May 20, 2026 – VC Nikhil Choudhary and Cementing Change Mary Lou Panzano

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. As always, we sure do appreciate you being with us, telling your friends about the show, posting and retweeting all of our stuff. We just appreciate you being part of the group that wants to learn a little bit more about entrepreneurship and get motivated to go out there and take over the world. Got a fantastic show for you today. Two great guests. First up, we have Nikhil Chowdhury. He is a VC doing some really cool things with the robotic space automation drones, all of that, that is the focus of the venture capital firm that he is with, and we get into a great conversation of humanoids and guardrails for AI, guardrails for the robots. How many robots we’re going to need in our house? If the robots can do laundry and clean the kitchen, one robot doing both of those, just absolutely fantastic conversation. Also, we’ve discussed how to get venture capital, how to approach the venture capitalists, and get in the right slot, so that you actually get looked at. Very useful conversation. If you’re interested in raising venture capital or positioning your company to do that, you need to listen to this interview. After that, Mary Lou Ponzano is with us. She is helping people prosper. I think her website is Help People prosper.com and it’s a great interview. She’s written a new book called Cementing Change, little oxymoron there, and we have a great conversation. We talk in particular about entrepreneurs who’ve got businesses up and running, and then someone comes in who just got out of MBA school or something like that, and thinks they know the entire industry and are going to make suggestions to an entrepreneur who’s been running the business for 10 years. See how that goes, and then we have a great conversation about Kodak and how they should still be the camera people that they blew it, and really couldn’t have done a much worse job than they did. So, absolutely great, great interviews today, and appreciate you being with us, and hope that you will learn a little bit from them. Our goal here is very simple: we want to create a mosaic of stories. Every little story that I can find we put out there, we’re going to put it into our index, so you can easily find it, so that if you want to start a business in any industry, there’s already a guest interviewed who will tell you how to do it, give you the tips, the tricks, and the techniques to be successful in the business that you want to start. Great show, thanks for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second, we

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Jim Beach 3:45
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited and honored to introduce another great entrepreneur. Please welcome Nikhil Chaudhry to the show. He is the managing partner of Nearman Ventures, which is a venture capital firm based out of the San Francisco area. Prior to working with this business, Nikhil has had a very interesting career. He has been working in several other industries. His goal is to work on industries that have sort of been ignored by everybody else, that maybe haven’t had that attention that everyone else has had, he used to, or prior to this, he was the founder and CEO of Zenith Engineers, which was the number one fastest growing design company in America at that time, and he is a very active writer and giving back to all of the rest of us. He’s published in Forbes Business Collective, Inc. Industry Week, and lots of other places. Nikhil, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Nikhil Choudhary 4:46
Hey, Jim, thanks for having me. Really appreciate this. I’m doing well.

Jim Beach 4:50
So, did I get it right? You like to look at things that other people have sort of ignored.

Nikhil Choudhary 4:55
That’s true. We like to look at boring industries. We think that. Generational opportunity right now, and that’s part of our focus from our fund.

Jim Beach 5:05
Okay, I know one billionaire that I could get on the phone right now. He is in Florida. He made his billions in concrete paving, paving roads, nothing more boring or less sexy than that. You’re not that

Nikhil Choudhary 5:22
we’re not that and sexy, we still think we’re sexy enough.

Jim Beach 5:28
Okay, so tell me some of the deals that you’ve made, some of the things you’re allowed to talk about.

Nikhil Choudhary 5:34
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so our focus, our focus from the fund is mostly construction tech, industrial automation, so you know all the legacy industries, as we call them, that are ripe for disruption, but decades behind in technology adoption. From the firm I purely focus on deep tech, so a lot of robotic startups that we’ve invested in, we’re invested investors in a company called Field AI that’s also raised from marquee names like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. They’re creating autonomy for robots movements, subterranean robots, so you know where there’s no GPS maps, the robots can actually go navigate themselves, and that’s like a classic use for a construction site, because construction sites are always evolving day by day. That’s one of our investments. We’ve also invested in drones, we’ve invested in humanoid robots for traditional industries, we’ve invested in industrial automation robots to robotic arms, picking in packaging deliveries for three pls, and many more in our portfolio.

Jim Beach 6:50
Wow, what a cool collection of companies. Very, very interesting.

Nikhil Choudhary 6:56
Thank you.

Jim Beach 6:57
All right, so let’s do robotics first.

Nikhil Choudhary 7:03
Sure.

Jim Beach 7:03
Do you believe what we see coming out of China in their robotics? Because I don’t use the word, they’re very particular. See, I think they edit those videos. I think the China robot videos are 99% fake, and I can describe what I mean by fake in a minute, but what are your thoughts on the China robots in the video?

