Changing the Way You Think: Brian Wygle’s 40-Year Philosophy for Turning Companies Around

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome adversity. As you listen today, let one idea shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today's guest walked into a struggling oil and gas company, bought it, turned it around and walked out with a return. Then he did it again and again. For 40 years across different industries, each engagement begins with something that needs fixing. He has guided businesses through distress, helped owners exit on their own terms, and stepped into the CEO chair when no one else would. The work is rarely clean and the stakes are almost always high. Brian Weigel is the owner and corporate fixer at Help for My Company, the consultancy he built out of Lazarus Resources Group. He has served as CEO and CFO across companies ranging from 10 million to $150 million in revenue. He lectured on ethical leadership at USC and now focuses on working directly with clients through helpformycompany.com, choosing a intentional team so he could spend more time advising business owners. But before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company, AddBack Benefits Agency. Listen, if you run a business, you're likely stuck in the cycle of rising insurance premiums. You're paying more, but your team is getting less and many people can't afford coverage at all. So we do things differently. We offer a solution that provides your employees with unlimited access to doctors, therapists, and prescriptions that's always free for them to use. Here's the part that surprises most people. Unlike every other employee benefit out there, our program puts more money into your company's bank account. As an example, we recently helped a client increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary, but gains like that can change how a business is valued. And the consultation is free. Imagine being the advisor that delivers over-the-top value by introducing this to your clients. See if they qualify today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, Brian Weigel. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Brian Wygle: Thanks for inviting me. It's going to be fun.

Anthony Codispoti: This is gonna be a good time. Let's roll up our sleeves here. So you've described yourself as someone who fixes things rather than starts them. Take me back to the earliest point in your career where you realized that was more of your true skill and instinct.

Brian Wygle: Okay. Well, it goes back long before I actually took it on as a career. I started out, I was young, I was probably 21 years old. I'd gotten a real estate license and was working in a real estate office, just getting started. And I would eat at a restaurant across the street fairly regularly. And one day I... said something to the manager about poor service. And he threw his apron on the table and said, if you think you can do this better, you do it. And I didn't realize at the time he had been feuding with the owner and he wanted out. The owner didn't know where to turn. So I ended up running the restaurant. I had no experience in restaurants, but I ran the restaurant for about nine months before he, in order for him to sell it off to an owner operator. And that stuck with me. And then from real estate, I realized I didn't enjoy selling houses. I had more business mind in, more of a business mind than holding open houses and things like that. I joined the finance department at the real estate organization. And then when my boss left there and went to a a banking institution, I went with him and I kept seeing that people were, businesses were getting turned down for loans. I'd bring in a loan for a business and they got turned down. So I started wondering, was it me? What was I doing wrong? What are they doing wrong? So I started looking at the loan business from the view of the lender, not from the borrower. And I started helping a couple of the clients fix what the lender would see as an issue. Didn't tell your story right. Didn't have the systems in place to guarantee success, that type of thing. And eventually, I just left the finance side of it and started working with clients to resolve their problems. Also in that time, I found that money is not always the answer to your problems. Yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: So can I pause you here for a second because I want to understand what were some of the things that you were seeing once you put yourself in the lender's shoes that the borrower was not understanding where you were able to make that bridge and connect.

Brian Wygle: The number one thing was the borrower's assumptions about their business. Financial projections and things like that really are only as good as the assumptions you make that you base them on. So that was one issue, the assumptions. Number two was not having an appropriate plan for a business structure to support the business. You have a great product. We understand that. We love your product, but we're not buying your product. We're lending you money to sell your product. And you don't have a plan for the infrastructure and how that's going to happen. You haven't thought through some of the problems. We don't see how we're going to get paid back from this if something doesn't go well. So it really begins And it's still the same today. What are your assumptions? And I'm real big on changing the way people think. And so let's go back through your assumptions. Let's make sure that they are in line with as close as possible to reality. What's really going to happen? Do you have contingency plans? And then, you know, I started getting a couple of clients that were really actually in trouble and they thought they could just go borrow their way out of trouble, but They weren't addressing the issue. They had no plan how to fix it. And so we would work together to create a plan of here's how we're going to fix it. And then if you did need money, here's why this is going to work and why the money, what the money really does towards making this work as opposed to just giving you more money.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you are making the point that you discovered, yeah, oftentimes money isn't the actual solution to the problem. And so you're going in and what you're looking at more like operational things.

Brian Wygle: Yeah, it's kind of a multifaceted thing. You have the financial aspect of a business and that's what everybody seems to focus on, restructuring financially or whatever. A lot of times you have either external forces, a crisis in your industry, economic downturn, something that is forced on you, but most of the time it's... how the business thinks, how are the employees bought in? you, you know, I start first with, can you make money making and selling your product or your service? If you can't make money doing that, you can cut all the administrative overhead you want, but you're not gonna make money because, you know, your cost of goods are too high. So we look at that and we just start at the top of the income statement and work our ways down and. I look at what causes this. You can tell a lot about someone's decision-making by reading their financial statement, what they are investing in, what they choose to overspend on. And so it really becomes an issue of trying to get the client to look at their business differently than they have. They're in the middle of it, they're in the thick of it, and when a crisis happens or a problem happens, is it internally generated? Or is it external forces that we need to find a workaround? But at the end of the day, it's all about, I have a favorite quote from Einstein. He says, you cannot fix a problem using the same thinking you used to create the problem.

