking away and
wishing you luck with therecommendations that we've put
(06:47):
into place, but we put a greatemphasis on going to sea and so
we grew up in, you know, sort ofthe early days of COVID. Our we
don't have a corporate officethat people go to work to every
day. Our corporate office is ourclients, what we call gembas, or
the place where the actual workhappens. We put a lot of
emphasis on going there tocollect data and talk to people,
(07:09):
to identify the real problems,and then to experiment our way
into better ways standardizethat work and then help the team
think through how they mightpackage the solutions to the
problems that they have, andthen scale them across, you
know, hundreds, if not, 1000s oflocations. Oh,
Stephen McLain (07:25):
very nice. Tell me a little bit more about that
experimentation. What actuallyare you doing?
Brian Reece (07:30):
We're out in those restaurants, collecting data,
trying to figure out ways tocreate a better customer
experience, maybe moving fasterthrough the line, having a
higher quality product or abetter personal interaction with
with one of the team members,really thinking through how that
customer experience can beimproved, and then working our
(07:52):
way backward into the operation,to think about the work the
employees have to do to createthat experience right, making
that work as easy, as joyful, asfriction free as possible. So
we've got employees doing easy,joyful work, creating great
customer experiences, right? Andyou put those two things
together, happy people, happycustomers, and that always flows
(08:15):
down through the to the bottomline of the business. Very nice.
Stephen McLain (08:18):
You had mentioned restaurants. Is that
your typical customer, or areyou also doing other type of
hospitality businesses?
Steve Crowly (08:25):
What we've come to understand is that these
techniques, which we, you know,sort of borrowed from
manufacturing, apply to almostany industry that has customers,
and even those that don't. Atthe end of the day, everybody
just doing something in serviceof somebody else. And when you
think about the way that workhappens using people's hands,
(08:45):
heads and hearts, and you applysome of these principles, it's
not always a one to onetranslation, but the principles
still hold. I think when we whenwe started out, we saw ourselves
as you know, squarely in therestaurant industry, it wasn't
long, maybe about a year or yearand a few months into this
(09:06):
journey, when we were contactedby a fortune 500 healthcare
company. I didn't take the callseriously at all. In fact, I
think I took it from the stoopof my apartment in Queens and a
hooded sweatshirt with a cup ofcoffee in my hand, and when
asked if we could help, I said,Well, we don't do healthcare,
but I'm happy to talk to you.
We've now been working with thatcompany for, you know, little
over four years. Oh, nicehelping, helping them lead. What
(09:28):
I what I think just won't be atransformation of that health
care company, but will be atransformation of health care
more holistically, with some ofthe things that we're learning
and working to publish inoperations journals.
Stephen McLain (09:44):
Nice, very nice.
Do you particularly work withthe operations side, or are you
also working with the CFOs onthe finance side?
Brian Reece (09:53):
The CFOs always want to know what we're going to
do for them, right? You know, Italked about making the work
more joyful. People creatingbetter customer experiences. And
then, you know, you talked alittle bit about what kind of
experimenting we do. And so weknow, you know, in order for any
of these solutions to see thelight of day, there has to be a
an ROI associated with the work.
So a lot of what we do, and alot of the data that we collect
(10:17):
is to demonstrate not just theimproved customer experience,
not just the improved workflows,but also how that's going to
trickle down to the bottom linefor the business. And actually,
often we're focused on top lineimprovement, which I think is
pretty unique for consultants. Alot of consultants go after cost
cutting and are really focusedon, you know, things like
(10:39):
reducing labor costs or cost ofgoods, we actually have found a
niche for ourselves and reallythinking through tactical ways
that the operation can drive topline. And so it's not about
marketing necessarily. It'sabout taking advantage of the
customer demand that you havealready. And so when we've
interacted with CFOs, we usuallyget kind of this reaction of,
(11:01):
oh, you're not going to show mehow I'm going to cut labor or
cut cost of goods. You'reactually going to show me how I
can make more money. And thathas has really been a game
changer for all very good,especially when talking to CFOs.
Stephen McLain (11:16):
Oh, absolutely.
You guys talked aboutparticularly on your offerings,
you want to go and use thoseLean principles. Now, how do you
use those Lean principles tohelp organizations achieve that
transformation?
Steve Crowly (11:30):
The one thing it always comes back to is problem
solving, okay, and time and timeagain, and once you become aware
of it, becomes infuriating howoften we start solutioning
without understanding whatproblem we were trying to solve
in the first place. It's socritical, in fact, that we've
(11:50):
now developed training that wedo with our partners to help
them hone the problem solvingskills of their teams. Because
without that, the transformationcan't take hold. I think one
example, and sort of like at thebase of that set of Lean
principles that we that we bringto bear, there are also a lot of
(12:11):
techniques, and all of themreally center around the work
that people are doing thatprovides the value to the
customer. And we have somemantras that come up time and
time again related to that. Forexample, motion is not equal to
work. Okay, motion looks a lotlike work, but it actually
provides no value to thecustomer, guest, patient,
(12:33):
whoever that is. And so one ofthe very early things we do, and
I this is one of my favoritetechniques, because the barrier
to entry is a pen and a piece ofpaper, something called the
spaghetti diagram, where youvery quickly draw some circles
and squares and rectangles on apiece of paper to depict the
area that people are working in.
And then you put pen to paper,you trace the worker as they
walk around. If you do this withan operator, invariably, within
(12:54):
30 seconds, they're askingquestions like, Why is she going
over there? Why did he go overthere. And we always stop them
and say, Don't worry about that.
Yet they went over there to getsomething the right question is,
why is that thing over there?
And so what we can then do issay, let's look at the work
space and the way that thingsare organized to reduce that
motion. And it may seem trivial,but if you think about, you
(13:17):
know, an entry level restaurantworker making $20 an hour. If
10% of everything they do iswalking, that's $2 an hour we're
attributing to walking.
Absolutely save that across80,000 employees, 350 days a
year. What is right up to right?
And let's say for a mid sizedcompany, that's, you know, a $5
million opportunity cost ofwalking for people in this one
(13:40):
station. How many restaurantswould you have to open to drop
$5 million to the bottom line?
Well, let's say 10 or 12restaurants. That's 10 or 12
sites that I have to scout,build a location into, filled
with equipment, inventory, ateam of 25 people train them, a
district manager, all theoverhead to support so suddenly
(14:00):
think about, you know, it's justa little bit of walking, but
walking isn't work
Stephen McLain (14:05):
absolutely. So when you when you mentioned the
issue about motion, I think youboth know that I served in the
Army, that reminded me of acommander that I had when I was
a lieutenant. He was anengineer. So we always talked
about work equals force timesdistance. So the opposite of
that was that if you apply a lotof force and don't move, you
haven't done any work. Give me agreat memory there of you
(14:27):
talking about motion when youstart to do the big calculation
and add up all the it probablyreally amazes those leaders,
actually, how much money iscosting when you start to look
at those motion studies, whatare those follow on
conversations that you guys havewhen you start to show those big
numbers?
Steve Crowly (14:45):
There's often disbelief to start and what this
fortune 500 healthcare company Iwas referring to earlier, there
was a senior leader when weproposed, sort of the problem,
the opportunity size and thesolution, or the way we might go
after. And said, Whoa, wait. Ithink what you're saying is you
can turn water into wine. Andthe thing is, about these Lean
(15:08):
principles is they are simple,but not easy, right? And so if
there's often a little bit oflike disbelief, they're often
counter to human instinct, ahuman instinct, because we're
hunters and gatherers and we'refit for survival, we're trying
to surround ourselves withinventory, surround ourselves
with labor. Give ourselves morespace. Like Nope, we should need
(15:29):
less inventory, less labor, lessspace. Right, right fit for
survival, instead of surroundingourselves by all the excess
Absolutely,
Stephen McLain (15:39):
when you're doing this analysis and you're
helping your customer, you mustalso be relying on some
particular metrics, you know, inparticular, either some leading
or lagging indicators. Can you?