Nikhil Choudhary 7:25
Well, I feel we, we

Nikhil Choudhary 7:30
shouldn’t be naive about, you know, just discounting China space in robotics, they have the scalability, which is unparalleled, and unfortunately for us as a country, here we’ve not spent enough time in reinterest, reindustrialization. We’ve kind of like, we’ve ignored our manufacturing processes, and I feel that’s kind of one reason that we’ve been left behind. Now, coming back to your question about China and their videos around robots. Most of the videos in robotics are are synthesized videos to an extent, but that does not mean that their technology is behind or far behind those videos. They do have, they do have built a great technological advantage when it comes to robotics. They also have a lot of supply chain choke points that, right now, the world needs, which is like, for example, the batteries – they all come from China, and just giving them an advantage where they deserve is the scalability that they have, and they are like a leading manufacturer of robotics right now, right. So that’s kind of my small take on where China is. I think there is definitely no competition where it comes to robotics tech. US has a clear advantage when it comes to that, but then when you talk about grand scale manufacturing, China is still leading, and we have ways to catch up there.

Jim Beach 9:02
You said we have a tier advantage, T I E R advantage.

Nikhil Choudhary 9:07
We have a technological advantage. So, let me, yeah, take a ratchet, right? So, let me explain it in pure terms, of like software, you know. We have the best foundational models, we have the best resource scientists that are working on foundational models, and I think as we proceed in this decade, we’re going to see more and more small dexterity, small foundation models. So, we’ve seen the age of large language models, which is your OpenAI, cloud, Gemini, but those large language models are not necessary for smaller tasks, so you know there are many tasks that are siloed in this industry. For example, a robot to walk on a construction site, it does not require to use that many tokens and that many, that many data points that these large language models have, because that also causes hallucination. So to term it. Simply, we’re going to see the birth of a lot of small models, which are going to be niche for each industry and each use cases in the industry, and US still has a clear advantage in that technology.

Jim Beach 10:17
All right, I believe that we’re going to end up with 1000s of robots, one that does the floor, one that does the blinds, one that does the windows, one that works in your refrigerator. I don’t know that we’re going to end up with one robot that does everything like a human could be. What are your thoughts on that? Aren’t we going to end up with hundreds of different robots, just like that I robot that cleans the floor. Now it can’t do anything else, but it cleans the floor really damn well.

Nikhil Choudhary 10:48
That’s true. That’s a good question. So I have a contrarian take on this. So the universe of the world we live in right now is designed around a human form factor. A humanoid is a human form factor. There is touch spacing on construction sites that you know a skinny human can slide, slide through, and I think humanoids have their purpose, and with the technology advancing so fast, we’re going to see a lot more humanoids than smaller robots, or many different stacks of robots doing it, even if we see many different robots on, let’s say, a construction site or a manufacturing facility, there’s going to be a central brain around these robots, because you know, let’s say a construction equipment caterpillar or GCB, they both are going to come up with their own stack of autonomy, but then it just becomes a nightmare for the project team on that construction site to manage so many tech stacks, so we’re going to see a decentralization of the autonomy layer. I also feel that humanoids, we still have not yet seen the full potential of a humanoid robot, so the world we live in is structured around a human form factor, and I think humanoids have, like, the biggest and largest space in the next decade.

Jim Beach 12:12
Do you think that we’ll have humanoid robots in the next decades that can do three different things: walk, pick up a book, and clean a dish,

Nikhil Choudhary 12:23
absolutely, absolutely, we will, and

Jim Beach 12:26
that years we’re going to have that robot, less than 10 years, we’re going to have that robot, I’m not sure, I believe

Nikhil Choudhary 12:33
our job is to look into the future, and maybe you know, I’m completely wrong, but you know it’s what is venture capital. It’s having a belief system in something that you’ve read about, you researched about in the future that’s coming and making an early bet on it, right?

Jim Beach 12:54
Yes,

Nikhil Choudhary 12:55
yes,

Jim Beach 12:57
I don’t doubt that we’ll have human rights. I just don’t think it’s that close or that soon we can have a humanoid robot that does the three things I mentioned. Let me tell you what I about my China philosophy. For you, the listeners, there’s a TV show that I watch on YouTube called China This Week, I think is the name of it, and it’s two white guys who used to live in China. They both married Chinese women, and they spend the entire week on Chinese social media, and then report back to us Americans, mostly. It’s a show in English about what they have found. They have a whole series of fake robot videos that they’ve collected, where the robot’s walking and doing really great, and then you zoom out 10 more feet, and you see that there’s a group of six people controlling the robot, that that part’s not released, you know, they only release the video of the robot working, they don’t then zoom out in the press release and show you that it takes six people to keep that robot functioning while it’s walking, and they have 1000s of videos like that, where there’s the other piece that they’re hiding that the Chinese media doesn’t show simply because they want their perception to be so grand about their abilities, and that so many of these Chinese videos are not AI fake, but human fake humans using some trick to make the robot look better, just like with the guy who pushed the truck downhill, so that everyone would think that his electronic truck was working. Remember that guy, what’s his name?

Nikhil Choudhary 14:31
Yeah, I remember that. Forgetting, forgetting the company was it, Ruby, or

Jim Beach 14:36
no, it’s Tesla’s other name,

Nikhil Choudhary 14:40
Ruby, and that’s the company, right?