Anthony Codispoti: So how do you get a client to think differently about their business, especially when they're in crisis?

Brian Wygle: Well, I'm a little odd in that I use stories, I use word pictures, I use humor. I kind of jokingly, you know, in the business world, they talk about, you know, management by wandering around. I say management by wondering aloud, asking philosophical questions. You know, I go deeply into the difference between what people and why people. what people do, you you tell them what to do and they do it. Why people, you tell them why you're doing it and then probably find a better way to do it. I find that most managers are not good at converting what people to why people. They need to understand the whole philosophy behind why we're doing whatever we're doing so that they can then encourage their employees or other team members to come up with their own creative ways. And so My methodology is really challenging to them, know, challenging them to think differently, playing devil's advocate, wondering out loud, can this, what if you did this, can this work? And allow them to find ownership of that thing that fits for them. And when the light bulb goes on and they go, I never thought of that, let's give that a try. and then creating a way to implement that and get buy-in from all the stakeholders. So that's kind of where I come in. like I said earlier, I tell stories, I give examples of other clients or things that I've seen. And I ask a lot of questions. And I do a lot of business philosophy, if you will. Why do you think this is important to you? What's this gonna do for you personally, not just for the business? And try and meld all that together into a plan that says, okay, we're gonna roll this all into a ball and we're gonna start over. And we're gonna do this differently rather than trying to bolt on a fix onto something that's still moving. I say it's like trying to change a tire on a moving car. You gotta get everybody to lean to one side, you know, if you're gonna try it. But eventually you have to stop the car. You have to get out and fix the tire. And so.

Anthony Codispoti: So you're a storyteller. let's go to one of those stories that we brought up in the intro. Max Oil. You bought this company. It's an oil and gas industry. You restructured it. You exited with a return. Take us back to kind of the early days there. How did this opportunity come about? What did you see that made you decide this was something you wanted to get involved

Brian Wygle: Mm-hmm. Well, okay. So I had a small office in Glendale, California, where I was living at the time. And it was one of those shared offices, you know, where people have their own office, where we all share a receptionist and all that. And there was a small oil company in there. And I got to be friends with the owners and they were, they were older. All three of them were reaching retirement age and all three of them had other interests. And they would express frustration about this money losing operation. And I just saw some things that they wouldn't look at. I said, well, how about this? no, we can't do that. And I was thinking, well, I could, you know, I wouldn't have any problem doing this. The company was a subsidiary of a small publicly traded company. And the publicly traded company was trying to do a reverse merger with another company. and go into a different industry. The public company actually went into laser eye surgery centers. So they merged with the company and used that as a way to go public. They divested themselves of this little oil company in California and basically gave the stock to the three owners. The business was in the business of managing oil wells for investors. that they'd put pools together. The investors were no longer putting money into the oil business or into their wells. They were just waiting for a return. They were behind on their royalty payments to the landowners or the mineral rights owners. But I saw some real opportunities that got me excited about it. And so I just one day said to all three of them, what is the par value of your stock? And they said, it's $100. each and I said okay I'll give you a hundred dollars each cash you give me your stock you can just walk away from all the liabilities and so they did and I knew I was going to have to put about 180,000 of my own money in to do some work on some of the wells. I knew that the guys who actually operated the wells up in Bakersfield were they knew their stuff and I didn't have to know that and so I said about one of the things that excited me was the balance sheet was all wrong. They showed a liability of owing to the parent company $800,000. But I knew that the parent company from kind of getting involved in the public merger, that they had written off that $800,000 loan in order to clean up their books. So I knew I was immediately gonna have an $800,000 improvement to the bottom line. And so I... You know, I changed that. The other thing that excited me was they had a two and a half million dollar tax loss carry forward. It was a C corporation. And I knew I could use that vehicle of the tax loss carry forward. Number one, to write off the 800,000 and not have a taxable event, but also, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: So explain this for folks who don't understand the tax implications here, because this is a big deal.

Brian Wygle: So a tax loss carry forward or carry back is a calculation. If you're a C corporation and you've been losing money for a couple of years, when you do make money, you can take your losses and apply it forward under a certain formula towards gains, or you can look back and recapture some taxes you paid. I'm not an accountant, but I understand enough of it to know that it's a usable vehicle. I see it a lot of times. It's a value in a business that a lot of people don't recognize.

Anthony Codispoti: You were able to acquire this ability to write off future profits by buying the stock at par value and you'd be able to apply it to.

Brian Wygle: Right. Right, and assuming, yeah, assuming about $800,000 debt. The other thing I know, I knew was that these investors who were refusing to invest in the Wells, in their contracts, there was a right for the owner for Max Oil to pay that amount, you know, on their behalf and then seize their interests. So I wrote letters to all the interest holders and said, we need to raise $180,000. If you want to put the money in, you know, you could stay in with me. If you don't, let me know and we'll do a voluntary surrender of your interest. Well, I ended up getting 100 % of the interest. So all the income was now coming to me rather than passing through and taking just a management fee. All the income from the oil was coming into the company. I also had learned through my own study, that the oil wells were in growing residential area and developers were developing around them. And in order to get them to abandon some wells, they had given them lots in their developments, which were buildable lots. So I ended up with about a half a dozen buildable lots in developments that were already built out and this was the only lot left. So I was able to sell those lots to other developers, other builders and use that money to improve the oil wells. And again, with no taxable income, because I was writing it off against the tax laws carry forward. then when, know, and so we did that, and, you know, did that for about five years. And at the end of five years, price of oil was high enough that it justified selling. And so I sold it to another oil company and made a tiny little profit. It didn't seem like a huge profit. But if you think about you know, collecting almost 40,000 a month for, you know, five years selling the lots, you know, having the tax loss carry forward, I sold the assets of the business did not sell the corporation. kept the corporation, which I could write off the sale, of the assets. And when I'd used up the tax loss, carry forward, I just simply dissolve the corporation. that sounds a lot like a lot of moving parts, but it was actually fairly straightforward.

