The Playbook – System of Systems for Business and Startup Management for Companies with

During his recent interview with Tobias, Michael Girdley, Executive Chairman at Dura Software discussed his Playbook – System of Systems for Business and Startup Management for Companies with <50 Employees. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Tobias: That’s kind of interesting. Often you find these things, they’ve got to the peak of some phase, but they just can’t transition beyond that phase to whatever the next level is. And you guys have that, because you’ve been at much, much bigger organizations. You know how to take them from one phase to the next or get the person who can run it at that systems phase and the business builder phase.

Michael: Right. Well, in the playbook we make everybody use, actually forces you to start to create systems. So, we give them a system for hiring like sustainable recruiting. We give them a system for how you’re gonna do your strategic planning, how are you going to do your quarterly goals. We give you a system that forces– you’re gonna use those things. So even if people on our CEO level or the existing company don’t have that, they really don’t have any choice, because we’re just like, “Well, this is the way it’s gonna be.”

Tobias: And that system, that’d be a great book sometime that you could publish, unless you wanna keep that private for the firm?

Michael: No. It’s on my website. You can go, it’s girdley.com is my website, I posted the whole thing. The genesis of what I call the playbook was about five years ago, I made some really bad hires. And I’m a member of a CEO group here called Vistage. And I went to everybody in the group, and I was like, “How do I not hire so terribly?” And everybody else goes, “We don’t know. We hire terribly too.” And I ended up talking to another business partner of mine, and he’s like, “You should check out this thing called Topgrading.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s changed– it’s wonderful.

It is a wonderful system if you need to hire admin support freelancer. And so that started me on a quest to go out and say like, “Why am I solving all of these problems that other people have solved? If there’s a system out there for hiring, why don’t I just go find the best of that thing and use it? If there’s a system out there for strategic planning, for SMBs, I can’t be the only person that’s ever had that.”

So, I spent two years basically going through and identifying the best of breed of every single one of these systems, and we’ve codified it in this thing we call the playbook. And, yeah, I published it on my website. It’s just like, different people’s books in different people’s systems.

Tobias: Well, that’s brilliant. I’ll make sure I link to that in the show notes. That sounds very interesting. I’d love to have a look at that. Just taking a step back a little bit, what’s your overall investment philosophy

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