Jim Beach 14:46
What’s Tesla’s last or first name?

Nikhil Choudhary 14:51
Completely forgetting.

Jim Beach 14:55
Okay, let’s keep

Nikhil Choudhary 14:56
going. No worries, which, yeah, to your point. I think a lot of robotics right now, it’s a chicken and egg, with these companies have to show to the world that you know they’ve achieved that full stack autonomy layer, which is not true yet, but that does not discount the fact that we’re moving at a super fast pace, it’s not, it’s, yeah, it’s not incremental, it’s exponentially moving fast. There’s tele operating in robotics, which is like very true, and which is happening. We’ve also heard news about way more using tele operators based out of Philippines, but you know, again, it’s not going to take as much time for this technology to advance, because there is a lot of human learning through vision, vision-based learning, that’s going to happen with these robots, and I feel we’re closer than we think we are.

Jim Beach 15:55
Well, I hope so, because I want one. Nicola was the name of the truck company, and he was convicted, and then Trump pardoned him. Interestingly enough, and he gave the Democrat, I mean the Republican Party, two and a half million dollars, and then pardoned him. Oh my goodness. All right, let’s move on from that. What about drones. I think that in the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a tremendous explosion, literally explosion in drone usage, and we’re supposedly going to get deliveries soon from drones. What are your thoughts there? What are you seeing 510, years from now in the drone space,

Nikhil Choudhary 16:41
drone autonomy has, to an extent, already been achieved. We’ve seen that with various wars – India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia. I feel my thoughts around that is like, where are the guardrails around the usage, and how do we stop, or how do we have an advantage in this next gen of warfare, which is going to be driven by machines and not humans, and humans have some sort of emotions, but machines do not, especially if it’s autonomous. So, you know, I’m no one too close to even comment on how government policies are made, but I feel that something, as humanity, we all have to think about, and where are we headed, and where are the guardrails around them?

Jim Beach 17:31
Well, let’s just take that on to NI AI, then Nikhil, what are we doing with AI? It’s so scary, every single person involved says we need guardrails, everyone says that, and not a single guard rail out there.

Nikhil Choudhary 17:47
Yep, it’s same, similar to what I said before. I feel there’s a good use of AI. There’s could be a bad use of AI. There have been many cases in the past two, three years where people have used deep fakes to extract money out of organizations, and literally one case where the CFO of the company came online and asked subordinate to release like some 20 $25 million and the money was wired, and then later they got to know that the CFO was a deep fake, so I feel we’re not doing enough as a world. We’re just so entangled in wars, and I feel like not many people know how to deal with AI right now, and you know, as a citizen, as a, as a, you know, a human being in this world, I think I would at least expect that governments start thinking about the guardrails, and how do we go about it, and what’s the structure in place to govern these AI tools?

Jim Beach 18:50
What guard rails would you suggest?

Nikhil Choudhary 18:54
I suggest you know, at least a framework of certain things, that is, that is acceptable to use, or you know, what are the fallback options that we have in terms of certain technology? Because right now, thinking about a drone and autonomy, you know, I’d hate to see a situation where you know, an autonomous or fully autonomous drone can be in the hands of a kid, and you know that drone could be flown anywhere, and now imagine that drone with, like, a certain, you know, payload capacity, you know, it’s it’s kind of scary, right, to think about that, so by the time anybody intervenes, and even, like, you know, our, let’s say, a police force intervenes, it’s like, I don’t think they are geared to deal with some sort of this sort of situation. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be done. There’s a lot to be done.

Jim Beach 20:00
Yes, there is. It really scares me. So, what do you think the Terminator outcome likelihood is versus the outcome that everything’s just perfect with AI and everyone loves it 20 years from now? What’s the likelihood of Terminator? What’s the likelihood of everyone loves it 20 years from now? Like, we all love

Nikhil Choudhary 20:19
it. Well, I don’t think I think we, we shouldn’t be gooey about it. I think we should have faith in humanity. There are more good people than there are bad people.

Jim Beach 20:32
Bad person only takes that one kid you was just talking about for us adults,

Nikhil Choudhary 20:38
but I think we’ve seen enough with recent warfare, what could be the potential misuse of technology, and I think I’m at least, you know, I’m self-assuring myself that different world governments have started thinking about these guardrails, and I’m pretty sure in the next couple of years, so right, like if I were to set it in a timeline the last two three years, where we were like, you know, everybody was kind of confused, and it was like a race towards, you know, more technology, but now I think the second phase is where we start, like, really thinking about, like, how do we protect ourselves with the proper and right guardrails around technology, and I think moving forward, making it more positive, more bringing more efficiency, bringing more productivity to industries, and you know, I’m more of a positive thinker there.

Jim Beach 21:31
Excellent. Well, that’s good to know. All right. Tell us a little bit about Nearman Ventures. How early or late are you investing? How much are you putting in? Do people come to you, or are you finding who you invest in? Give us the general breakdown of the firm, please.