Anthony Codispoti: Clever.

Brian Wygle: And I saw that from the very beginning and I wanted them to do it, but they were just tired and they didn't see it and they didn't... Yes. Yeah. They all wanted to go, one wanted to retire completely, one wanted to go into a different business. And the third person who was a lady ended up working for me for a couple of years before she retired. So I gave her a nice bonus for sticking with me and helping me through the business. She already knew all the accounting and all of that.

Anthony Codispoti: Did you try to explain it to them? And they were like, nah, we just went out.

Brian Wygle: And it wasn't a big business. There weren't a ton of employees. There were a couple of guys up in the field, but it was a good moneymaker for the time it was. And when it was time to get out, was time to get out and, you know, go on to the next thing. So that's the story of Max Oil.

Anthony Codispoti: And so was the next thing Lazarus Resources Group?

Brian Wygle: Yes, I actually renamed the Maxwell Corporation Lazarus Resources Group, bringing it back from the dead analogy. But then I dissolved it then I formed Lazarus Resources LLC because I wanted a little bit more flexibility and not deal with corporate returns. And I just started doing more clients. I'd already been doing it. I'd already been CEO of several fairly large companies. And so, Lazarus Resources became an investment banking model. And I went and got all my securities licenses and set up shop to basically help people fix their company to sell it. The idea was, you know, it's very difficult to fix a company and then hand it back to the owners if they haven't changed their mindset. So we would fix it up and then I would represent them in the cell or I'd represent a buyer looking to do it, but it was very hands-on. And I would take on deals that other investment bankers didn't want to deal with because they were messy. They weren't an easy sell. Kind of like buying a fixer-upper house, you know, and having to fix it up to sell it, knowing how much to put into it until there's no return.

Anthony Codispoti: Most other brokers wanna walk into a situation where the business is ready to sell, they can get their transaction fee and move on to the next one. You like getting your hands dirty, you wanna go in, you like the fixer operator, like, I got some ideas here.

Brian Wygle: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. so then that morphed, just, got tired of the whole securities industry side, you know, all the regulation of having to maintain my licenses and all of that. And, and I found that, some of my best sources of referrals and friends were investment bankers, brokers, and I didn't want to take that away from them. I enjoyed the hands-on part. So I got out of the you know, buying and side, transactional side, and would refer that to somebody else. And that allowed me to get referrals from another source, which is investment bankers who would say, hey, we need to get this company ready to sell. And I'm more than happy to roll up my hands and do the work of helping the owner prepare his company for sale so that the investment banker can then step in and sell the company. you know, more successfully. So.

Anthony Codispoti: And in your type of work, is there a success fee attached to that exit or is it strictly like a consulting fee?

Brian Wygle: No, you know, I've gotten a tip a few times for good service. No, I don't do anything on a contingent basis because then I would have to have licenses still and all of that. You really can't do that. But a lot of times we'll have a simple thing that says, this is my hourly fee or my weekly fee or whatever we've negotiated. And if you successfully sell the business, you're going to pay me a flat bonus of X dollars. and it's a fixed rate no matter what you sell your business for. It's not a percentage or whatever. But sometimes that's not really appropriate. I'm not involved in the transaction. I just did a sale where I had to help the company get ready, but I had to walk them through the whole, I didn't find them the buyer, the buyer found them, made an offer, but I walked them all the way through closing. Dealt with the attorneys, dealt with everything that came up, helped them through the due diligence and all of that. So yes, on that one. you know, while they were paying me my retainer, my fee for consulting, they did pay a bonus after the sale. And that was pre-negotiated. So, you know, on that side, I still do that. But with help from my company, I'm moving more towards coaching, advising, and helping people kind of take a more do-it-yourself approach to things. And... know, guiding them, shepherding them through that process, rather than saying, get out of the way, let me do this.

Anthony Codispoti: Scott, in the past, you were a lot more hands on. Now you're moving into a little bit of a different model, a different mindset.

Brian Wygle: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've been CEO of $150 million company and I commuted, it was back east and I commuted two weeks on, one week off, two weeks on, one week off while my wife was trying to raise two young boys. And so with new technology and being able to do what we're doing right here, I don't have to get on a plane and I don't have to fly to Chicago. to meet with a client where I'm billing them for the flight time, the airline, the hotels. It's probably gonna be two days to accomplish what we could do in an hour a day of actual time. So I can pass that savings on to the client, which means smaller clients can afford my expertise. I don't have to charge as much and I'm not wasting my time with all the travel and all that. Yes, there are times when I need to be there, but for the most part, What has been successful is having clients book an hour, you know, an hour, a week, hour a day. have one client I do a morning session and afternoon session almost every day. You know, what are we doing today? How did we do at the end of the day? It's still a lot cheaper for them than having me be there all day. And I want to be able to help more clients at one time.