Can you take us through that alittle bit? I love the
Steve Crowly (15:54):
the conversation about leading and lagging
indicators, and particularly theindustries we work in, they're
highly focused on laggingindicators. I mean, obviously
sales is a key metric for most,you know, service based
organizations, but you know, youdon't know what your sales were
until after they've happened,right? And so, to your point,
(16:15):
what? What are some of thethings that contribute to those
sales? That's the kind of datathat we actually go after and
help organizations to see and beable to measure. So most
organizations that we work withare stuck in the lagging
indicator space through some ofthe techniques Steve was
describing, looking at laborutilization, looking at motion,
(16:35):
looking at how long is the lineat peak. You know that's that's
not something that a lot ofrestaurants actually know that,
but that's your leadingindicator for whether or not you
have unmet demand that you canactually go and and capture. So
that's kind of how we'rethinking about we can help you
drive sales by improving thetime it takes for the customer
(16:57):
to work work through theordering and payment process at
the register. So if we canreduce the time that the
customer spending at theregister, still make it a great
experience, but just make itquick, we can actually get more
customers through that registerand capture more of that unmet
demand. But most organizationswe work with don't understand,
don't see those leadingindicators of what's the time
(17:18):
that the customer is spending atthe register. How many customers
are? Are there in line? They'rejust looking at those lagging,
lagging indicators, like thesales that they were able to
ring through yesterday. If I canbuild on that a little bit,
quick plug for our app in the wehave it for Android and Apple,
you can just go to the app storeand download it, but that app is
designed to help us answer threereally important questions
(17:43):
before where to start doing thework. The first question is,
really, what is the currentproduction capacity of this
restaurant, of this healthcareclinic, of whatever? So here we
do a lot of process timing, andwe capture something called line
off rate, like, what is the paceat which something can come off
the line or out of the kitchenor out of the window. The next
question is, how much equipmentcapacity exists across the
(18:05):
system and with machineutilization and every restaurant
operation that we work with isalways talking about like, more
fryers, bigger ovens, more grillspace. They want bigger, bigger,
bigger. And we've not found theneed to introduce any larger or
more equipment in a restaurant,and with now have this data from
(18:25):
over, you know, 1000s and 1000sof restaurants, and probably,
like, 10s, if not hundreds of1000s of hours. And we always
capture this data at peak. Thethird question is, how much
human capacity exists across thesystem, right? So when you put
the humans in the machinestogether, that those are the
constraints of the total systemcapacity, which was the first
(18:47):
question. And with this app, youdo some studies, and you don't
need to do much to getsomething. I mean, you're not
going to have statisticallysignificant data, but you're
going to get a pretty goodfinger in the wind about what
your current bottleneck is. Youcan start to like, go unlock
them, and you put them alltogether. It's all about
creating more capacity to dowhatever you capacity is
amazing, because you can eithertake it to the bank, if that's
(19:07):
your need, you can invest it intraining, you can invest it in
customer experience. We'veworked with some restaurant and
healthcare companies that haveimproved their quality metrics
by over 100% organizationactually improved by 800% by
just reading all capacity andmore time to do work in the
right way. Wow, that's amazing.
Stephen McLain (19:27):
What I'm picking up on, though, a little bit, was
that once you start to dig intothat data, I'm very curious
about the leadership that you'reworking with, they tend to
operate more from the gut,especially when you're talking
about adding more fryers andmore equipment, and then then
they're really surprised by thatdata once you show it to them,
Steve Crowly (19:47):
I'd say always there's a new product on the
market that we've become a bigfan of, which is the Ray Ban
meta glasses that have a camerainstalled in them will now put.
Am on workers doing the work?
Oh, wow. And then as we'resharing, because oftentimes
we're when you're talking tosenior leaders, you're not doing
(20:07):
it in the setting of therestaurant. You're not in the
gemba where the work happens. Sopeople have all kinds of myths
that they tell themselves aboutthe way things go down. But if
we can show them a three minutevideo of somebody working on a
grill, or somebody working on amake line, and they see how
disorganized that is. Humansdon't naturally understand how
to sequence their activity witha machine so that it's like a
(20:30):
ballet. We tend let's get thatmachine busy and then go on to
the next thing. And now themachine is done, and it's either
burning the thing or it has somekind of auto eject. And now it's
just sitting there, but that'sidle. But what can we do to just
keep the machines busy? Imentioned most motion is not
equal to work as one mantra,another mantra is keep the
machines busy.
Stephen McLain (20:52):
Wow, right?
That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Ireally like what you're talking
about. Your that the applicationof data, and then you show the
the leadership exactly what'shappening. And then there's so
there's this epiphany, and thenyou can start to really start to
do some transformation. Is thatwhat you're finding That's
right, yeah, amazing. You soundso proud and happy of the
founding of service physics. AndI want to delve into a little
(21:15):
bit about startup leadership,because I always like to talk to
founders. How do you get whatyou what you want to do, off the
ground? Again, startups seemvery chaotic, so how do you what
are the very first things you'redoing, other than like, seed
funding? What are you doing tolike, align your team with that
same vision, the direction, whattasks are you working on? What
are you doing first, and how youstaying focused?
Brian Reece (21:39):
I love talking startups before starting service
physics. Actually, Steve and Ihad the opportunity at Anheuser
Busch InBev to part toparticipate in, like a they
called it an accelerator, butreally it was a business
incubator. And so we learned alot of those kind of techniques
that you would learn readingLean Startup, or something like
(22:01):
that. And actually, we took alot of that to heart when we
started the business. I thinkSteve mentioned it a little bit,
but after we decided to, youknow, there was a big industry
opportunity, we had this gutfeeling. We knew that there was
a better equation for the peopleworking in the industry, for the
for the employees and for theowners, but we didn't know for
sure, because we didn't have anydata. So we went back to New
(22:23):
York, and we actually kind ofdid some trial runs. We started
offering our services for freeto really understand, you know,
what was the market out there,what was the product we were
trying to sell, and what, whatwas, what would the market bear
in terms of paying for it? Andso we, you know, I highly
recommend doing, you know,whatever you can to get those,
(22:44):
those signals for the market andwhat the what the market wants,
and what it's willing to pay. Sowe talk about the DVF framework,
desirability, viability andfeasibility. So we want to think
through desirability is, do wehave something the customer
(23:07):
actually wants? Is there aproblem we can solve or a value
we can create? Viability, youraudience will love. Can this
thing make money? Can we chargeenough money for this thing to
actually be profitable and thenfeasibility? Can we build a
team? Can we design a system?
Can we write some code toactually deliver on the
desirability and the viabilityof the business? And so I think
we spent probably the first yearand a half, two, three years,
maybe even still today,stumbling around, trying to,
trying to create the balancebetween the d, v and f for this
(23:28):
business. But I'm, I'm superproud to say, to your point, you
know, we're really proud of whatwe've built. We have not had to
take on funding, because westarted from day one, really
thinking through the businessmodel and making sure that we
had something that would turnthe economic engine that being
said, Steve was it three yearsof doing this before we paid
(23:49):
ourselves. So I think to someextent, we self funded, we
bootstrapped, but it ispossible, especially in a
service business like ours, toget off the ground without a
whole lot of money, as long asyou're willing to, you know,
sacrifice a little bit for thevision. You know, absolutely,
Steve Crowly (24:07):
if I can add a little bit to the sacrifice
story, because I think this is asomething that entrepreneurs
need to hear during the earlydays. So 2019, and, you know,
totally different. It was a preCOVID world, Brian and I held on
to our w2 day jobs, and so whatoperations looked like for us
was setting up video cameras inrestaurants around Manhattan in
(24:30):
the morning, going to work from830 to noon, meeting up for
lunch, going back to therestaurant, switching out the SD
cards and batteries And thecameras, letting them run
through lunch and into theafternoon, and then going to
pick them up on our way home,getting home, doing dinner,
putting the kids to bed, andthen crunching data from the
(24:50):
videos, right, and then rinseand repeat, and then doing like,
all the whatever powerpointingor experiment designs or
whatever on the weekends. Andthis was like, I. That was
months and months and months ofthat grind until COVID hit, and
then suddenly we had, like, anew problem to solve. We went
dark like we had clients whowere like, We don't know if
we're going to be able to payyou, let alone let you into our
(25:13):
restaurant. We're like, totallyget it. But then it was a matter
of maybe four or five weeksbefore everybody realized that
their five year digital strategyneeded to be a five week digital
strategy, right? And stilltrying to manage, you know, the
family, the the day job and soforth. But it wasn't long before
it became clear that there was athere, there, and we're able to,
(25:34):
sort of, like, break free fromthat, but again, a few years of
really, you know, pinchingpennies on the on the home
front, in order to make surethat we could fund a team in
order to meet the demand that weknew was there. Yeah, that's
Stephen McLain (25:46):
awesome. Now you don't have to deal with any kind
of venture capitalist, so that'sreally good. So as the firm's
leaders, what are you focused oneach day?
Brian Reece (25:56):
I think the game, at least as I understand it, is
building the machine. So, youknow, we're, we're operations
consultants, we understandsystems and how that, you know,
the full system needs tofunction in order to deliver the
result. And so steadily, youknow, over the last six years,
we've been building thedifferent components of the
(26:18):
system that that is thebusiness. And so when we started
out, Steve and I were literallywearing every single hat that
there was to wear, the financehat, as well as the operations
hat, as well as the marketinghat and the sales hat and the,
you know, on and on. And aswe've grown, you know, a lot of
our time is spent figuring outhow to divest ourselves of the
(26:39):
various hats we still aware. SoI would say, you know, over the
last couple years, we've reallyfocused on building an amazing
team that can deliver for ourclients in the way that we
would, you know, want the brandto show up. Built a great and
amazing delivery team. And thenrecently, we've actually been
able to put together a verysmall finance team. So we have a
(27:01):
head of finance, we have abookkeeper, we have a CPA. They
keep us out of trouble, keep uson the straight and narrow, and
prevent a lot of fire drills. Tobe really honest. There were a
lot of times when, you know, Ican remember one June and I was
looking at, oh, crap, like, allthese invoices just came in, but
we haven't gotten paid yet. Andso it was a mad dash to, you
(27:22):
know, ring up our clients andtry to get the money to come in.
We haven't had a fire drill likethat in a couple years, because
we've got folks that are on topof that stuff for us and built
systems and processes for us tostay on top of those things. And
so I think, you know, just toget back to your question, a lot
of what we're doing is figuringout, how do we, how do we build
the systems that will enablethis company to run as a as a
(27:44):
machine, and not require Brianor Steve to be in every meeting,
in every decision, in everyprocess and making it go?