Nikhil Choudhary 21:48
Absolutely, so I’m a Silicon Valley-based investor and operator focused on technologies, modernizing the physical economy. You know, we’re an early stage fund, so by early stage, I mean we go in as early as pre-seed. The company has formed. There’s a founding team. There are engineers working on a problem statement. We understand the problem statement. We are, we’ve experienced it closely in our network, and that stage we like to go in. We’d also go in up to like seed or series A rounds in startups, our sweet spot would be seed, where seed stage, where a startup has proven that you know their product is actually needed and they’re getting paid for it. There’s a team that’s like stable and it’s not going to break, that’s our sweet spot that we like to go in. We fake, for we focus on under digitized legacy industries, by that I mean construction, logistics, mining, and manufacturing. These are also industries that employ the largest workforce on the planet. They also contribute to the largest GDP in the world, and they’ve been left far behind in the past two decades in terms of technology, because a few reasons. One is, you know, technology back in the day was more expensive. Now, with the whole AI revolution, I think technology, the unit cost is coming down steeply. So that’s one main reason. There’s another reason, which is like, you know, data center build out the whole use of energy demand going up, that’s causing a lot of new infrastructure, new industry to build around it, and we just don’t have enough workforce, we don’t have like skilled trades, like how many people are sending their kids to trade schools, it’s a big problem to have, and it’s that’s kind of, you know, our focus, so we look at these aged industries where technology has been far left behind, they have like thin margins, they don’t have balance sheet capital to invest heavily in technology, and now they just don’t have a choice, like the world is moving a completely different pace. Yeah, that’s a little bit about us. We are globally focused. 75% of our investments, though, are in the United States. Even if we invest outside the US, we would want that company to domicile in the US, and we’re all about bringing manufacturing industrialization back to America, and that’s our core thesis.

Jim Beach 24:21
What’s the average size of the investments? 5 million, 10 million, 4 billion.

Nikhil Choudhary 24:27
Yeah, we write anywhere from half a billion to a minute and a half entry check. Okay, we’d go in early stage. We usually look for about seven to 15% of capital position on our entry we also keep reserve capital of about 50% so we’d like to support our startups as they raise successive rounds after we’ve invested in them and be as supportive as we can to the founders that are part of our portfolio.

Jim Beach 24:57
How many VCs and how many associates that. The farm altogether,

Nikhil Choudhary 25:01
we have absolutely zero associates. We are completely partner-led fund. The genesis of our fund was we saw that there are a lot of fund managers out there that are purely financially driven. They don’t have much knowledge, macroeconomics knowledge about the industry, and we wanted to kind of have a different flavor to our investing approach. So, we have completely partner-led. We are three general partners in our fund, we have three other junior partners, and literally one EA, and we are partners ourselves. We do all the heavy lifting the day that we’re not directly talking or speaking to the entrepreneur first is a day that you know we’re going to be sitting back and not doing this anymore.

Jim Beach 25:53
Yes. All right. Well, I love that. That’s really fascinating to have no associates or no interns, any of the other people. How do we get in touch with the firm? How do you want to find deals? Deals come in through the website, or do you only do deals with people that have been recommended to you? What does your inflow occur because of

Nikhil Choudhary 26:16
all of the above? We’re pretty active on LinkedIn, we get a lot of outreaches on LinkedIn. We respond to every single one of them, as long as it matches our thesis. We get about 50 deals a week on an average week, and it’s all of the above. We also get deals thrown to us from our allies or the fund managers that are talking to entrepreneurs. It’s a network effect. How do people get in touch with me? I’m an open networker. I’m on LinkedIn, Chadri underscore Nikhil. My email is open to everybody. I publish it on my LinkedIn, nikhil@nirman.vc And we’re always happy to hear from entrepreneurs on what they’re building,

Jim Beach 27:01
fantastic. Nikhil, thank you so much for sharing all of this great information. And I hope those damn robots do 20 functions each.

Nikhil Choudhary 27:11
10

Jim Beach 27:11
years, we’ll have another interview and see who got it

Nikhil Choudhary 27:15
right. Perfect, that sounds like a plan, Jim. Thank you so much, appreciate the time.

Jim Beach 27:19
Thank you, and we will be right back.

Intro 2 27:36
Well, that’s a wonderful question. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 27:59
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great entrepreneurial guest. Please welcome Mary Lou Ponzano to the show. She is an award-winning communications executive, best-selling author. She did about 35 years in the corporate world, doing internal communications, working for companies like Prudential, Pfizer, and Bayer, you don’t get any more prestigious than that. Along the way, she contributed to a couple of anthology books, Cracking the Rich Code, and also 365 Days to Resilience, and has a new book out on her very own called Cementing Change: Cracking the code for communications that work, it’s five star rated on that Amazon place. And I also do want to point out the tremendous amount of community work that Mary Lou does. She is on the board of directors at the Greater or one of the Habitat for Humanities, and also serves on church leagues and does a lot of volunteering as well. Mary Lou, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Mary Lou Panzano 29:05
Hey, Jim, I’m doing great, thanks. So much for having me. I’m honored to be here this morning. It

Jim Beach 29:08
is our pleasure. Congratulations on the new book. I love the title, Cementing Change. Those are there’s a little oxymoron for us right off the bat.