Anthony Codispoti: I'm curious if shifting into this model has been a challenge at all, or if it's been pretty smooth for you to make that transition.

Brian Wygle: It has been a challenge. Number one, having to learn technology. And number two, your referral source. My business has always come from attorneys, bankers, insurance companies, other investment bankers. When you go to what I'm trying to accomplish, you have to find new sources of lead feed, if you will. I always hate talking about the messy part of trying to client acquisition. You like to think it's just going to, know, somebody just says, Hey, call Brian. And then you, know, everything's wonderful. But yes, you have to go through that. COVID changed a lot of things in terms of networking opportunities. It drove me a little bit more to think about online. And so finding new clients is more of a challenge. it's easier to find one big client and be with them for a period of time than it is to find clients that may be a little bit more in and out. And as all of us are getting older, a lot of my referral source, the attorneys, the bankers, if they're my age, they're retiring. They've worked for a big firm, they get a nice pension, and they say, hey, I'm out. And the new generation of attorneys, bankers, and all of that, the way to reach to them is different than the old days where you knew an attorney and you played golf with them and you spent a lot of time with them and you went to the same organizational meetings. Now everything's online. I've been hit up with lot of offers to help with AI lead generation. And I'm studying that. but I'm at this point slightly agnostic about its success rate because what I do is not a cookie cutter. I'm not an IT consultant. I'm not a tax consultant. I'm kind of a more broad range. So how do you put that into AI and have them find the appropriate lead? Content generation, staying relevant. Used to be you stayed relevant with calling up someone or sending them an email. If you're not on LinkedIn, you're not on Instagram, you're not putting content up on my website. My SEO guy is on me all the time about stopping and writing an article, to post on my website to keep it relevant. Those are the challenges. The challenge is not helping the client. That's the same as it always has been. But it's a new model for me and it's challenging my way of thinking, as I said. I try to teach people to think differently. I'm having to teach myself to think differently. I don't mind saying it. I'm in my 60s. When I worked in that first real estate company, we got one of the very first fax machines. And it was about as big as your desk. And it had thermal paper. And we were excited when the phone rang and we heard that beep and we had to put it down on the machine. That's where I started. That was the technology. And look what we have now. So that is a big challenge for me to stay up with it, to understand it, to know how to help my clients with it.

Anthony Codispoti: Now, do you think that it's really changed in so much that you couldn't do the old things of playing golf and going to the organizational meetings or making phone calls? Or are the other people just not receptive to that?

Brian Wygle: F.C. Yeah, I mean, I, well, I do that to some degree with some of the, you know, some of the people, you got to get to know the people first, you know, so my marketing is often not to potential clients, it's to potential referral sources. That is, it's fine, but it's time consuming. If I'm out playing a round of golf with a couple of attorneys, that's not billable time. And so that's a longer play than the instant kind of the instantaneous response rates you get on the internet. You know, I post something and I'm immediately checking every hour to see if it's getting any traction. know, it's...

Anthony Codispoti: Are you finding that your online work is getting traction?

Brian Wygle: is getting, it's getting noticed, you know, posted something on LinkedIn the other day. And within a day at a hundred impressions, no interaction, but I don't expect it to, I don't expect someone to look, read an article I wrote or something to go, okay, that's it. I'm hiring the guy. But if they see, if they come back and they see a trend that, I like what this guy is saying. Then maybe. when the situation comes up, they will know, hey, I should call this guy. That's why I named my website Help for My Company. It's pretty self-explanatory.

Anthony Codispoti: So you have talked about the five stages of a company's life cycle, right? Startup, growth, stability, distress, and exit. So typically when somebody does come to you, Brian, what stage are they in?

Brian Wygle: Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm. They are in some form of distress or disorganization, or they are looking to exit. Those are the two. So I tend to get more of the end stage than I do startups and growth and stability. But I want to be able to help those kinds of people. You have a stable company and your vice president is, you you want to groom him to move up the ladder. what better way to groom them than talk to an old hand who's been there, who's done it, who has some quote unquote sage advice, if you will. And I've not really done a ton with startups. I did early in my career, but one of the big problems with startups, quite frankly, is they don't have the money to pay you. Although I did help a startup recently and I got paid in stock and last month the company went public. So that was a win. But now that I'm older and more financially stable, I could do those kinds of things because I'm not having to feed my kids. My kids are grown and gone and I have grandkids now. They can feed themselves. answer your question. I kind of got off track is usually the time somebody calls me is when they need help. And that usually means some form of distress.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay.

Brian Wygle: It may not be financial distress. I had a client that called me in several years ago. They went into their attorney. It was a family business and they couldn't get along. They were just destroying the business by destroying each other, you know, and what they were doing. And so they went to their attorney and said, maybe we should just shut this down. Their attorney was one of those ones who said, I'm not going to help you do that until you've talked to Brian. They became a client. And I said to them, the best way I can help you as a family is remove the business from your day-to-day concern. And so we took it over and I ran it on their behalf until they were in a place where they wanted to come back. And it allowed them to resolve some of their differences. One of them retired, said, you know, I'm just going to own my stock and I don't really want to be involved anymore. So I helped them through that. Right in the middle of that, the sister of these three businessmen who was running the business died of cancer. So I had to then take her role and find somebody to replace it and keep the wheels rolling. but their business was doing okay. So it wasn't financial crisis from that standpoint. Financial crisis because one of the problems is when you have that many owners trying to make a living off of a business. you're usually taking out more from the business than you should. And that was one of the hardest things for me to get them to see was you have a choice. You can build value in the business so that you guys can sell it and make money, or you can continue to live out of the business, in which case you're gonna have to grow this business, because there's not enough in the pot for all of you and your kids and everything else you're doing.