Stephen McLain (27:52):
That's the key, right there? Absolutely. If I
can
Steve Crowly (27:56):
add a little bit to that, there's really two
things that I wake up thinkingabout every morning. One of them
is sort of a recent learningbased on coaching that Brian and
I have been receiving from ourexternal coach, our external
lean coach, which is, you canalways be more clear, and most
things break down as a result ofnot being clear enough. It's
(28:18):
easy to just wake up, go to workand start talking about, talking
about, but that's confusing. Canbe misinterpreted. And I think
about how many times we go to atask on the Kanban board and
have to click into it and try toremember what the heck it was
that we said that we were goingto do, and who has the context
on this? And like, that's just afailure moment. It creates a lot
(28:39):
of waste, and it's it's badenough for us, but the cascading
effect as the company grows isreally tremendous. The other
thing, and this is a little bitrelated to what Brian said about
building the systems, it'simportant to remember that
people are a part of thatsystem. Our product is our
people, and this year, ourmantra has been to build the
people that will build thecompany that will transform the
(29:01):
industry. And so it doubled downon investing in our people and
our practice, because ourpractice is evolving. We're
learning all the time aboutbetter ways to translate these
concepts, apply these concepts,and so everybody's got to stay
fresh all the time. We put a lotof emphasis on collaboration as
a team. We do a lot ofcontinuous improvement hours
every week, on looking at ourown work and the way that we do
(29:22):
things, and then also looking atthe client work and better ways
to refine these like chaotic andcomplex problems, very good. And
so, yeah, I just double down onthat people and people and
clarity. That's awesome.
Stephen McLain (29:33):
Brian, you had talked gave us a little bit of
an introduction to how you workwith your finance and accounting
team. Help us understand how youuse finance and accounting in
your business, and what's yourrelationship with them. And how
do you beyond like financialstatements, what do you how do
you use finance to leverage yourdecision making? I
Brian Reece (29:55):
think you know sort of the answer I might start with
here is, I. We're a little bitlike the the cobbler with no
shoes. We're, we're experts, andwe've built a team of experts
in, you know, helping folksoperationalize their business
process, improvement andbuilding systems, tools and
training for those things.
We've, we've been slower to dothat for ourselves. I think this
(30:19):
is an area where bringing in ahead of finance has really
helped to systematize a lot ofthe things that we had been
doing or had, you know, somesome really basic processes
around and really turn them intosustainable processes for us.
And I think the that when I saythe Emperor with no clothes, or
(30:39):
the cobbler with no shoes. Theonly metrics we have today are
our finance metrics, and we'remaking much better and more
informed decisions by looking ata key set of metrics every week.
But our head of finance isreally like every week,
literally improving thedashboarding, literally
improving the availability ofthose numbers in in real time,
so that we're crystallizing ourvision and our ability to
(31:02):
understand the business. So it'skind of this effort of
continuous improvement thatwe're going through. And so
while you know, a lot of ourbusiness is focused on helping
other organizations find thoseleading indicators, we're still
very much appreciative of ourability to look at our financial
metrics, and a key thing for usis our forecast. And so we spend
a lot of time thinking about ourforecast and the way that we
(31:25):
generate the forecast, and then,you know, not just sort of using
statistics to arrive at aforecast, but actually almost
doing like a bottoms upforecast. Let's look at all the
clients that we have in thefunnel. Let's think about how
much we might be able to chargethose clients. Think about which
months we're going to issuethose invoices and actually
build a forecast from thebottoms up. And so we've
(31:47):
actually integrated our financeour head of finance sits in our
sales meetings and is takingthat real time input into the
forecast to help us really havea better bead on on our
business. Similarly, our financelead also sits in our weekly
people planning so he'sintimately aware with our hiring
plans, our plans to use, youknow, part time contractors, and
(32:10):
building all of that into ourforecast in real time to allow
us to then on on Mondaymornings, really look at the
state of the business and bearmed, you know, with whatever
actions we need to take. Oh,very
Stephen McLain (32:23):
nice. I like that. So what type of
conversations do you have withyour head of finance?
Steve Crowly (32:28):
I might add, maybe just a little bit of like
structural context. And I thinkthat'll will help answer that
question. Okay, we operate asscrums. So each project team
functions as a scrum, but thenwe treat our finance function
also as its own Scrum. Nicescrums come together weekly for
(32:50):
a roadmap session and daily forwhat we call incidents and high
rollers and the scrum of scrums.
Teiciona said, you know, data,of course, is important, but I
prefer facts, the data inisolation, without the context
of everything else that'shappening in the business is not
good for decision making. So thefact that we have operations,
people, finance, Brian and I atthe table, surfacing and
(33:11):
explaining, you know, why thingsare happening, or why the
forecasts look like this, orwhat will be the consequence? I
think a lot of the I try toanswer your question more
specifically. Now, a lot of theconversations are scenario
planning. A lot of what happens?
What if that happens? And thenBrian and I, as as you know,
sort of like lean coaches forthe scrum of Scrum teams is
(33:34):
trying to help the teamarticulate things as problems.
And back to that originalcomment about problem statements
and problem solving being veryimportant, what's the gap? So if
this is our forecast, what's thegap in May, what's the gap in
June, what's the gap in July?
And then we can talk about howwe're going to close that, and
now we've got people andoperations also at the table to
think about how we'll do that.
Excellent.
Stephen McLain (33:54):
I like that so that. So that leads me to
another question, any plans, andthis may be a no any plans to
maybe use AI in the future withthat what if scenario planning?
It's funny.
Brian Reece (34:05):
We've been talking a lot about AI this week in
particular, although I'd sayit's not not a constant topic.
For sure, we haven't yetintegrated AI or even much
advanced statistics or modelinginto our finance specific
analysis, we get a lot ofleverage from AI in the actual
(34:29):
performance of of the consultingwork. And so I'm a big fan of
perplexity. I think Steve's achat GPT user. But what I love
is being able to take that, youknow, structured and
unstructured data, throwing itinto the tool. And so when I say
unstructured, I mean transcriptsfrom calls, scholarly articles,
(34:52):
previous presentations we'vedelivered, we'll put those,
those documents and all of thatcontext into a workspace. You.
Perplexity, and now I use it asa thinking tool to help really
untangle, you know, because alot of the the problems we're
working on are quite complex.
And so we find AI to be a reallygreat thinking tool to help us
simplify, take a very complexsort of problem space and turn
(35:14):
it into some key components thatwe can then, you know, better
describe to our clients, youknow, how, how we would propose
to help. And so I think we get alot of benefit out of AI as a
thinking partner, more so than aany kind of, like, analytical or
predictive modeling kind ofcapability. Okay,
Stephen McLain (35:35):
I like that.
That's excellent. That's a greatmove forward. I like that.
That's great to hear. I
Steve Crowly (35:39):
can think of one specific example where we are
leveraging AI with finance, andit might not be Brian somewhere
where our brains would goimmediately, but we have a good
habit around what we call aquarterly pulse, where we bring
the team together to go overwhere we are financially, where
we are operationally, and sortof paint a quick look back and
then paint a picture of a lookforward early on, that meeting
(36:02):
would look a lot like a 90minute session where Brian
Steven, some other folks weretalking to the team, and then,
if we were lucky, we'd have fiveor 10 minutes at the end to do
like an open forum and answerquestions. But what we learned
was the most value actually cameout of the Q, a component. And
so pivoted to now, and it'sstill, I think we're about to go
through our third like iterationon this actually tomorrow
(36:23):
morning, is we go through and webuild the PowerPoint deck for
that, that readout, as if wewere going to present it to the
team, and then we feed it intonotebook, LM, and have it
generate a podcast. Oh, nice. Wesend the podcast to the team as
a pre listen, and put thePowerPoint slide in a digital
whiteboard and have them likepre listen to the 15 minute
(36:47):
podcast and then take any noteswith post its on any parts of
the presentation that they wantto talk about. And now tomorrow,
we'll spend 990 minutes justanswering questions instead of
having them digest thatinformation. That
Stephen McLain (36:58):
is amazing. I love hearing that. That's a
great tip. I really like that.
That's now that sounds very likeit's very effective. Has that
proven to be so super
Steve Crowly (37:07):
effective? Of course, is always a better way.
So we go to school on thattomorrow. Yeah.
Stephen McLain (37:11):
Awesome. I love that. Tell us about a hobby or a
that you really love to do onyour off time, or a book that
you're reading or something funthat you like to do.
Brian Reece (37:21):
Well, I'm, I'm a big process nerd, and so my
hobby, of course, is all aboutprocess. And my process of
choice is smoking meat. So I'm abig fan of Texas style barbecue.
Oh, nice. Uh, which, for fans ofbarbecue, will know there are
many variables and many hoursspent in the making of good
(37:41):
barbecue. And so from for me,it's, you know, on Wednesday
night, unwrapping that brisket,trimming off the fat, salting
it, getting it in the in thefridge, letting it sit, do its
thing for, you know, a few days,night before the smoke, getting
it out, rubbing it down withwith a nice rub, and getting it
all ready, waking up super earlyat like, you know, three in the
(38:02):
morning to get that smokergoing, building that fire just
right to last for 12 hours, andthen getting that thing on there
and kicking back and watching itgo. But it's, you know, you can
imagine, with all those steps inthat process, there's a lot of
lot of fun tweaking that youhave to the recipe.
Stephen McLain (38:17):
So do you use a wood, a particular type of wood.