Mary Lou Panzano 29:19
Yes, there is. And I have, I have a story behind the inspiration for that, that title, because we had a different working title for a while that just did not sit very well with me.

Jim Beach 29:30
Tell us the story.

Mary Lou Panzano 29:31
Well, now that I’ve laid the groundwork, right? So I was out walking with my dog, which is usually where I get most of my creative juices flowing, and I was thinking about the book, and it was getting pretty close to, you know, it’s time to get the manuscript to the publisher, and I just didn’t, I wasn’t feeling the title was like the secret formula for change or something was the working title, and as I’m walking, we’re walking in the middle of a very quiet street, we’re not walking on the sidewalk, and I’m looking at the sidewalks, and I thought. Of my dad, and my dad was a mason. He was a craftsman. He had his own company for many years in construction, and I thought,

Jim Beach 30:06
real mason, not a mate, like the lodge. You’re saying he was a real mason, really built stuff.

Mary Lou Panzano 30:13
Yes, this man built stuff. He built

Jim Beach 30:15
a real mason to the lodge type masons.

Mary Lou Panzano 30:19
He wasn’t involved as much in the lodge. He was more involved with his Italian American club. He was a bricklayer and a stonesman and a craftsman at that. And I was walking, and I saw the sidewalks, and I saw some new sidewalks being put in. I thought, oh my gosh, all the work that my dad worked so many years with cement, and I thought cement cementing change, it’s, it’s foundational, it’s long lasting, it’s enduring, it’s so I just kept thinking about cementing change, cementing change, and there you go, that’s where the title came from, and we worked for a little bit on the subtitle, but my dad inspired the title for my book, it’s very, it’s very exciting, and it warms my heart to think about it.

Jim Beach 31:05
I love it. And you have a sidewalk on the cover that’s going off into the sunset or heaven, or

Mary Lou Panzano 31:11
yeah, yes. And that’s that was AI-inspired. I did a little, just said, “Hey, I wonder what Copilot can help me create here, and I asked it to give me a sidewalk heading into the future with the word cementing and with the word change cemented, you know, like stamped in the cement. So I had this big long prompt, and that was the image that came up, and I was blown away. I thought, wow, that’s really great. And when we were working with the designer on the book, we tried a few other iterations, and nothing compared. We kept coming back to it. So there you are. It was, it was adapted a little during the, during the layout of the book covers, but it, that’s where it originated from.

Jim Beach 31:49
That’s interesting. I have also done cover designs from AI, and they are good. They are really good. I think that that may be one of the things that it does the best is come up with covers.

Mary Lou Panzano 32:06
Yeah, I mean, I had tried a few other iterations and looked at a couple of different types of, I went to Chat GPT to this, and this is going back, you know, about a year and change ago. So the technology has increased and blown, blown a lot, actually, is it’s really, it’s quite incredible, but yeah, that was the first image that came up, and that’s the one that stuck.

Jim Beach 32:27
Interesting, I love it. I love it, and I love the idea that just when you think about it, change is so hard, and it always seems like it’s rubbery, you know? You push a little bit this way, and then they push back a little bit toward the other way, you know. Change is so hard in an organization because of the pushback and stuff. It just seems to me like that the metaphor of cementing that rolling wave is just really appropriate. So, I love

Mary Lou Panzano 32:59
it. Thank you. Why are we so bad at communicating with the people we’re sitting next to? Well, I don’t think we mean to be bad. I just don’t think we really think about what we say and think about the implications of what we say and followed by what we do. And one of the most challenging things that people came up with, and I was challenged this even as I was thinking about, you know, what I was going to do when I decided to retire. I retired early. Have a little back story around that as well, but as I was thinking about what it is that I wanted to do, I needed to get really clear about who, what I’m doing, who I’m serving, what problem I’m solving, and I’m a communications executive, I mean, I’ve been doing communications for 30 years, and it took me about 18 months to figure that out for myself, and I think one of the biggest challenges that leaders have, regardless of the size of the organization, is being very crystal clear about what it is that you are trying to change, why that change is absolutely necessary, and why it has to happen now. What, what the role that people are going to be playing in making that change happen? How it impacts them, you know, how you’re going to support them. What’s the vision of the future? What’s it going to look like on the other side of the change? You know, look like and feel like, and people don’t spend enough time up front thinking about how they’re going to talk about it, you know. Leaders think a lot, a lot of times, Jim, about how they, you know, what they want to do, and they’ve been contemplating the direction they want ahead, and then they’re ready to, ready to announce it, but they haven’t laid that framework, and all of the, you know, all of those nuances in terms of the language you use and how you inspire people to want to buy into your change, and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges, and one of the biggest failures is that people don’t understand what the change is all about, they don’t understand how it impacts them, they don’t understand why it matters, and if that’s not clear, then. You’re off to a bad start.