Anthony Codispoti: How often do you find yourself kind of stepping into this role of being a therapist?

Brian Wygle: every client. mean, that's, I actually have a therapist so I can talk about the therapy I have to do. and we talk about it quite often that at some point it is all basically being a therapist. It is basically hearing hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, ideas, stupid thoughts, wrongheaded plans and, guiding them to see the light, see a different way of doing it. So really, I don't care if it's trying to restructure the balance sheet or whether it's trying to restructure the business operationally, it still comes down to, okay, we need to change the way you think. Alcoholics Anonymous has a saying, my best think, my best, and I. quite frankly, had a son who had an issue and so he taught me this. My best thinking got me where? And that's the question they ask. So you need to change your thinking. And so I kind of take that approach is if, you we need to look at this differently and it doesn't matter what the issue is, what the problem is. You've obviously stared at it long enough to realize you need some outside help to do this. So let's walk through it. What have you done that didn't work? When this happens, what is your default thinking? Those kinds of things. That helps me plan a more holistic plan of how we're going to address things. And I don't do it just with the owners. I do it with the key employees as well. Because the owner may change his thinking. The employees aren't so much. They don't have, they're not invested. Or they've been told for so long to do it a certain way that they just, they don't see the light. So I love that aha moment when I see an employee or an owner or something, suddenly you almost can see the switch flip when they start looking at it a little differently and all of a sudden they become a little more creative in their problem solving and teaching them to think critically about the choices they're about to make rather than knee jerk reactions or trying to... just continue to do the exact same thing and hope it changes how it comes out.

Anthony Codispoti: Is there some common low hanging fruit, Brian, that you typically see when you go in to help companies turn things around?

Brian Wygle: Yes, there are a couple of things that are basically easily identifiable and you want to have a win quickly when you come in to something so that it builds the confidence with the client that, know, yeah, okay, we're not just going to talk about it. We're going to fix something right now. Those are often poor relationships with vendors or customers, poor relationships, employee morale. And then the next one is they've usually gotten in trouble with lenders or out on their credit cards or something. There's almost always financial distress is a symptom of what's going on. And so if you can at least stem the flow of the symptom, then get back to addressing the root of the problem. So that's kind of the low hanging fruit that every company will show something, low employee morale, poor customer relations, losing customers, tension with vendors or other stakeholders, defaults on their loans. And it may not even be a payment default. It may be a default in covenants that they will or will not do certain things. And they've defaulted on that. That can be just as deadly as a financial covenant payment. default.

Anthony Codispoti: Explain that. What's a covenant that breaking it could be as deadly as missing a payment?

Brian Wygle: Okay, so if you have a, there's what they call positive and negative covenants. If you have a negative covenant, it says we will not do the following things. We will not take more than 5 % of revenue as personal income. We will not borrow money from another institution. Positive covenant might be, and this is one that people get hit with all the time, that your assets to liabilities ratio cannot slip below 1.5. Financial reporting requirements. Must provide quarterly financial reports to the lender. Maybe you didn't make any payment mistakes. You didn't miss any payments, but you didn't file those reports with them. That has the same rights to foreclose, if you will, or to discontinue lending as missing a payment. And frankly, missing a payment is easier to fix. You call them up and you say, we're a little behind. Can we stretch these payments out and work something out on a modification? If you don't have your financials together, that's gonna be a little longer term, trying to put them together. Maybe you don't have an accountant. Maybe, know, lack of financial information is often a big problem in companies. They fly by the seat of their pants, they send everything off to the accountant at the end of the year, but they're not really looking at anything during the year. Or they're hyper-focused on one issue over another. My account's receivable or, you know, top line sales growth or whatever. And they don't have a holistic understanding. And then that usually means the information is not available. in a readable sense, then that means I can't get it to the lenders if I have a lender issue. But like I said, those are symptoms. Those are easy to kind of grab and say, OK, let's fix this. Let's get on the phone with the lender or let's get on the phone with the vendor and work something out. That's the easy part. People think it's hard because they don't want to call their vendor and say, I'm struggling. not my company, I don't have problem doing that. I'll call them and say, hey, you know, they brought that, you know, they realize they have a problem. That's why they brought me in. I'm here to say both of you. Those are symptoms. You fix the symptom so that you buy the time to fix the root problems, which very simply could be broken manufacturing processes, employee morale, which is a broad category. But if you don't have employees that are on the team and motivated, maybe they're not working that fast. Maybe they've cut output or whatever it is you have them doing in a way that is causing you to lose money on your product. It takes longer to make that product, so you're paying more wages on that product. So dealing with all those kinds of things.

Anthony Codispoti: So what kind of things can you do to help with employee morale?