Brian Reece (38:21):
I'm a big fan of mesquite charcoal. Okay, gotcha,
yep. So it's, it's, it'scharcoal. It's not pellets.
It's, you know, proper lumpcharcoal. But it's, it's old
school, you know, really got tobabysit that thing to keep the
the temperature in range. Yeah.
Stephen McLain (38:37):
Now, how many hours do you smoke? Smoke it?
We're old school in
Brian Reece (38:41):
some ways, and advanced in others. I have an AI
thermometer that I use. So Iheard this analogy one time. A
lot of recipes are written as ifyou were giving somebody
directions that said, get on theroad, put your accelerator
halfway down, and go for threehours. Okay, that's the very
typical recipes are written,right? Instead of that, you
(39:03):
know, I like to be data driven.
So I'm bringing that brisket upto two, three degrees, however.
Long that takes eight hours, 10hours, 12 hours. Get it ready,
two or three, and then we restit until it it comes back down
to about 95 and she's ready togo. Oh, wow,
Stephen McLain (39:19):
that sounds good. Now I want some brisket.
Steve, what kind of hobby orsomething? Tell us a bit more
about yourself. Something youlike to do.
Steve Crowly (39:28):
I used to like to do a lot of things, and had a
lot of hobbies, and then I hadkids, and so that takes most of
my time now, but I'd say apassion of mine has always been
teaching, and so having childrengives me an opportunity to,
like, teach them cool thingslike how to how to bait a hook
and how to untangle fishing linein your in your reel. Over the
(39:49):
last few years, Brian and I havehad the opportunity to go up to
the Nolan School of Business atCornell, which is like the
premier restaurant school in thecountry, if not the world, and.
And I really find a lot of joyin getting these ideas to people
who are super early in theircareer, when they can go do a
lot of like, quote, unquotedamage to help help with the
(40:11):
transformation. Very good. Yeah,I get to scratch that itch.
Maybe if I, if I were to retire,someday, I'll go teach in a
school, somewhere college orhigh school or something
Stephen McLain (40:22):
nice, very nice.
Hey, so please tell us aboutwhat's next for service physics.
Brian Reece (40:27):
Well, Steve, Steve likes to say that his his
biggest worry in life alwayscomes down to a cycle time and
demand rate problem. And so ourmission at service physics is to
make service work better forpeople. That mission really is
about the people doing the workas well as the people receiving
the service as well as theowners. And so if we can think
(40:49):
about what that could look likeon a on a massive scale, right,
how could all of the servicebusinesses be serving their
customers better? Be creatingbetter jobs, be creating better
business equations for for thebusiness, that's a big mission,
and so Steve's big fear is thatwe just don't have enough time
in our lives to to achieve thatmission. But that's, that's what
(41:10):
we're we're after is a fullindustry transformation, and
we're not going to stop until weget there or die, I guess.
Stephen McLain (41:18):
Awesome. No, please tell us where we can find
service physics. What's thewebsite? Pretty
Steve Crowly (41:23):
simple. Www, dot service physics.com. We are, I
guess, another exciting thing onthe horizon for service physics.
We are overhauling that websitenow for grand release in May,
which will coincide with ourattendance of the National
Restaurant Association's bigshow in Chicago. We'll have a
booth there and hoping toconnect with a lot of industry
(41:45):
folks. We're also going to be inattendance in our sponsorship of
the PROSPER forum 2025 I'mexcited for that, as well as the
PROSPER accelerator, which isfocused on, again, the sort of
people who are just coming intothe industry and have a lot of
potential. Always connect withus on LinkedIn. We're trying to
(42:08):
get better about keeping oursocials up to date. But you
know, as a as you mentioned,startups are chaotic, and
sometimes we we lose focus whenwe get busy, but we're trying to
be better there as well.
Stephen McLain (42:20):
Awesome. Very good. And you also mentioned an
app earlier.
Steve Crowly (42:25):
Yeah, please download our app if you'd like
to answer these questions aboutcapacity, throughput, machine
and labor utilization, they canbe the great equalizer. You
know, the restaurant industry inparticular is known for every
field operator thinking theydon't have enough labor, and
every owner or senior leaderthinking we're over allocating
(42:45):
labor, and it's the greatequalizer in that conversation.
And the fact of the matter is,is that everybody is everybody
is wrong, and the data willpoint us in the right direction.
Absolutely,
Stephen McLain (42:56):
I completely agree with that. Brian, Steve,
thank you so much for joining uson the finance leader podcast. I
appreciate it. I wish you guysboth the best of luck going
forward and what you guys areoffering with service physics
and the best to your team. Iappreciate it. Thank you so
much. Thanks,
Steve Crowly (43:11):
Stephen. Thank you. Stephen.
Brian Reece (43:12):
It was great.
Really appreciate it. Now.
Stephen McLain (43:15):
I really enjoyed my time with Brian and Steve. I
learned a lot from both of them.
Now, here are a few highlights Iwant to share before I close.
Number one, do your taskprocesses make sense? Your
processes may be hurting yourbusiness. A badly developed
process, or a process not beingfollowed properly, may be
(43:35):
costing you productivity, whichthen costs you top line revenue
and that leads to a lower bottomline. Pay attention to your
processes number two, leadingand lagging indicators. Many
businesses, of course, use salesas a key lagging indicator. But
let's start analyzing the keyleading indicators before the
(43:56):
sales occur, so you canunderstand why your sales are
not where you want them to be,which can give you the
opportunity to take actionearlier in the cycle. Number
three, invite your financeleaders into your key business
activities. Ensure your financeteam is involved directly in key
meetings so they can help youwith better forecasting and
(44:19):
people planning, for example.
And finally, number four,utilize financial results to
drive the business. Brian andSteve discovered that there was
better understanding in theirown business at the quarterly
financial update, when everyonewas given information up front
in the form of a podcast plus apresentation, and then they use
(44:43):
the actual meeting as a highquality Q and A session, which
has proven to be very effectiveoverall, with more understanding
for the entire team. Now pleasevisit service physics.com for
more information. Also downloadtheir app. The links will be. In
the show notes, thank you againto Brian and Steve for joining
(45:03):
me on the podcast. Good luck toyou both, and to service
physics. I hope you enjoyed thefinance leader podcast. You can
find this episode wherever youlisten to podcast. If this
episode helped you today, pleaseshare with a colleague until
next time, you can check outmore resources at financeleader
academy.com and sign up for myweekly updates so you don't miss
(45:24):
an episode of the podcast, andnow go lead your team and I'll
see you next time. Thank you.
You.
This week, I am sharing an interview with the co
founders of service physics,Brian Reese and Steve Crowley.
Service physics is dedicated tohelping corporate leaders and
business owners in transformingtheir companies without
sacrificing employeesatisfaction, they show you, not
(00:26):
only with data, but visibleevidence that your processes may
be costing you. Brian and Stevealso share valuable startup
business advice in how theyutilize their finance teams to
make better decisions for theirown business. Please enjoy the
episode. Welcome to the financeleader podcast where leadership
is bigger than the numbers. I amyour host. Stephen McLain, this
(00:49):
is the podcast for developingleaders in finance and
accounting. Please considerfollowing me on Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram andLinkedIn. My usernames and the
links are in this episode's shownotes. Thank you. This is
episode number 137, now let'sget right to the discussion with
Brian and Steve. Please enjoyboth Brian and Steve had
(01:12):
previously led teams atStarbucks and in Heiser bush
with a focus of applying leanprinciples to foster
transformation with the end goalof better customer experiences.
Brian and Steve, thank you forjoining me today. We want to
hear more about you, so pleasetell us about yourself. Brian,
you can start. Yeah,
Brian Reece (01:31):
thanks a lot.
Stephen, great to be on thepodcast today. Thanks for having
us. Yeah, as you said, cofounder and principal consultant
with service physics here, alongwith Steve, we've been doing
this together as service physicsfor about six years. But
actually, you know, ourrelationship goes back over 10
years ago to Starbucks. As youmentioned, I'm based in upstate
New York. I've got twodaughters, six and four. Just
(01:54):
love being in the outdoors andconsulting with service
businesses.
Stephen McLain (02:00):
Awesome. Steve,
Steve Crowly (02:03):
yeah. Stephen, thanks for having us on the
podcast. Really great to behere. Steve Crowley, based in
Des Moines, Iowa, though I'velived all over the country over
the course of this journey.
Other co founder service physicsprincipal consultant, aka Brian,
better half and chiefStoryteller here in the company.
I also am here with my family. Ihave two boys to counter.
(02:24):
Brian's two girls. They're 10and three, and they keep me
busy. All
Stephen McLain (02:30):
right, awesome.
We definitely want to hear moreabout service physics, and
please highlight the servicethat you provide and then how it
benefits your customers.
Steve Crowly (02:40):
Yeah, I might start by telling a little bit of
a story about how we ended uphere. And so Brian and I met
working at Starbucks, CoffeeCompany, around the time of the
great financial crisis, whenStarbucks was in a bit of hot
water that, you know, the stockprice was in a position where,
had there been any liquidity inthe market, it certainly would
(03:00):
have been acquired, and duringthat time, had been
experimenting with leanmanufacturing principles in the
roasting plants at the company.