Jim Beach 35:02
Do you know that the Japanese term Nemo washi

Mary Lou Panzano 35:07
now

Jim Beach 35:07
it’s, you know, in Japan they do this. I used to live in Japan, I worked for the Japanese government, I worked for Coca Cola in Japan, and in Japan, when they are proposing a change like this, they never, the method is totally different, so I come up with an idea, and I want to make an improvement, and so what I do is I go talk to my closest coworker and see if they like the idea, they like the idea, then the two of us go talk to the line leader and say here’s an idea that we’ve talked about amongst ourselves and we think it’s a good idea, and if the line leader likes the idea, then the three of you go to the shift manager and say the three of us have had this idea, and we’ve been talking about it, and we think that it might be really useful. We’ve been talking to some of the other line workers, and they think it might be a good idea. It’s this process where no one comes up with the change by themselves, it’s always the group that proposes a change, and the group bought in before they even proposed it. You see what I’m saying,

Mary Lou Panzano 36:08
absolutely. And so, what I talk about in the book is one of the first – I have a framework, I call it the Four Cs change framework, and the first, the first element of that, the first ingredient in that recipe is clarity, knowing, and then sticking to the goal, that’s the other part. Sometimes you give up too soon before you’re, you can see if your change really made it stuck or not. The second is connection, and you just said that, like engaging and involving others in the change. Now here you’re talking about socializing the idea of the change before it gets approved versus what usually happens the other way around is that the decision is made, but smart leaders will will pressure test the idea, they will involve people on the front lines, they will ask their employees questions, or at least their trusted advisors. How is this going to land with people? What are what are we going to need to get them from the current state to the to the other side and get them bought in, and that engaging and involving is also another place where sometimes leaders don’t want to be transparent about, you know, what’s really going on, you know, your employees know more about what’s happening and what works in the company than most leaders do, talk to them, get those answers, find out what’s really happening, and then you’ll, your decisions will be, will land better when you, when you bring them in.

Jim Beach 37:32
Yes, I want to tell a little story from my personal life and get your thoughts on this. You know, the show is for entrepreneurs, so let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneurs. I started a business, and I got it up to maybe 60 employees and maybe 10 million in revenue. And then I hired my brother, fresh out of MBA school, hired my brother and brought him in as a vice president, even though he hadn’t been there as long as other people, and didn’t know anything about the industry or anything, and you know, three or four weeks later, he came in and was like, God, y’all are doing all this, is all suck, you know, Jim, you’re running a horrible company, and he let you know, listed all the things that we were doing wrong, and he came out with all these changes, here are the nine things you need to do to fix it, I was like, well, number one, we tried that already, it didn’t work. Number two, I don’t, you know, went through the list. It was so hard as an entrepreneur for me to be told that all of these things need to be changed, but again, it was also, I think, a really strong indication that he didn’t know anything that he was talking about, you know, it was a strong uh is he just didn’t know what he was talking about, you know. And so, how do us entrepreneurs deal with change when we have history that maybe you don’t, and we’ve got a formula that’s working, you know? I got a formula that’s working, and you want to mess with it. The formula works, why mess with it, John. Why, you know that’s a hard question to answer. It’s working. Don’t mess with it. What are your thoughts on all this?

Mary Lou Panzano 39:07
Yeah, so I really appreciate your story, and I appreciate the struggle there, especially when you’ve got someone who comes in, regardless of whether they’re a family member, but who comes in who doesn’t really know your business and know your industry, so sometimes that can work, but I haven’t. I haven’t experienced that myself. I think one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs have is when they’re looking to try to make sure that they’re either sticking with what has worked in the past, you know, things are constantly changing, Jim, and I think that that’s one of the things that entrepreneurs always have to keep in mind, the formula that you have today that could be working very well may work tomorrow or next week or in the future, but you always have to be thinking about what’s coming, what are the trends, what do we want to make sure that we’re in front of, so that we’re not catching up on the back end when, when disrupt. Happens around us because you can’t control everything around your business, you can control what you’re doing. So, from the listening perspective, you know, when, when you are, when you do bring somebody in new, or when somebody, or maybe you will, you don’t have a consultant come in and take a look at what you’re doing, and say, hey, you know, where could we use some improvements here, you know, take some of that is just good information to know, and others of it could be, could be moving, that could really help your organization grow. And I think one of the things that leaders tend to forget is that it’s okay to ask the questions, but if you’re going to ask the questions, you got to do something with the feedback, if you’re going to ask for input, do something with it, and it’s okay to say we heard you, we’ve considered you your thoughts, or we’ve considered your, your ideas for change, and here’s why we’re not going to accept them. Here’s why we’re not going to be doing that. People want to be heard, they don’t necessarily want to be right.

Jim Beach 41:00
I love that they want to be heard, right? Doesn’t matter, that’s funny.