Brian Wygle: Number one is hear the employees, listen to what they have to say. I find a lot of owners of businesses do not have the level of respect for their employees' ideas or opinions. And that's a big problem in a lot of areas. I had a client tell me, another one where an attorney brought me in, big crisis, we got the crisis settled down. and the attorney and the client and I were meeting and the client said, I said something about employees and he said, I view my employees as my enemies. They're between me and my money. And if I didn't have to pay them, I would make more money. That is not an uncommon thought process, believe it or not. Yeah. They don't look at their employees as assets.

Anthony Codispoti: Really? That shocks me. Wow.

Brian Wygle: or as team members. And there's a lot of talk about teams and team building, but it's really not the employer being part of the team that he's building. It's him trying to build a team under him. so that, those are real problems I come across frequently. And that's why I talk about changing your mindset, changing the way you think. I have an acronym I use, acronym. Sorry, not an anachronism. An acronym I use called Pair. So when you're team building, when you're trying to get people to work together is participate, anticipate, instigate, and reciprocate. And so I try to teach them that if you're a team and you're the leader of the team, you have to be paired with your team. You have to participate. That's the number one thing. You gotta anticipate what's gonna happen, what they're gonna need. You need to instigate, you can't just let it happen to you. And when good things happen, you need to reciprocate. And so I have a little saying with Pear, I say, know, P-A-I-R, if you don't participate, the rest is just air. So that's a way just to get people to start thinking about, hey, my employees, I need to pair with my employees. I need to be a part of them. They make me money. They're assets. They are not liabilities. They're not a cost center. They are assets. And I need them to be fully engaged and participating, which means I got to reciprocate. When I do well, I've got to help them. Maybe it's financial. Maybe it's not. I hear a lot of people say, well, we made the boss money this year and he bought a new car and we didn't even get a bonus. And the employer says, well, I pay them $25 an hour. That should be enough. That's all great when money's just flowing and your employees are blindly following along. But when you need to make a change, when you need to turn left or right, you need those people on your team. And that's particularly an issue when you're in some form of distress. You know, when there's problem that needs to be solved, you're going to need those people to buy in and be a part of it and actually help you come up with ideas, not just wait for you to tell them what to do. You need to turn them into why people as we talked about what people and why people.

Anthony Codispoti: I'm genuinely surprised at how common you say that that viewpoint from owners towards their employees is. I mean, that's quite hostile, in my opinion. And I don't know, maybe I'm tainted because this show perhaps attracts a certain type of mentality to it. And, you know, those are the stories that I hear. And my own experience as a business owner and the way I've treated my employees and my friends who own businesses, that's just foreign to me.

Brian Wygle: Hmm? Hmm? Right, right. Yeah. You know, it is far more frequent, you know, in Main Street America, where they're not, you're not talking about a business that's innovative and doing, you know, all kinds of the latest things from McKinsey or whatever. You're talking about a guy who maybe sells some part for an aircraft or something, and he cranks them out in a little factory in Kansas and He doesn't have all that training. Most business owners didn't go to business school and then decide to start a business. They made a really good product or they provided a really good service and they've kind of built a company around it as it grew. And nor do a lot of them have time to, I will tell you, I've got five clients right now that I'm working with. I don't think one of them watches a podcast. listens to anything other than news in their car on the, you know, still listening to AM radio. The average age is 45 and up. You know, they're not the bright young entrepreneur style. The old way of doing things, you know, your employers or your nine to five workers is much more common in what I find. And maybe that's why some companies are in some kind of trouble. I have a client right now. They've got 20 employees. They're very nice to their employees. But in their mind, the employees are workers. They're out in the field working and they're not part of any conversations. They're not part of anything. They get their orders and they go out and do their work and they get paid. And if they do a good job occasionally, they get bonuses. I've been trying to get them to engage with these people and the owners don't really want to. They're just, you I keep them busy, I keep them working, I pay them, that should be enough. And they're not sending them for any training for anything, they're not helping them, anything. They're too busy doing the work. And frankly, I see they don't have time. They're too busy to call their employees in for a day and do something. Okay, maybe they'll have a Christmas party or whatever. There's also a language barrier. All of their employees are Hispanic and they are not.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay.

Brian Wygle: and they've never taken the time to learn how to communicate very well with their employees. And they kind of look down on them because it's a down and dirty business. And so that is not uncommon, unfortunately. And so that is probably the biggest challenge is getting first to the owner to think differently. And then by that happening, get the employees to view themselves and their business differently and understand the whys of the business.

Anthony Codispoti: Mm.

Brian Wygle: and understand how they benefit when the company makes more money. It all has to tie together or they're not going to move at the same pace you want to move.

Anthony Codispoti: So Brian, how would you describe the ideal client for Help My Company?

Brian Wygle: I'll say simply, anyone who wants to learn. to view their business differently, to take a step back and view themselves and their leadership abilities, how to think through problems. Anybody who wants to do that is an ideal client. Anybody who just has a problem but wants me to fix it but doesn't want to change anything themselves, however big that project may be, is not an ideal client. Because we're gonna just have frustrations all the time because you're expecting me to fix something. and you're going to stay the same. Typically, my client range is, I say generally 5 million to $150 million a year business. My sweet spot is I actually like to go a little lower than that sometimes if I can really be helped. They don't have the management level. You know, if you've got a $2 million business, you don't have, you know, two vice presidents and a CIO. You have a couple of people. and, I really like things that are under 50 million because again, in that spot, the infrastructure isn't there, for, multi divisions of, you know, leadership training and going to seminars and sending everybody to Florida for a week for, you know, to fall back on each other's arms or whatever the latest thing is. they're busy doing what they do and they're, they're trying to make it happen. And I want to be a part of that. So hope that answers your question.