And when the economy started toshift and operations started to
feel the pressure, the sort oflike chief strategist of the
company moved that function andall those learnings from the
roasting facility intooperations, and that's where
(03:22):
Brian and I were exposed to itfor the first time, really
taking a good hard look at theway that people were doing the
work to brew the coffee, toserve the customers, identifying
where waste was, and thendesigning better ways, which we
eventually cobbled together intoa full service delivery system
that helped transform thatcompany out of a time of great
peril into a time of greatfortune. And so at that point in
(03:45):
Starbucks history, they were inthe single digit 1000s, and
today, Star sand at about 40,000locations across the globe. So
that would have been possiblewithout that transformation
having been exposed to that,Brian and I found ourselves
working together again, buildinga hospitality business from the
ground up. So over five years,we built a business with
(04:08):
Anheuser Busch in Bev of about550 bars and restaurants across
the globe, and really got ourfirst experience in a more of a
consulting role. And during thattime, had come on to this idea
that Lean thinking and theprinciples and techniques
associated with it were prettybroad and prevented a lot of
organizations from applying themfully and transforming and we
(04:31):
came up with this concept of aminimum effective dose of Lean
thinking that you could give toa restaurant operator and in a
very short period of time watchthem start to solve real
problems and drive that businessforward. It was during that time
together, Brian and I were onthe road with a training that we
had developed called servicephysics, which was about a 90
(04:51):
minute workshop training that wewould conduct in like kitchens
or back offices of restaurantsthat. Culminated with running
experiments in the restaurantduring peak periods, where to
bring that team through,collecting some data, forming
some hypothesis about how we canmake things better, taking a few
loops through the Plan, Do,Check, Act cycle, and then sort
(05:12):
of watching their blinders comeoff. And during one of these
experiences, actually, on theside of a mountain in a national
park in Patagonia, Argentina,came to the conclusion that this
was too good to be reserved forthe biggest beer company in the
galaxy and the biggest CoffeeCompany in the galaxy when 90
plus percent of the industry issmall and medium sized business.
(05:33):
Mom and pops are reallysuffering and having challenges
making that equation between lowmargins, low wages and poor
customer experiences lookdifferently. And so we decided
to flip the script on that bygoing back to New York, starting
a company that was six yearsago, and now we are supporting a
lot of companies who peopleinteract with every day, some
(05:53):
fortune 500 players in bothhealthcare and hospitality.
We've got a team of about 20folks working in some capacity
around the country and someother parts of the world, and
we're starting to see the seedsof transformation for the
industry take hold. Oh,
Stephen McLain (06:10):
very nice. So I'm very curious, that 90 minute
workshop, when you were with anHeiser bullish, is that correct?
That's correct. So going fromthat 90 minute workshop you did,
what do you do in servicephysics? How did you expand
that? What are you offering?
Steve Crowly (06:27):
Now, we don't like to use the C word consulting,
because working in those bigcompanies, we had exposure to a
lot of consulting firms thatwe're just not joyful to work
with. We like to often say thatwe do consulting wrong. Okay, we
are not dropping PowerPointdecks and walking away and
wishing you luck with therecommendations that we've put
(06:47):
into place, but we put a greatemphasis on going to sea and so
we grew up in, you know, sort ofthe early days of COVID. Our we
don't have a corporate officethat people go to work to every
day. Our corporate office is ourclients, what we call gembas, or
the place where the actual workhappens. We put a lot of
emphasis on going there tocollect data and talk to people,
(07:09):
to identify the real problems,and then to experiment our way
into better ways standardizethat work and then help the team
think through how they mightpackage the solutions to the
problems that they have, andthen scale them across, you
know, hundreds, if not, 1000s oflocations. Oh,
Stephen McLain (07:25):
very nice. Tell me a little bit more about that
experimentation. What actuallyare you doing?
Brian Reece (07:30):
We're out in those restaurants, collecting data,
trying to figure out ways tocreate a better customer
experience, maybe moving fasterthrough the line, having a
higher quality product or abetter personal interaction with
with one of the team members,really thinking through how that
customer experience can beimproved, and then working our
(07:52):
way backward into the operation,to think about the work the
employees have to do to createthat experience right, making
that work as easy, as joyful, asfriction free as possible. So
we've got employees doing easy,joyful work, creating great
customer experiences, right? Andyou put those two things
together, happy people, happycustomers, and that always flows
(08:15):
down through the to the bottomline of the business. Very nice.
Stephen McLain (08:18):
You had mentioned restaurants. Is that
your typical customer, or areyou also doing other type of
hospitality businesses?
Steve Crowly (08:25):
What we've come to understand is that these
techniques, which we, you know,sort of borrowed from
manufacturing, apply to almostany industry that has customers,
and even those that don't. Atthe end of the day, everybody
just doing something in serviceof somebody else. And when you
think about the way that workhappens using people's hands,
(08:45):
heads and hearts, and you applysome of these principles, it's
not always a one to onetranslation, but the principles
still hold. I think when we whenwe started out, we saw ourselves
as you know, squarely in therestaurant industry, it wasn't
long, maybe about a year or yearand a few months into this
(09:06):
journey, when we were contactedby a fortune 500 healthcare
company. I didn't take the callseriously at all. In fact, I
think I took it from the stoopof my apartment in Queens and a
hooded sweatshirt with a cup ofcoffee in my hand, and when
asked if we could help, I said,Well, we don't do healthcare,
but I'm happy to talk to you.
We've now been working with thatcompany for, you know, little
over four years. Oh, nicehelping, helping them lead. What
(09:28):
I what I think just won't be atransformation of that health
care company, but will be atransformation of health care
more holistically, with some ofthe things that we're learning
and working to publish inoperations journals.
Stephen McLain (09:44):
Nice, very nice.
Do you particularly work withthe operations side, or are you
also working with the CFOs onthe finance side?
Brian Reece (09:53):
The CFOs always want to know what we're going to
do for them, right? You know, Italked about making the work
more joyful. People creatingbetter customer experiences. And
then, you know, you talked alittle bit about what kind of
experimenting we do. And so weknow, you know, in order for any
of these solutions to see thelight of day, there has to be a
an ROI associated with the work.
So a lot of what we do, and alot of the data that we collect
(10:17):
is to demonstrate not just theimproved customer experience,
not just the improved workflows,but also how that's going to
trickle down to the bottom linefor the business. And actually,
often we're focused on top lineimprovement, which I think is
pretty unique for consultants. Alot of consultants go after cost
cutting and are really focusedon, you know, things like
(10:39):
reducing labor costs or cost ofgoods, we actually have found a
niche for ourselves and reallythinking through tactical ways
that the operation can drive topline. And so it's not about
marketing necessarily. It'sabout taking advantage of the
customer demand that you havealready. And so when we've
interacted with CFOs, we usuallyget kind of this reaction of,
(11:01):
oh, you're not going to show mehow I'm going to cut labor or
cut cost of goods. You'reactually going to show me how I
can make more money. And thathas has really been a game
changer for all very good,especially when talking to CFOs.
Stephen McLain (11:16):
Oh, absolutely.
You guys talked aboutparticularly on your offerings,
you want to go and use thoseLean principles. Now, how do you
use those Lean principles tohelp organizations achieve that
transformation?
Steve Crowly (11:30):
The one thing it always comes back to is problem
solving, okay, and time and timeagain, and once you become aware
of it, becomes infuriating howoften we start solutioning
without understanding whatproblem we were trying to solve
in the first place. It's socritical, in fact, that we've
(11:50):
now developed training that wedo with our partners to help
them hone the problem solvingskills of their teams. Because
without that, the transformationcan't take hold. I think one
example, and sort of like at thebase of that set of Lean
principles that we that we bringto bear, there are also a lot of
(12:11):
techniques, and all of themreally center around the work
that people are doing thatprovides the value to the
customer. And we have somemantras that come up time and
time again related to that. Forexample, motion is not equal to
work. Okay, motion looks a lotlike work, but it actually
provides no value to thecustomer, guest, patient,
(12:33):
whoever that is. And so one ofthe very early things we do, and
I this is one of my favoritetechniques, because the barrier
to entry is a pen and a piece ofpaper, something called the
spaghetti diagram, where youvery quickly draw some circles
and squares and rectangles on apiece of paper to depict the
area that people are working in.
And then you put pen to paper,you trace the worker as they
walk around. If you do this withan operator, invariably, within
(12:54):
30 seconds, they're askingquestions like, Why is she going
over there? Why did he go overthere. And we always stop them
and say, Don't worry about that.
Yet they went over there to getsomething the right question is,
why is that thing over there?
And so what we can then do issay, let's look at the work
space and the way that thingsare organized to reduce that
motion. And it may seem trivial,but if you think about, you
(13:17):
know, an entry level restaurantworker making $20 an hour. If
10% of everything they do iswalking, that's $2 an hour we're
attributing to walking.
Absolutely save that across80,000 employees, 350 days a
year. What is right up to right?
And let's say for a mid sizedcompany, that's, you know, a $5
million opportunity cost ofwalking for people in this one
(13:40):
station. How many restaurantswould you have to open to drop
$5 million to the bottom line?