Mary Lou Panzano 41:04
They just want to, they want to know that my opinion counts, and that you’ve taken it into consideration. You never know, somebody could bring something up that was a blind side for you, but if you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? So you can’t fix what what you can’t see as a problem, and you may not have a problem, and you might say consider the source, I guess, is another caveat there, right? If you’re talking to somebody who’s in your business, who knows your business for five years, they see gaps, they see issues, they see a potential train wreck coming down, you’re gonna, that’s gonna carry more credence than someone who hasn’t been in the trenches for five years.

Jim Beach 41:43
What is the Kodak story? You know, we all know the Kodak blew it, that they should have been at the four month forefront of photography still to this day. You talk about in the book, tell me your thoughts on the Kodak debacle.

Mary Lou Panzano 41:58
Yeah, the Kodak story was really a fascinating piece of research. I didn’t realize there was so, so many articles and reports written about the Kodak story, but at the end of the day, what wound up happening with Kodak, and it was this, it was a series of, it was a series of issues, but what the one that comes to mind the most is that they had the brain, so they had the intelligence in the organization on digital photography, and they, they squashed it. They said, “This innovation, this is not our area, this is not our core area. Cute idea, digital photography, but we don’t do that, so let’s squish it and put it away, and don’t tell anybody about it. So, here you are, you’re paying brilliant innovators to innovate film and cameras and other things that they were doing, and their whole model was based, not necessarily on the device itself, like you needed the camera, but their

Mary Lou Panzano 42:51
real business

Mary Lou Panzano 42:52
was selling film, that repetitive purchases, the Gillette model, right,

Jim Beach 42:56
risers, exactly, I was gonna say, just like razors,

Mary Lou Panzano 42:59
and that’s, and that’s what was happening, and what they realized was that that trend was going to change, and they weren’t, they did not, they had the talent in house, and they just, they just didn’t listen, they didn’t take it forward fast enough, or they didn’t pay enough attention to it. I think the other thing was that they missed, they missed the opportunity to reconsider who their customer was as times were changing, so in the history is tells us that most of the people who were involved in capturing the moment, you remember the Kodak moment. I remember the first time I went to Orlando to Disney World, they had these signs that said Kodak moment, and you would, that was the perfect picture spot, right, Kodak picture spot, but, but most of the people taking those photographs were women, and they, they were dropping off the film at the Kodak photo mart, and they would pick it up on the way back from the grocery store. Well, now the women are in the workplace, and as the digital cameras came out, they were not about, wasn’t about capturing, it was using a fun new new device that was mostly men. Now, men were not the ones capturing family history, so their consumer market shifted from men to from women to men almost overnight, and they didn’t pay attention to that, and so I think that there’s a number of other things that had a lot of leadership changes, and and they were they were trying to hold to what was their staple business, and their staple business was dying, and they did not want to recognize that, and they didn’t want to take advantage of what was coming, and then then they had never had competition, either. Jim, you know, Kodak

Jim Beach 44:44
was right. And then was it close?

Mary Lou Panzano 44:46
Yeah, right. And then Fuji Film comes in, and next thing you know, they’re taking over the market, and Kodak didn’t know what to do, having a competitor in the game. They’re like, we’re the only horse in this race, no. Not anymore, and they didn’t pivot quickly enough, so I think there were a number of compounded issues with Kodak, but it is a very, very sad story about a legacy company that was, I don’t know, it was in its prime for, I think, over 100 years.

Jim Beach 45:16
You alluded to the secret formula for change that you had, and we went through part of it. Can we go through all four parts in a little more detail now, please? So, can we talk about the 4c’s the change framework and the scaffolding? So, we talked about first part, clarity. Can you give me one more sentence on that? And then let’s transition to the other three.

Mary Lou Panzano 45:39
Sure. So, clarity starts with knowing the goal, knowing what you’re trying to achieve with your change, and sticking to it. And when I say sticking to it, you can even think of this in terms of what companies do, but also what you do individually. Lots of people will go ahead and set a new year’s resolution, and then by the second week of January, you know, they give it up. There’s actually a Twitter’s day, right? So, sticking to the goal, which means doesn’t mean that the way you go about getting the goal never changes, because as you progress through a change journey, things are going to develop, you’re going to have new information, and you may have to adapt how you do it, but your goal should stay the same. Be clear about it, be clear about pins, is connection engaging and

Jim Beach 46:23
go into that. Let me ask a clearer question. Is it

Mary Lou Panzano 46:26
sure

Jim Beach 46:27
you know, like Simon Sinek yelled at me that I didn’t have my why? I had an unsatisfactory why, and I was like, well, it’s mine. How could my idea, you know, anyway? Anyway, what about the idea though that let me say that are there good clarities and bad clarities, good goals and bad goals. If it’s I want to grow sales 5% is that a good clear goal, or is it to, I don’t know, number based or whatever? Do you have good goals and bad goals that you see?

Mary Lou Panzano 46:59
I wouldn’t qualify the goals as good goals or bad goals, because they all – it all depends. A 5% growth could be good if you, if you’re regular, if your normal growth rate is two or 3% that’s a stretch for you. But if your normal growth rate is 10% 5% right?

Jim Beach 47:16
So

Mary Lou Panzano 47:17
it does depend.

