Learn Your Way Out of Any Challenge

Mike Lantz (00:00): The no call list basically came out of nowhere. Defender’s whole marketing model just went away overnight. But Dave Lindsey and Marcia Barnes, who was the CMO there at the time, they just got on an airplane and they started traveling all over the country learning from people about how to do inbound marketing. And the whole philosophy was no matter what challenge you have, especially in the day of AI today, there’s no reason why you can’t learn your way out of a challenge.

Jason Beutler (00:23): This is Shift where we talk with leaders about the moments that changed how they operate.

Kendra Beutler (00:27): Let’s get into what’s shifting today.

Jason Beutler (00:31): Thanks for joining us again. I want to introduce Mike Lantz, the founder of trueU. Mike, thanks for joining us.

Mike Lantz (00:37): Hey, I appreciate being here. I’m a fan of you guys, so anytime I get to spend time with you, I’m all down for it.

Jason Beutler (00:42): Well, hopefully this is a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Well, let’s start off by, why don’t you give us in your own words what your business is?

Mike Lantz (00:50): I’ve been in the business world for 30 years or so, and the one thing, the repeated pattern that I see all the time is the main reason why organizations don’t achieve what they want to achieve is because of people related challenges. Everyone’s different. Everyone thinks differently. Everybody has very different years of experience or years of experiences growing up. And so we help businesses solve those people challenges so that they can continue to grow. And so it’s been my life’s work. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and every day is a new day and every day is a new challenge because every day you’re interfacing with new people and they’re all unique.

Jason Beutler (01:26): Where did you learn you were passionate about that?

Mike Lantz (01:28): I’ve always been a people focused person. I love relationships. I love being with people. I try to be as empathetic as I possibly can and see circumstances from other people’s shoes. And I’ve always been that way, at least my parents tell me that. And I didn’t know you could make a career out of it. And so I kind of fell into this by happenstance and I’ve enjoyed it and it’s taken various pivots, but the central focus of everything that I’ve done in my life, both personally and professionally have really been around people and helping people. My personal mission statement is to coach and inspire and develop others to become the best version of themselves they possibly can be. That’s at the root of everything that I try to accomplish in my life and do in my life.

Kendra Beutler (02:13): So how did you get started with trueU? Tell us the story about how that started.

Mike Lantz (02:18): I had been in HR at some capacity since 1996 and owned a couple of businesses, sold a couple of businesses, was with a company called Defender Direct, and then they changed their name to Defenders here in town. Unbelievable success story here in Indianapolis. Dave Lindsey grew this business from his spare bedroom to a $750 million business and then exited it. And I got the opportunity from 2009 to 2017 to be his chief people officer. And so he and I started something back in 2014 called trueU, and it was very different than really what we do today. And then I left Defenders in 2017 to start a fractional HR business that we called trueU HR. Then in 2021, I took over the running of the business that Dave and I started and pulled the two things together. So it’s been a really fun, fun journey, but ultimately it’s all about bettering people’s lives.

Mike Lantz (03:11): And so when we’re out doing fractional HR for our clients, we’re bettering the lives of all their employees. That’s our goal and that’s our ambition and aspiration is to make it a little bit better for them. I was at a barbecue once in my neighborhood and I was invited over by a friend of mine and I didn’t know anybody there. And I was sitting there talking to them. I told them I was in HR and he said, “Our company used to be just this horrible place to work and I didn’t enjoy it.” And then they hired some company to come in and help. And he’s like, “Now everybody loves it.” And I’m like, “Well, who did you hire?” And he says, “I don’t know.” And I go, “What company do you work for?” And it happened to be one of our clients. I just didn’t know it.

Mike Lantz (03:49): And so that’s why we’re all in it. We have a team of 20 and that’s why we’re all in it. We want to make the lives better of the people that work in our clients and the communities that we work in as well.

Jason Beutler (03:58): So you’re chief people officer and then you start a new business. That’s a shift. What happened there?

Mike Lantz (04:04): So I owned my own fractional HR business from 2000 to 2009. We grew a lot during the recession because people were outsourcing and had the opportunistic chance to sell my business in 2009. So it wasn’t a first go round, but I learned a lot of what not to do in that first go round. But I was spending a lot of time in 2016, 2017 while I was still at Defenders with small to medium sized business owners, sharing with them how we were growing so fast on a people strategy. And I realized there was this huge opportunity in companies with 20 to 150 to 200 employees that did not have good HR capabilities inside their organization because I fundamentally believe and our company believes that HR is an enabler of business growth. It is really a revenue engine. A lot of HR people don’t see it that way, but that’s the way I believe it to be.