Well, let's say 10 or 12restaurants. That's 10 or 12
sites that I have to scout,build a location into, filled
with equipment, inventory, ateam of 25 people train them, a
district manager, all theoverhead to support so suddenly
(14:00):
think about, you know, it's justa little bit of walking, but
walking isn't work
Stephen McLain (14:05):
absolutely. So when you when you mentioned the
issue about motion, I think youboth know that I served in the
Army, that reminded me of acommander that I had when I was
a lieutenant. He was anengineer. So we always talked
about work equals force timesdistance. So the opposite of
that was that if you apply a lotof force and don't move, you
haven't done any work. Give me agreat memory there of you
(14:27):
talking about motion when youstart to do the big calculation
and add up all the it probablyreally amazes those leaders,
actually, how much money iscosting when you start to look
at those motion studies, whatare those follow on
conversations that you guys havewhen you start to show those big
numbers?
Steve Crowly (14:45):
There's often disbelief to start and what this
fortune 500 healthcare company Iwas referring to earlier, there
was a senior leader when weproposed, sort of the problem,
the opportunity size and thesolution, or the way we might go
after. And said, Whoa, wait. Ithink what you're saying is you
can turn water into wine. Andthe thing is, about these Lean
(15:08):
principles is they are simple,but not easy, right? And so if
there's often a little bit oflike disbelief, they're often
counter to human instinct, ahuman instinct, because we're
hunters and gatherers and we'refit for survival, we're trying
to surround ourselves withinventory, surround ourselves
with labor. Give ourselves morespace. Like Nope, we should need
(15:29):
less inventory, less labor, lessspace. Right, right fit for
survival, instead of surroundingourselves by all the excess
Absolutely,
Stephen McLain (15:39):
when you're doing this analysis and you're
helping your customer, you mustalso be relying on some
particular metrics, you know, inparticular, either some leading
or lagging indicators. Can you?
Can you take us through that alittle bit? I love the
Steve Crowly (15:54):
the conversation about leading and lagging
indicators, and particularly theindustries we work in, they're
highly focused on laggingindicators. I mean, obviously
sales is a key metric for most,you know, service based
organizations, but you know, youdon't know what your sales were
until after they've happened,right? And so, to your point,
(16:15):
what? What are some of thethings that contribute to those
sales? That's the kind of datathat we actually go after and
help organizations to see and beable to measure. So most
organizations that we work withare stuck in the lagging
indicator space through some ofthe techniques Steve was
describing, looking at laborutilization, looking at motion,
(16:35):
looking at how long is the lineat peak. You know that's that's
not something that a lot ofrestaurants actually know that,
but that's your leadingindicator for whether or not you
have unmet demand that you canactually go and and capture. So
that's kind of how we'rethinking about we can help you
drive sales by improving thetime it takes for the customer
(16:57):
to work work through theordering and payment process at
the register. So if we canreduce the time that the
customer spending at theregister, still make it a great
experience, but just make itquick, we can actually get more
customers through that registerand capture more of that unmet
demand. But most organizationswe work with don't understand,
don't see those leadingindicators of what's the time
(17:18):
that the customer is spending atthe register. How many customers
are? Are there in line? They'rejust looking at those lagging,
lagging indicators, like thesales that they were able to
ring through yesterday. If I canbuild on that a little bit,
quick plug for our app in the wehave it for Android and Apple,
you can just go to the app storeand download it, but that app is
designed to help us answer threereally important questions
(17:43):
before where to start doing thework. The first question is,
really, what is the currentproduction capacity of this
restaurant, of this healthcareclinic, of whatever? So here we
do a lot of process timing, andwe capture something called line
off rate, like, what is the paceat which something can come off
the line or out of the kitchenor out of the window. The next
question is, how much equipmentcapacity exists across the
(18:05):
system and with machineutilization and every restaurant
operation that we work with isalways talking about like, more
fryers, bigger ovens, more grillspace. They want bigger, bigger,
bigger. And we've not found theneed to introduce any larger or
more equipment in a restaurant,and with now have this data from
(18:25):
over, you know, 1000s and 1000sof restaurants, and probably,
like, 10s, if not hundreds of1000s of hours. And we always
capture this data at peak. Thethird question is, how much
human capacity exists across thesystem, right? So when you put
the humans in the machinestogether, that those are the
constraints of the total systemcapacity, which was the first
(18:47):
question. And with this app, youdo some studies, and you don't
need to do much to getsomething. I mean, you're not
going to have statisticallysignificant data, but you're
going to get a pretty goodfinger in the wind about what
your current bottleneck is. Youcan start to like, go unlock
them, and you put them alltogether. It's all about
creating more capacity to dowhatever you capacity is
amazing, because you can eithertake it to the bank, if that's
(19:07):
your need, you can invest it intraining, you can invest it in
customer experience. We'veworked with some restaurant and
healthcare companies that haveimproved their quality metrics
by over 100% organizationactually improved by 800% by
just reading all capacity andmore time to do work in the
right way. Wow, that's amazing.
Stephen McLain (19:27):
What I'm picking up on, though, a little bit, was
that once you start to dig intothat data, I'm very curious
about the leadership that you'reworking with, they tend to
operate more from the gut,especially when you're talking
about adding more fryers andmore equipment, and then then
they're really surprised by thatdata once you show it to them,
Steve Crowly (19:47):
I'd say always there's a new product on the
market that we've become a bigfan of, which is the Ray Ban
meta glasses that have a camerainstalled in them will now put.
Am on workers doing the work?
Oh, wow. And then as we'resharing, because oftentimes
we're when you're talking tosenior leaders, you're not doing
(20:07):
it in the setting of therestaurant. You're not in the
gemba where the work happens. Sopeople have all kinds of myths
that they tell themselves aboutthe way things go down. But if
we can show them a three minutevideo of somebody working on a
grill, or somebody working on amake line, and they see how
disorganized that is. Humansdon't naturally understand how
to sequence their activity witha machine so that it's like a
(20:30):
ballet. We tend let's get thatmachine busy and then go on to
the next thing. And now themachine is done, and it's either
burning the thing or it has somekind of auto eject. And now it's
just sitting there, but that'sidle. But what can we do to just
keep the machines busy? Imentioned most motion is not
equal to work as one mantra,another mantra is keep the
machines busy.
Stephen McLain (20:52):
Wow, right?
That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Ireally like what you're talking
about. Your that the applicationof data, and then you show the
the leadership exactly what'shappening. And then there's so
there's this epiphany, and thenyou can start to really start to
do some transformation. Is thatwhat you're finding That's
right, yeah, amazing. You soundso proud and happy of the
founding of service physics. AndI want to delve into a little
(21:15):
bit about startup leadership,because I always like to talk to
founders. How do you get whatyou what you want to do, off the
ground? Again, startups seemvery chaotic, so how do you what
are the very first things you'redoing, other than like, seed
funding? What are you doing tolike, align your team with that
same vision, the direction, whattasks are you working on? What
are you doing first, and how youstaying focused?
Brian Reece (21:39):
I love talking startups before starting service
physics. Actually, Steve and Ihad the opportunity at Anheuser
Busch InBev to part toparticipate in, like a they
called it an accelerator, butreally it was a business
incubator. And so we learned alot of those kind of techniques
that you would learn readingLean Startup, or something like
(22:01):
that. And actually, we took alot of that to heart when we
started the business. I thinkSteve mentioned it a little bit,
but after we decided to, youknow, there was a big industry
opportunity, we had this gutfeeling. We knew that there was
a better equation for the peopleworking in the industry, for the
for the employees and for theowners, but we didn't know for
sure, because we didn't have anydata. So we went back to New
(22:23):
York, and we actually kind ofdid some trial runs. We started
offering our services for freeto really understand, you know,
what was the market out there,what was the product we were
trying to sell, and what, whatwas, what would the market bear
in terms of paying for it? Andso we, you know, I highly
recommend doing, you know,whatever you can to get those,
(22:44):
those signals for the market andwhat the what the market wants,
and what it's willing to pay. Sowe talk about the DVF framework,
desirability, viability andfeasibility. So we want to think
through desirability is, do wehave something the customer
(23:07):
actually wants? Is there aproblem we can solve or a value
we can create? Viability, youraudience will love. Can this
thing make money? Can we chargeenough money for this thing to
actually be profitable and thenfeasibility? Can we build a
team? Can we design a system?
Can we write some code toactually deliver on the
desirability and the viabilityof the business? And so I think
we spent probably the first yearand a half, two, three years,
maybe even still today,stumbling around, trying to,
trying to create the balancebetween the d, v and f for this
(23:28):
business. But I'm, I'm superproud to say, to your point, you
know, we're really proud of whatwe've built. We have not had to
take on funding, because westarted from day one, really
thinking through the businessmodel and making sure that we
had something that would turnthe economic engine that being
said, Steve was it three yearsof doing this before we paid
(23:49):
ourselves. So I think to someextent, we self funded, we
bootstrapped, but it ispossible, especially in a
service business like ours, toget off the ground without a
whole lot of money, as long asyou're willing to, you know,
sacrifice a little bit for thevision. You know, absolutely,
Steve Crowly (24:07):
if I can add a little bit to the sacrifice
story, because I think this is asomething that entrepreneurs
need to hear during the earlydays. So 2019, and, you know,
totally different. It was a preCOVID world, Brian and I held on
to our w2 day jobs, and so whatoperations looked like for us
was setting up video cameras inrestaurants around Manhattan in
(24:30):
the morning, going to work from830 to noon, meeting up for
lunch, going back to therestaurant, switching out the SD
cards and batteries And thecameras, letting them run
through lunch and into theafternoon, and then going to
pick them up on our way home,getting home, doing dinner,
putting the kids to bed, andthen crunching data from the
(24:50):
videos, right, and then rinseand repeat, and then doing like,
all the whatever powerpointingor experiment designs or
whatever on the weekends. Andthis was like, I. That was
months and months and months ofthat grind until COVID hit, and
then suddenly we had, like, anew problem to solve. We went
dark like we had clients whowere like, We don't know if
we're going to be able to payyou, let alone let you into our
(25:13):
restaurant. We're like, totallyget it. But then it was a matter
of maybe four or five weeksbefore everybody realized that
their five year digital strategyneeded to be a five week digital
strategy, right? And stilltrying to manage, you know, the
family, the the day job and soforth. But it wasn't long before
it became clear that there was athere, there, and we're able to,
(25:34):
sort of, like, break free fromthat, but again, a few years of
really, you know, pinchingpennies on the on the home
front, in order to make surethat we could fund a team in
order to meet the demand that weknew was there. Yeah, that's
Stephen McLain (25:46):
awesome. Now you don't have to deal with any kind
of venture capitalist, so that'sreally good. So as the firm's
leaders, what are you focused oneach day?