Mary Lou Panzano 47:20
Okay,

Mary Lou Panzano 47:20
being clear about specific, maybe is a better word, being specific about what it is that you’re trying to do is, is critical. That is important.

Jim Beach 47:29
All right now, communication

Mary Lou Panzano 47:32
and the why is important as well. Yeah, so the next one, so then the section C is connection, engaging and involving others in the change journey, and what this gets down to is oftentimes leaders are, or business owners are thinking about what’s my next, what’s my next, and you might be doing some market research, you might be doing, looking at consumer trends, you might be edited situation, whatever that is, and you decide that you want to make a change as you’re going through that process, the more you can invite some other people who are in your organization who are going to be impacted by the change to listen to what it is you’re you’re planning to do and invite their input, get their perspectives, chances are they’re going to raise something that either you hadn’t thought about or that might even validate the direction that you want to take. Either way, the more you can let other people know what you’re planning to do, and I get it. Sometimes you know, if you’re, if you’re planning to do a merger or an acquisition, there’s only so much information you can start to talk to people about before the announcement happens, right? I get that there’s some information that’s market moving, you can’t share everything, but you can get underneath what is the problem we’re trying to solve with this change, and a lot of times leaders are not willing to open up to what the problem is, they’re not willing to share that, and that lack of transparency makes people feel disconnected, they feel like, you know, what I think, there’s more to the story here, and they’re not telling us everything. And then that grows the trust, so that’s why engaging and involving others in that connection with people, and listening to them, and like listening not to judge, but listening to understand, like what’s your perspective, and why? Why does that perspective matter to you? What you know, what are you trying to tell me? So that’s the connection piece.

Jim Beach 49:26
All right. Next, the

Mary Lou Panzano 49:28
next one is caring. Now, most people don’t talk about caring in the workplace. They think like loving your employees is not something that you need to do. I completely disagree. The more you can show and demonstrate that you truly care about the human beings that are in your business. The better off you’re going to have their buy-in, you’re going to gain their trust, and you’re going to be able to get them to move along with whatever it is you’re trying to change in your organization. What often happens is that leaders and business. Owners will go from we made the decision, here’s what we want to do, and they move right to execution, and they forget, and I don’t mean execution like letting people go, although sometimes they do do that, but it’s really all about taking care of your people as they go through the change. Smaller companies don’t have the same issues that larger organizations do, but if you think about everybody’s like normal day, you might have one or two things changing in your own company, you might be introducing a new technology, you might be doing new training on AI tools, you might have a new product that you’re launching, a new customer market that you’re trying to go after all of those changes compound for employees. Lot of people are doing two, three, or experiencing up to 10 changes in the organization at the same time, even leadership changes. You know, you brought your brother in, right, as a VP, that’s a change. So, if you think about that, and then people go home, and then life happens. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing burnout and mental health issues at alarming rates, because people are trying to grapple with all of this, and they’re just trying to get their job done. So, if you can help your people through this by supporting them through the change, listening to them, helping them understand what’s going to change, giving them the training they need, giving them the time and the space to make the change happen. They will remember that you took care of them through the change, versus just saying, you know, here’s the change, go figure it out, deal with it, you know, get over it, you know. And then there’s one other piece of that, Jim, before we go on, and that’s taking care of yourself, because you can’t run an organization and lead your own team if you are in ill health, or you know, can’t breathe yourself, you got to take care of yourself too,

Jim Beach 51:55
all right, courage,

Mary Lou Panzano 51:56
and the last one is courage, courage means you need to take some risks, and you need to actually do something, because none of those other things I just talked about matter if you’re paralyzed and don’t take action. I also caution that when you do take action, you do the right thing legally, ethically, and morally, because one thing you don’t want to do is change where you live and being like in jail, right? Because you don’t want to have to learn how to live in jail, but I think one of the things that that can sometimes be paralyzing for for business owners is there’s they’re trying to manage so many different pieces of the puzzle at the same time that sometimes they’ll just stall and they’ll forget to take the risk. Leaders generally tend to be more risk takers. They’re not as risk averse, they’re not afraid to step out of their comfort zone, but the people they lead are probably less like, are probably not like that as much. So, give that some consideration. You know, you’re more likely to take risks. You’re a business owner, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going out there doing your thing, but maybe everybody working for you isn’t like that, so consider that as you’re going through the change, because they’re they’re going to need some support.

Jim Beach 53:09
Mary Lou, how do we get in touch? Find out more, follow you online.

Mary Lou Panzano 53:13
So, my, the best place to find me is at my website, it’s www help people prosper.com Information about my book, about my coaching services, and my speaking engagements, and all of that is available on the website.

Jim Beach 53:28
Fantastic, Mary Lou. Thank you so very, very much for being with us. Great stuff. Congratulations on the book, it’s selling well, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

Mary Lou Panzano 53:36
Thank you, Jim. Appreciate your time.

Jim Beach 53:38
Likewise, likewise, we are out of time for today, but you know what, we do that’s right. We come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now.

Mary Lou Panzano 53:47
Bye.