The Last Word

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There is a difference between wanting the right answer and wanting to be the one who thought of it.

Most of us cannot tell the two apart because, from the inside, they feel identical. Both of them look like caring about the outcome.

I spent years consulting on nutrition for dairy farms, which meant I got paid to walk onto somebody else’s operation and tell them what to change. The recommendation was the product, and my name went on it.

So I learned to make it quick or arrive with the plan already made.

There were mornings a herdsman would start telling me what he thought was going wrong with the fresh cows, and I would let him get half a sentence in before I finished it for him in my own words. Instead of supporting him, I tried hard to make it mine.

The question I never said out loud: if he already knows, what are they paying me for?

One of the four walls I write about in The Things We Hide is insensitivity, and it almost never arrives as cruelty. It shows up as a leader who is not listening to you so much as waiting for the gap where his answer goes. A callousness.

The belief holding that wall up was that my value lived in being the source, not in the result.

So I got the last word, over and over, and I got it fast. What I stopped getting was the first one.

You can win every conversation in the room and still be the reason nobody starts one.

Podcast

Matt Friedman started Wing Zone in 1992 with $500 and a phone line in his University of Florida fraternity house kitchen, which the school shut down within a semester for operating without a license. 

He and his partner borrowed $50,000 from their parents, opened a storefront in Gainesville in 1993, and spent the next twenty-seven years building it to more than 140 locations across six countries before selling. 

Now Matt is the Managing Partner at Friedman Consulting, CEO of Epic Wings, and the author of From Frat House to Franchising: The Wing Zone Story.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Matt.

1. Nobody Plans for the Morning After

Starting a company is hard, growing one is harder, and Matt says exiting well is hardest of all. Most owners plan for none of it. He sold at fifty, stayed nine months as a figurehead, then had money in the bank and nothing on the calendar. A watch for himself, a wedding band for his wife, a car for his kids. “Those things are nice. Like, what changes now?” 

It took his wife to say out loud that he had been happier running the company. The question is not what your exit gets you. It is what you do the first Monday nobody needs you at nine. It's all about identity, and the hardest change in succession is changing your identity.

2. Your Job Is Not to Have the Idea

As founder, Matt was the innovator: the most wing flavors, the first boneless wing. Underneath it, he had to be right, and it had to be his. “I don’t actually want the ideas to come from me. I want it to come from others,” he told me. 

His job now is to steward the good ones. Two weeks into Epic Wings, he had sat with thirty franchisees face to face. The old Matt would have walked in listing what each one did wrong. This time, he asked and listened. Try one room this week carrying a question instead of an answer.

3. MVPs Do Not Hang Banners

Looking back at twenty-seven years, Matt asked whether he built it or whether a lot of committed people built it alongside him. Be the MVP and never win a championship, and what did that get you? Most of us would trade five MVPs for one banner. 

He credits a three-legged stool: his franchisees, his team, his suppliers, and admits he undervalued all of it while standing on it. So he wrote the book to say thank you where it would last. The people who built it, you know what they gave. The question is whether they know that you know.

Be Invitational, Not Confrontational

Matt's word for who he is now is steward, and getting there cost him a company, five years, and the version of himself that had to be right.

Anyone who has moved cattle knows how this spreads: the herd moves when one animal goes through the gate, and the rest decide it is safe.

At a construction company, one leader did this work, and the man who noticed brought his whole team in behind him.

At a training academy, a twenty-four-year-old coach brought in his own boss. Nobody was convinced; they observed.

Your organization does not have to be ready. One person does.

Lead Without Hiding Challenge, September 22 through 24. Three days, live with me, naming what you have been protecting.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.

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