Anthony Codispoti: You've lectured it. It does. Thank you. You've lectured at USC on ethical leadership. What's, what are the kinds of things that you talk about in that room?

Brian Wygle: Well, so my conversations, my lecture was targeted towards the investment banking program in particular at SC, but I can't help but not talk about leadership. So for me, you know, I know there's a term out there that everybody throws out ethical leadership and all that. Mine starts with being an ethical person. You know, you can, you can care about the environment and you can do all your you know, pardon me, I'm not being derogatory DEI stuff. can do all the right things. but if you are not an ethical person, you're never going to lead ethically. So it, and so I talk about defining your ethics. What guides you, what's your worldview? How do you see the world and how do you see yourself in it? Then. how do you want to lead people according to your standards? So we did some exercises to again, think differently, to drill down and say, what is your worldview? How do you view the world from religious, moral, ethical, financial standpoint? How do you view your business, your place in the world, and what do you want to accomplish? That's gonna guide how you lead. And if you've got your ethics, you could be true to yourself and be a horrible person because your ethics are horrible. So it's really not about trying to lead from some moral standard. It's really trying to stay true with integrity to what you believe. And I may not agree with what you believe, but if you can articulate it, if you can envision it, you can put it together and you can lead from that place and be successful, that's ethical leadership in my book. I, you know, if somebody I think is, know, they're, if, if, if they're, if their ethics disagree with mine, but they're consistent, they're cohesive and well thought out. I, you know, I can't really, I mean, maybe I can challenge you and say, well, I think that's pretty lousy way to look at things, but it certainly ties to everything else. The way you look at things, understanding yourself first, before you try to understand anyone else. And before you try to put together. any kind of leadership. The first thing I say is the definition of a leader is someone who has followers. If you don't have any followers, if nobody's following you, you can call yourself a leader all day. You're not leading anything. You're just out in front. The next thing I taught was the role of a leader is to envision, empower, equip, and encourage. It's my ease of leadership. So the vision comes from your ethics, from what you, you know, your worldview of you, your business, the world around you, your competitors, your moral compass, whatever. You have to set the vision as the leader. And then you have to make sure that those who are following you have the right equipment, the right tools to do the job, to do what they need to do. And you have to empower them. You have to give them the permission. You have to break down the barriers to make it happen. And then you have to encourage them. And that is not always positive. Sometimes it's, it's negative carrot and stick. Encourage simply means to come alongside. Ties into the pair. You need to participate. You need to come alongside and you need to be part of that. From that, the next thing, and you can see, I love these little acronyms. The next thing is what we call ACME. And that is your communication style based on what you're trying to accomplish. ACME is. speak with authority, communicate clearly, and manage expectations. So I tie all of that into basically an hour long conversation of who are you, do you see yourself properly? Have the students ask each other, how do you see me? Have those conversations, what are my flaws? What are my blind sides? I think I'm good at this, do you agree? And being willing to take some of that and maybe reshape yourself to say, okay, maybe I need to change my ethics, my worldview a little bit because I always thought I was this, but I'm not. I always do a little psychological analysis on my clients when I first meet them. And then after I worked with them for a while, I kind of go back to it and say, do I see the same thing? I have a client right now, there's three owners. One I assessed before I even started with him that he had a Napoleon complex. He's the shortest of them, the youngest of them, and the bossiest of them. The other one has a messiah complex. He's always hiring the wrong people thinking he can turn them into gems. And the other one is what I call an abdicator meddler. Sometimes he completely abdicates and disappears. Then when he feels like things are out of control for him, he gets it in metals in the smallest little things. and you never know which one he's gonna be. It's like leaning backwards on the last back two legs of a chair, you know, and just catching yourself. That's how it is being around him because you just don't know which one's gonna show up. Well, I've worked with them for several years and while I've gotten them to progress, my assessment of those three has still not changed. So I try to kind of get a little assessment after talking to a client, who am I dealing with? And that's gonna impact my leadership of them. guided by my own ethical standards. My particular ethics standard is servant leadership. It's not being boss, it's leading from behind, it's leading in the trenches. And I always have another saying, if you practice servant leadership, you better get used to being treated like a servant. And you gotta have strong shoulders to put up with that because people will treat you. like their personal servant, but that's the cost of showing them how to lead from humility, from servant hood, rather than being the little Napoleon Bonet part who comes in and tells everybody what to do and struts around, especially when you don't know what you're talking about. I hope that kind of ties it up in a nutshell for you.

Anthony Codispoti: It does. Yeah, lots of good topics there that you get into. What's one of the hardest things you've had to overcome personally in your life, Brian?