Brian Reece (25:56):
I think the game, at least as I understand it, is
building the machine. So, youknow, we're, we're operations
consultants, we understandsystems and how that, you know,
the full system needs tofunction in order to deliver the
result. And so steadily, youknow, over the last six years,
we've been building thedifferent components of the
(26:18):
system that that is thebusiness. And so when we started
out, Steve and I were literallywearing every single hat that
there was to wear, the financehat, as well as the operations
hat, as well as the marketinghat and the sales hat and the,
you know, on and on. And aswe've grown, you know, a lot of
our time is spent figuring outhow to divest ourselves of the
(26:39):
various hats we still aware. SoI would say, you know, over the
last couple years, we've reallyfocused on building an amazing
team that can deliver for ourclients in the way that we
would, you know, want the brandto show up. Built a great and
amazing delivery team. And thenrecently, we've actually been
able to put together a verysmall finance team. So we have a
(27:01):
head of finance, we have abookkeeper, we have a CPA. They
keep us out of trouble, keep uson the straight and narrow, and
prevent a lot of fire drills. Tobe really honest. There were a
lot of times when, you know, Ican remember one June and I was
looking at, oh, crap, like, allthese invoices just came in, but
we haven't gotten paid yet. Andso it was a mad dash to, you
(27:22):
know, ring up our clients andtry to get the money to come in.
We haven't had a fire drill likethat in a couple years, because
we've got folks that are on topof that stuff for us and built
systems and processes for us tostay on top of those things. And
so I think, you know, just toget back to your question, a lot
of what we're doing is figuringout, how do we, how do we build
the systems that will enablethis company to run as a as a
(27:44):
machine, and not require Brianor Steve to be in every meeting,
in every decision, in everyprocess and making it go?
Stephen McLain (27:52):
That's the key, right there? Absolutely. If I
can
Steve Crowly (27:56):
add a little bit to that, there's really two
things that I wake up thinkingabout every morning. One of them
is sort of a recent learningbased on coaching that Brian and
I have been receiving from ourexternal coach, our external
lean coach, which is, you canalways be more clear, and most
things break down as a result ofnot being clear enough. It's
(28:18):
easy to just wake up, go to workand start talking about, talking
about, but that's confusing. Canbe misinterpreted. And I think
about how many times we go to atask on the Kanban board and
have to click into it and try toremember what the heck it was
that we said that we were goingto do, and who has the context
on this? And like, that's just afailure moment. It creates a lot
(28:39):
of waste, and it's it's badenough for us, but the cascading
effect as the company grows isreally tremendous. The other
thing, and this is a little bitrelated to what Brian said about
building the systems, it'simportant to remember that
people are a part of thatsystem. Our product is our
people, and this year, ourmantra has been to build the
people that will build thecompany that will transform the
(29:01):
industry. And so it doubled downon investing in our people and
our practice, because ourpractice is evolving. We're
learning all the time aboutbetter ways to translate these
concepts, apply these concepts,and so everybody's got to stay
fresh all the time. We put a lotof emphasis on collaboration as
a team. We do a lot ofcontinuous improvement hours
every week, on looking at ourown work and the way that we do
(29:22):
things, and then also looking atthe client work and better ways
to refine these like chaotic andcomplex problems, very good. And
so, yeah, I just double down onthat people and people and
clarity. That's awesome.
Stephen McLain (29:33):
Brian, you had talked gave us a little bit of
an introduction to how you workwith your finance and accounting
team. Help us understand how youuse finance and accounting in
your business, and what's yourrelationship with them. And how
do you beyond like financialstatements, what do you how do
you use finance to leverage yourdecision making? I
Brian Reece (29:55):
think you know sort of the answer I might start with
here is, I. We're a little bitlike the the cobbler with no
shoes. We're, we're experts, andwe've built a team of experts
in, you know, helping folksoperationalize their business
process, improvement andbuilding systems, tools and
training for those things.
We've, we've been slower to dothat for ourselves. I think this
(30:19):
is an area where bringing in ahead of finance has really
helped to systematize a lot ofthe things that we had been
doing or had, you know, somesome really basic processes
around and really turn them intosustainable processes for us.
And I think the that when I saythe Emperor with no clothes, or
(30:39):
the cobbler with no shoes. Theonly metrics we have today are
our finance metrics, and we'remaking much better and more
informed decisions by looking ata key set of metrics every week.
But our head of finance isreally like every week,
literally improving thedashboarding, literally
improving the availability ofthose numbers in in real time,
so that we're crystallizing ourvision and our ability to
(31:02):
understand the business. So it'skind of this effort of
continuous improvement thatwe're going through. And so
while you know, a lot of ourbusiness is focused on helping
other organizations find thoseleading indicators, we're still
very much appreciative of ourability to look at our financial
metrics, and a key thing for usis our forecast. And so we spend
a lot of time thinking about ourforecast and the way that we
(31:25):
generate the forecast, and then,you know, not just sort of using
statistics to arrive at aforecast, but actually almost
doing like a bottoms upforecast. Let's look at all the
clients that we have in thefunnel. Let's think about how
much we might be able to chargethose clients. Think about which
months we're going to issuethose invoices and actually
build a forecast from thebottoms up. And so we've
(31:47):
actually integrated our financeour head of finance sits in our
sales meetings and is takingthat real time input into the
forecast to help us really havea better bead on on our
business. Similarly, our financelead also sits in our weekly
people planning so he'sintimately aware with our hiring
plans, our plans to use, youknow, part time contractors, and
(32:10):
building all of that into ourforecast in real time to allow
us to then on on Mondaymornings, really look at the
state of the business and bearmed, you know, with whatever
actions we need to take. Oh,very
Stephen McLain (32:23):
nice. I like that. So what type of
conversations do you have withyour head of finance?
Steve Crowly (32:28):
I might add, maybe just a little bit of like
structural context. And I thinkthat'll will help answer that
question. Okay, we operate asscrums. So each project team
functions as a scrum, but thenwe treat our finance function
also as its own Scrum. Nicescrums come together weekly for
(32:50):
a roadmap session and daily forwhat we call incidents and high
rollers and the scrum of scrums.
Teiciona said, you know, data,of course, is important, but I
prefer facts, the data inisolation, without the context
of everything else that'shappening in the business is not
good for decision making. So thefact that we have operations,
people, finance, Brian and I atthe table, surfacing and
(33:11):
explaining, you know, why thingsare happening, or why the
forecasts look like this, orwhat will be the consequence? I
think a lot of the I try toanswer your question more
specifically. Now, a lot of theconversations are scenario
planning. A lot of what happens?
What if that happens? And thenBrian and I, as as you know,
sort of like lean coaches forthe scrum of Scrum teams is
(33:34):
trying to help the teamarticulate things as problems.
And back to that originalcomment about problem statements
and problem solving being veryimportant, what's the gap? So if
this is our forecast, what's thegap in May, what's the gap in
June, what's the gap in July?
And then we can talk about howwe're going to close that, and
now we've got people andoperations also at the table to
think about how we'll do that.
Excellent.
Stephen McLain (33:54):
I like that so that. So that leads me to
another question, any plans, andthis may be a no any plans to
maybe use AI in the future withthat what if scenario planning?
It's funny.
Brian Reece (34:05):
We've been talking a lot about AI this week in
particular, although I'd sayit's not not a constant topic.
For sure, we haven't yetintegrated AI or even much
advanced statistics or modelinginto our finance specific
analysis, we get a lot ofleverage from AI in the actual
(34:29):
performance of of the consultingwork. And so I'm a big fan of
perplexity. I think Steve's achat GPT user. But what I love
is being able to take that, youknow, structured and
unstructured data, throwing itinto the tool. And so when I say
unstructured, I mean transcriptsfrom calls, scholarly articles,
(34:52):
previous presentations we'vedelivered, we'll put those,
those documents and all of thatcontext into a workspace. You.
Perplexity, and now I use it asa thinking tool to help really
untangle, you know, because alot of the the problems we're
working on are quite complex.
And so we find AI to be a reallygreat thinking tool to help us
simplify, take a very complexsort of problem space and turn
(35:14):
it into some key components thatwe can then, you know, better
describe to our clients, youknow, how, how we would propose
to help. And so I think we get alot of benefit out of AI as a
thinking partner, more so than aany kind of, like, analytical or
predictive modeling kind ofcapability. Okay,
Stephen McLain (35:35):
I like that.
