Why You Need Non-Negotiables with Paige McPheely

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Paige McPheely. Paige is the founder and CEO of BASE. BASE is the assistant talent intelligence marketplace for tomorrow's leaders. Let me ask you first, Paige, to explain exactly what BASE does and then I will jump into my question.

Paige McPheely: Yes. We are a full stack administrative solution. So we started as a software for assistant organization. We acquired an assistant staffing organization that I started about a decade ago. We blended it all together. Now we've actually built out a very awesome talent ecosystem infrastructure on the backend that uses our decade of data to help us find and match the best talent and arm them with our software.

Matt Blumberg: All right. So if you are a CEO listening to this and you need an EA or you think you might need an EA, Paige and BASE are the ones to go to.

Paige McPheely: We are.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. So here's my question to you. Why do you think it's important for CEOs to have non- negotiables, like red lines? And what are yours? Or how do you think about developing them?

Paige McPheely: Yeah. Definitely. So there are a few different reasons why we think non- negotiables are so important. But at BASE we try to live by this three pillared principle. It's from a book loosely adapted from Amp It Up that we've really, really grabbed onto internally and each of the pillars are in conflict with one another. So the first is we try to have really, really high standards, impeccably high standards. We try to move at a very, very fast pace, faster than maybe we can, so fast that we can't do very many things at once. And in order to do both of those at the same time, you have to have a laser narrow focus. You have to have a singular core focus. And I believe that enable to actually execute against a narrow focus, you have to have guardrails. And that's where these non- negotiables come in, as leaders, certainly, but I think it as anybody in the organization, we're going to be pulled in a million different directions. We're probably going to have 2 million really awesome, great ideas that we want to act on. And I think these guardrails are what can help make sure that you're pointing at your North star, your narrow focus, which is where you should be spending your time.

Matt Blumberg: So do you think of the non- negotiables as for you as the CEO for the organization or some of both?

Paige McPheely: The way that I think about it is for our organization. They certainly apply to me personally. They're more on a professional setting, certainly. I don't know. I'll talk through mine, but I suppose they could apply to my family. But they're things that I think are sort of table stakes that we have to have in place at the organization if we're going to do what we set out to achieve.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. So what are yours?

Paige McPheely: Yeah. So first is culture. We really think of this as your talent magnet. We think this is what enables depth and diversity of thought, but also obviously the talent that we need to execute against our goal. I remember it was actually at High Alpha XO Summit years ago where Brad Feld was talking about how important culture is, and you're not looking for people to match your culture. You're looking for people who are going to expand your culture and push it to grow. And that's where I think the real secret sauce is if you're surrounding yourself with people, yes, who are aligned on that big goal you're trying to achieve, but are going to make sure that you're thinking as big as you possibly can. You're seeing the landmines that might be in your way and hopefully you're being called out on any of the dumb ideas that you have.'Cause there are plenty of those too.

Matt Blumberg: There are. There are more of those than the other kind.

Paige McPheely: Right.

Matt Blumberg: All right. So culture and values is number one. What's number two?

Paige McPheely: Operational excellence. This is also taken from Amp It Up as well, but this idea that it doesn't matter how great your strategy is, none of it matters if you are not set up to actually execute against it. And so this is another stable stakes. So superb execution has to be in place. You have to have people who are able to execute and ideally they're strategic as well. But the execution is really, really core. I focus a lot on, we want drivers at our company, not passengers, people who are going to be able to solve the problems, figure it out. We're a startup so there's so many unanswered questions and all of that comes down to execution.'Cause if you're sitting there waiting for us to give you instruction, then you're me waiting for a long time.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. I think you just identified the pull quote for this episode. Drivers not passengers.

Paige McPheely: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. And you have one more?

Paige McPheely: You can quote Amp It Up for that one too.

Matt Blumberg: Okay.

Paige McPheely: Clearly we talk about that a lot internally. Yeah. So the third, which is really key to what we do as an organization is delegation. I really think this is your superpower. We all know what our skills are and many of us know what our hourly rate is or could probably guess at what it is. Yet most of us spend a lot of our time doing things that we could pay somebody way, way lower than our hourly rate to achieve. And yet they're probably business critical things that have to happen. And so thinking critically about what it is that you're doing, can it be delegated? If it can be delegated, who can take it over? Is it somebody highly skilled that has to have context and ability to access all of the information in your organization? Or is it anybody in your organization could do it? And make a spreadsheet of it. That's something that I've done. Many, many times we tell a lot of our incoming clients who are looking for assistance to do the same thing, to get a picture of what can you take off your plate.

Matt Blumberg: Sure.

Paige McPheely: I think it's-

Matt Blumberg: Delegation is so important in getting that relationship to work. Right?

Paige McPheely: It's huge. Right? And I know you've got a great relationship there with delegation, with your...

Matt Blumberg: We do.

Paige McPheely: ... with Andrea, but I think that being smart and admitting that you can't do everything is crucial. So we're a huge, huge supporter of assistance, obviously. But I think a lot of times leaders just have this idea that they should be doing it all and that they have to suffer through it and inaudible

Matt Blumberg: As you know, I have a big soapbox that I get on about this particular topic. So Paige McPheely from BASE, thank you so much for joining me today.

Paige McPheely: Thanks for having me, Matt.