Mike Lantz (04:57): And so when I was really unpacking a lot of the strategies we were using at Defenders about how we were growing our business through our people, it was like an aha moment for all of those business owners. They really didn’t see it that way. And so I though this is a real opportunity to go help small to medium sized companies here in central Indiana with their growth, but through their people. So that’s why I quit my job. I’ve resigned from two jobs in my life and my last day’s always been on St. Patrick’s Day, but I need a little luck of the Irish. And so we’ve been going. We just celebrated our nine-year anniversary last

Kendra Beutler (05:28): Week. Yes, congratulations. Kristen was telling you about that. It’s exciting. Yeah, that’s awesome. So as you were running this new business, what were the challenges at first?

Mike Lantz (05:38): The first 12 months it was just me. So I was head salesperson, head technologist, head HR person, head success manager. So this is difficult for anybody starting a business to play all the roles and to being able to keep all of those plates spinning and all the customers happy and that sort of thing. So as usually most businesses are, and I know Jason and Kendra, you can appreciate this, those first year too, they’re a grind. It’s not a grind nine years later too sometimes, but they’re a grind. I think that was one of the challenges. Not too long after we started the business, just a couple years later, we ran into COVID. Chris Mills and I were out to dinner one night in 2019 and we’re just kind of celebrating a good year. She’s my business partner. She joined me a year after I started this and I was like, Chris, between your 30 years of experience and my 25 years of experience at the time, I’m like, there’s nothing we haven’t seen in HR except for a global pandemic.

Mike Lantz (06:35): So many of my friends, when I tell them that story, they blame me for the COVID virus. So that was a difficult time. All of a sudden we’re trying to coach clients through stuff that we had never experienced before. We’re in the people business, and so you would think we are just perfect at hiring and getting the right seats defined and who we want. And we made some mistakes on that and thought we wanted something in the seat and really it was something else. So we made some hiring mistakes along the way, not bad people, but just had not really defined what we really wanted to see in those particular roles. And when I first started true HR, we weren’t focused on providing the real tactical HR support. We were really in the world of strategy. And what’s difficult to do is to drive strategy when the tactical foundational HR pieces aren’t in place.

Mike Lantz (07:27): And so then I had to real quickly bring on Chris Mills because while she could do the strategy piece, she’s also just phenomenal expert at the real foundational technical pinnings of the HR framework.

Jason Beutler (07:42): Let’s go back to COVID timeframe, right? You’ve got a bunch of clients that are looking to you for leadership and this is an unprecedented situation. How do you go about advising, guiding your clients in a world where really no one knows what the right answers were?

Mike Lantz (07:58): One of the first things that we did is we reached out to all of them and we said, “We’re all in this uncertain time. Nobody’s been through this for the most part. So what we want to do is every morning at 7:00 AM, we’re inviting all of you onto a call.” And these were all CEOs, presidents. They were the person leading the company. They weren’t like any employee that they had. And I said, “Let’s all get on a call. It might last 30 minutes. It may last two hours. We’ll bring some things that we’re learning just in the last 24 hours about how you’ve got to deal with your people relative to COVID, and then you guys can all build a little bit of a community yourselves and ask each other questions. What are you doing here? What are you doing there? Are you sending your people home?

Mike Lantz (08:37): Are you not?“ So we built a bit of a community where business owners could not feel alone, first off. We have five core values and our very first core value is we learn. And I learned this at Defenders to really lean into this. We had this philosophy at Defenders that there was no problem that we would run into that we couldn’t learn our way out of. For example, early on in Defender’s career, they would do all of their meeting booking to schedule appointments to go and sell security systems through outbound calling. Well, then the no call list basically came out of nowhere. Defender’s whole marketing model just went away overnight. But Dave Lindsay and Marcia Barnes, who was the CMO there at the time, they just got on an airplane and they started traveling all over the country learning from people about how to do inbound marketing.