That's excellent. That's a greatmove forward. I like that.
That's great to hear. I
Steve Crowly (35:39):
can think of one specific example where we are
leveraging AI with finance, andit might not be Brian somewhere
where our brains would goimmediately, but we have a good
habit around what we call aquarterly pulse, where we bring
the team together to go overwhere we are financially, where
we are operationally, and sortof paint a quick look back and
then paint a picture of a lookforward early on, that meeting
(36:02):
would look a lot like a 90minute session where Brian
Steven, some other folks weretalking to the team, and then,
if we were lucky, we'd have fiveor 10 minutes at the end to do
like an open forum and answerquestions. But what we learned
was the most value actually cameout of the Q, a component. And
so pivoted to now, and it'sstill, I think we're about to go
through our third like iterationon this actually tomorrow
(36:23):
morning, is we go through and webuild the PowerPoint deck for
that, that readout, as if wewere going to present it to the
team, and then we feed it intonotebook, LM, and have it
generate a podcast. Oh, nice. Wesend the podcast to the team as
a pre listen, and put thePowerPoint slide in a digital
whiteboard and have them likepre listen to the 15 minute
(36:47):
podcast and then take any noteswith post its on any parts of
the presentation that they wantto talk about. And now tomorrow,
we'll spend 990 minutes justanswering questions instead of
having them digest thatinformation. That
Stephen McLain (36:58):
is amazing. I love hearing that. That's a
great tip. I really like that.
That's now that sounds very likeit's very effective. Has that
proven to be so super
Steve Crowly (37:07):
effective? Of course, is always a better way.
So we go to school on thattomorrow. Yeah.
Stephen McLain (37:11):
Awesome. I love that. Tell us about a hobby or a
that you really love to do onyour off time, or a book that
you're reading or something funthat you like to do.
Brian Reece (37:21):
Well, I'm, I'm a big process nerd, and so my
hobby, of course, is all aboutprocess. And my process of
choice is smoking meat. So I'm abig fan of Texas style barbecue.
Oh, nice. Uh, which, for fans ofbarbecue, will know there are
many variables and many hoursspent in the making of good
(37:41):
barbecue. And so from for me,it's, you know, on Wednesday
night, unwrapping that brisket,trimming off the fat, salting
it, getting it in the in thefridge, letting it sit, do its
thing for, you know, a few days,night before the smoke, getting
it out, rubbing it down withwith a nice rub, and getting it
all ready, waking up super earlyat like, you know, three in the
(38:02):
morning to get that smokergoing, building that fire just
right to last for 12 hours, andthen getting that thing on there
and kicking back and watching itgo. But it's, you know, you can
imagine, with all those steps inthat process, there's a lot of
lot of fun tweaking that youhave to the recipe.
Stephen McLain (38:17):
So do you use a wood, a particular type of wood.
Brian Reece (38:21):
I'm a big fan of mesquite charcoal. Okay, gotcha,
yep. So it's, it's, it'scharcoal. It's not pellets.
It's, you know, proper lumpcharcoal. But it's, it's old
school, you know, really got tobabysit that thing to keep the
the temperature in range. Yeah.
Stephen McLain (38:37):
Now, how many hours do you smoke? Smoke it?
We're old school in
Brian Reece (38:41):
some ways, and advanced in others. I have an AI
thermometer that I use. So Iheard this analogy one time. A
lot of recipes are written as ifyou were giving somebody
directions that said, get on theroad, put your accelerator
halfway down, and go for threehours. Okay, that's the very
typical recipes are written,right? Instead of that, you
(39:03):
know, I like to be data driven.
So I'm bringing that brisket upto two, three degrees, however.
Long that takes eight hours, 10hours, 12 hours. Get it ready,
two or three, and then we restit until it it comes back down
to about 95 and she's ready togo. Oh, wow,
Stephen McLain (39:19):
that sounds good. Now I want some brisket.
Steve, what kind of hobby orsomething? Tell us a bit more
about yourself. Something youlike to do.
Steve Crowly (39:28):
I used to like to do a lot of things, and had a
lot of hobbies, and then I hadkids, and so that takes most of
my time now, but I'd say apassion of mine has always been
teaching, and so having childrengives me an opportunity to,
like, teach them cool thingslike how to how to bait a hook
and how to untangle fishing linein your in your reel. Over the
(39:49):
last few years, Brian and I havehad the opportunity to go up to
the Nolan School of Business atCornell, which is like the
premier restaurant school in thecountry, if not the world, and.
And I really find a lot of joyin getting these ideas to people
who are super early in theircareer, when they can go do a
lot of like, quote, unquotedamage to help help with the
(40:11):
transformation. Very good. Yeah,I get to scratch that itch.
Maybe if I, if I were to retire,someday, I'll go teach in a
school, somewhere college orhigh school or something
Stephen McLain (40:22):
nice, very nice.
Hey, so please tell us aboutwhat's next for service physics.
Brian Reece (40:27):
Well, Steve, Steve likes to say that his his
biggest worry in life alwayscomes down to a cycle time and
demand rate problem. And so ourmission at service physics is to
make service work better forpeople. That mission really is
about the people doing the workas well as the people receiving
the service as well as theowners. And so if we can think
(40:49):
about what that could look likeon a on a massive scale, right,
how could all of the servicebusinesses be serving their
customers better? Be creatingbetter jobs, be creating better
business equations for for thebusiness, that's a big mission,
and so Steve's big fear is thatwe just don't have enough time
in our lives to to achieve thatmission. But that's, that's what
(41:10):
we're we're after is a fullindustry transformation, and
we're not going to stop until weget there or die, I guess.
Stephen McLain (41:18):
Awesome. No, please tell us where we can find
service physics. What's thewebsite? Pretty
Steve Crowly (41:23):
simple. Www, dot service physics.com. We are, I
guess, another exciting thing onthe horizon for service physics.
We are overhauling that websitenow for grand release in May,
which will coincide with ourattendance of the National
Restaurant Association's bigshow in Chicago. We'll have a
booth there and hoping toconnect with a lot of industry
(41:45):
folks. We're also going to be inattendance in our sponsorship of
the PROSPER forum 2025 I'mexcited for that, as well as the
PROSPER accelerator, which isfocused on, again, the sort of
people who are just coming intothe industry and have a lot of
potential. Always connect withus on LinkedIn. We're trying to
(42:08):
get better about keeping oursocials up to date. But you
know, as a as you mentioned,startups are chaotic, and
sometimes we we lose focus whenwe get busy, but we're trying to
be better there as well.
Stephen McLain (42:20):
Awesome. Very good. And you also mentioned an
app earlier.
Steve Crowly (42:25):
Yeah, please download our app if you'd like
to answer these questions aboutcapacity, throughput, machine
and labor utilization, they canbe the great equalizer. You
know, the restaurant industry inparticular is known for every
field operator thinking theydon't have enough labor, and
every owner or senior leaderthinking we're over allocating
(42:45):
labor, and it's the greatequalizer in that conversation.
And the fact of the matter is,is that everybody is everybody
is wrong, and the data willpoint us in the right direction.
Absolutely,
Stephen McLain (42:56):
I completely agree with that. Brian, Steve,
thank you so much for joining uson the finance leader podcast. I
appreciate it. I wish you guysboth the best of luck going
forward and what you guys areoffering with service physics
and the best to your team. Iappreciate it. Thank you so
much. Thanks,
Steve Crowly (43:11):
Stephen. Thank you. Stephen.
Brian Reece (43:12):
It was great.
Really appreciate it. Now.
Stephen McLain (43:15):
I really enjoyed my time with Brian and Steve. I
learned a lot from both of them.
Now, here are a few highlights Iwant to share before I close.
Number one, do your taskprocesses make sense? Your
processes may be hurting yourbusiness. A badly developed
process, or a process not beingfollowed properly, may be
(43:35):
costing you productivity, whichthen costs you top line revenue
and that leads to a lower bottomline. Pay attention to your
processes number two, leadingand lagging indicators. Many
businesses, of course, use salesas a key lagging indicator. But
let's start analyzing the keyleading indicators before the
(43:56):
sales occur, so you canunderstand why your sales are
not where you want them to be,which can give you the
opportunity to take actionearlier in the cycle. Number
three, invite your financeleaders into your key business
activities. Ensure your financeteam is involved directly in key
meetings so they can help youwith better forecasting and
(44:19):
people planning, for example.
And finally, number four,utilize financial results to
drive the business. Brian andSteve discovered that there was
better understanding in theirown business at the quarterly
financial update, when everyonewas given information up front
in the form of a podcast plus apresentation, and then they use
(44:43):
the actual meeting as a highquality Q and A session, which
has proven to be very effectiveoverall, with more understanding
for the entire team. Now pleasevisit service physics.com for
more information. Also downloadtheir app. The links will be. In
the show notes, thank you againto Brian and Steve for joining
(45:03):
me on the podcast. Good luck toyou both, and to service
physics. I hope you enjoyed thefinance leader podcast. You can
find this episode wherever youlisten to podcast. If this
episode helped you today, pleaseshare with a colleague until
next time, you can check outmore resources at financeleader
academy.com and sign up for myweekly updates so you don't miss
(45:24):
an episode of the podcast, andnow go lead your team and I'll
see you next time. Thank you.
You.
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