Brian Wygle: Yeah. If I had a deck of cards, I'd say pick one. But I'm gonna go out of limb here and I hope I don't offend clients, potential clients. I think the hardest thing I went through was a series of about 10 years from the late 90s to the early 2000s. My father became terminally ill. My mother could not take care of herself very well either. I had kids who were teenage. The relationship with my father... because of his illness, which impacted his mental ability, became very, I tried not to make it, but contentious. He had a lot of caretaker rage and I was essentially in charge of all his care. So I was trying to run my business, raise some very rambunctious teenage boys, deal with a mother and they did not live together. So I was going between two houses, taking care of two people. And then in 2008, I was heavily invested in real estate and the real estate market went down. And I was in place where I was having to sell properties in order to raise enough money for my parents' financial, I mean medical. So, you know, I basically ran down my tank to almost nothing. So while I was earning, I didn't have those reserves anymore. It took a far bigger emotional toll on me than I thought and on my kids. And so basically in mid 2006 or seven, I essentially had to start over again. My father had passed away. I'd learned some lessons from that on how to take care of my mom in a different way. And she lived for another 10 years after that, but it was much easier to take care of her. I had to start over financially. My kids are... both very strong Wilkins. I won as a professional athlete, know, fairly successful professional athlete. And we had to nurture that as he was growing up and his desire to do that along with that. And the other one is my favorite, I hate to say favorite son, but he's my favorite nonconformist and underachiever. And he's the typical. kid of his generation that is more focused on anything other than work. You know, and don't worry, dad will always take care of you. But all of that happened in a timeframe that really set a tone for me for the last 15 years, 20 years of my career and how I deal with my family, how I deal with others. It really humbled me because I was riding on the top and you know, big house, nice cars, all of that. And we had to make the decision to downsize and start over. And at that point, it really started my journey of, I doing what I'm doing for the money or am I doing what I'm doing because I really believe I can make a difference in my client's life. And I decided that's what drives me. And, you know, we rebuilt. successfully and you know, there's a happy ending to that story other than losing my parents and all of that. but it taught me a lot. I thought I was a pretty humble guy, but I wasn't. It taught me a lot about humility in how I deal with my clients because you never know if they're going through the same kind of thing that I went through. They're trying to run a business, put a good face on it. In the meantime, they've got a, you know, a mother at home with cancer or whatever. I just found out an employee, one of my clients that I work with on a regular basis, she started asking if she could telecommute a little bit more. And I had the authority. So I said, yes, you know, can let's work something out. And we did. But it wasn't until I really got to talking to her that I found out her husband has stage four cancer and she needs to be home more with him at this point in her lives. And she can't afford to lose her job. The owner. would have said, well, we don't need a telecommuter. We need someone in the office. That's their thinking. I was able to bridge the gap and get them to work together so that she is able to work when she can. One of the things I told him that changed his thinking was never confuse activity with achievement. Is she getting done what you need her to do? If so, can't you accommodate her or do you just need her there? so she can look active from eight to five. And when we measured it out and said, it's actually making her more productive, same as me with my online, it's a concentrated hour or two that I have to do that, gotta get it done. I don't have time to just sit at my desk and look like I'm doing something. those kinds of things happen. Life goes on around us and... the focus so much in finance, in consulting, in turnarounds is on the business, you know, and how can we restructure this business? And when it doesn't go well, the consultant or whatever doesn't understand, I didn't change the people. I didn't do anything to help the people. I just tried to put a new widget on their product, or I just tried to open a new sales channel. I didn't think about... How is this gonna impact them? Do they have the capability? Is this gonna work for them? And so I try to take that approach rather than just say, I got this great thing, you need to buy it.

Anthony Codispoti: It's such a powerful story to hear about how your own life stressors, you know, really helped to reset what was already a really great mental foundation and mindset in a way that you can see is carrying forward for your clients and their employees. Brian, I've just got one more question for you today, but before I ask, I want to do three quick things for the audience. Anybody who wants to get in touch with Brian Weigel. HelpForMyCompany.com is a great resource. There's a place in there where you can schedule a meeting with him and the first consultation is always free. You've heard all the wisdom he's dropped here on the show today. if anything that he says sounds like it could be interesting or helpful for you, reach out, HelpForMyCompany.com, set up that first call. And if you're enjoying the show today, please take a moment to subscribe wherever you're listening. It sends a signal that helps others discover our podcast. So thanks for that. And as a reminder, you can be the hero advisor that helps clients give their employees access to therapists, doctors, and prescription meds while paradoxically increasing their net profits. Real gains that can change how a business is valued. So contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. So last question for you, Brian, a year from now, what is one very specific thing that you hope to be celebrating?

Brian Wygle: One specific thing, it all fits together. I hope to be celebrating the success of the transition to more virtual consulting because I want more time with my grandkids and I want more time with my family and I don't want to spend all that time on the road trying to get from place A to place B. I live in Los Angeles. So it could be 20 minute drive or it could be two hour drive, just depending on when you have to be there. So the thing I want to accomplish is the success of being able to reach more clients and provide help through my website and through Zoom meetings and things like that. And subsequently have more time for myself. That would be what I would like to be able to celebrate. I'm on my 41st year of marriage with my wife and we have not had a lot of vacations in our lives because I've run my business. And I run a business that clients depend on me to be available during their times of trouble. So it's been hard to go away. I can sit in hotel room and have a Zoom meeting and still accomplish and still be present. So that's really why I'm going where I'm going. And I'm hoping that within a year, I will be able to reduce my in-house presence with clients and more online presence with clients. And hopefully from a business standpoint, see the same revenue.

Anthony Codispoti: Terrific, wonderful goals. Brian Weigel from helpformycompany.com. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you being here.

Brian Wygle: Thank you.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us. And if one thing stood out, put that into action today.