Mike Lantz (09:22): And the whole philosophy was no matter what challenge you have, especially in the day of AI today, there’s no reason why you can’t learn your way out of a challenge. And so that’s the approach we took back in COVID. Chris Mills and I were like, we need to be reading everything we can read, finding everything we can find, paying attention to new regulations that are coming out, all this kind of stuff so that we can help our clients learn their way through this uncertain time. And so that’s why we would always say, “Hey, this is what’s changed since yesterday.” And if you remember back to those times, things were changing since yesterday. We just learned our way out of it and created a community of business owners that all were throwing in and learning with us and some grace. Nobody expected us to have all the answers at the time because the times were changing.

Kendra Beutler (10:05): Yeah, that’s really inspiring. I think that you can learn your way out of anything. I love the idea that it’s like we’re intelligent people, we can learn to do this.

Mike Lantz (10:11): The cool thing about it is too, we live in a community in Indianapolis where everybody is so giving of their knowledge. If you run into a problem, there’s people that you can reach out to who have run into those problems before, those challenges. And I travel a fair amount and have clients in various locations and not every community’s like this. A lot of them are like, “Hey, learn it on your own. School hard knocks. I made the mistake, you go make the mistake.” And instead people are like, “Hey, let me share with you what I learned through

Kendra Beutler (10:42): That.“ I want to know a little bit more about, so what technological shifts have you seen, I think in the years that you’ve been doing this in both companies?

Mike Lantz (10:48): A lot, right? I mean, it used to be, we were joking about it. We brought in a AI attorney from Ice Miller, and he was just talking about all the shifting sands around AI regulations and compliance and things like that. And I was joking with everybody in the room because all of our serve advisors, they’ve all been in the HR world for at least 20 years. And I go, “Let’s just go back to being the personnel department and doing everything on a piece of paper.” Jokingly, obviously, but that’s the way it used to be. It was called the personnel department and everything was on ledgers. Then it shifted to Lotus Notes or all these other different things. I think in all industries, technology is really advanced, but in the HR world, it is significantly advanced. I mean, some of the technology that’s out in the marketplace makes the job of an HR executive so much easier and making data so much more available.

Mike Lantz (11:38): I remember back in the early days of Defenders, we would have to have six or seven systems to run everything we needed to do in HR. Well, the day I left, we had one system, did it all. And then now in the day and age of AI, I think an HR practitioner’s job is going to get easier and we’re going to be incredibly more effective because we’re going to have decision-making data at our fingertips fairly easily, where before it would take hours and hours or maybe sometimes even days and days of analyzing data and things like that. So I’m excited where HR is going with technology today, especially with AI. There are HR people that feel like they’re nervous about it, but to me, it allows HR executives to spend more time on the strategic work and less time on the mundane tactical work that they don’t enjoy doing anyway.

Jason Beutler (12:25): I think AI exists so that we can help people do meaningful strategic work. That’s literally what we talk about in our core values and how we talk about AI is it exists right now for people to be able to do meaningful, impactful work in the organization.

Mike Lantz (12:38): When you look at all the data about employee engagement, Gallup’s been measuring this since the mid 1990s, one of the biggest reasons why people stay at a job or stay at a company is meaningful work. If you are doing a repetitive task in HR or anything else, it’s just grunt work, that’s not meaningful work. Anybody that’s been HR for 20 or 30 years, they’ve done a lot of that. So if we can utilize AI agents and things like that to go do that work for us, it’s a good thing.

Kendra Beutler (13:05): Letting the computer do what the computer’s good at, which is not the things that people are good at. There are things that people are great at that we should never let a computer do, but the computer can pull in data all day long really well and doesn’t get tired and doesn’t need a break.

Mike Lantz (13:19): Yeah, for sure.

Kendra Beutler (13:20): So do you mind if I ask you to talk a little bit about your family?

Mike Lantz (13:24): Yeah, I have five kids. So I’ve been married 28 years coming this May. We’ve been together for 30. Her name’s Julie and we are empty nesters. We have a 27-year-old, 26, 25, 24, and 22-year-old. We were fortunate enough to be able to have two kids biologically, and then we adopted three kids, and that’s why they’re all stacked so much. So we adopted our son, who was our first adopted child, a year and a day after my daughter was born. And so it’s been quite a ride. They’re all great kids. They’re all very unique. I mean, I always laugh at this whole nature nurture conversation because not all of them have the same biology, yet sometimes they’re more similar than you think. And then sometimes our biological ones couldn’t be more different. And so it’s been great. They’re all here, so we get to see them a lot.

Mike Lantz (14:10): They all are great friends with each other, which is something that we were pretty intentional about in raising them because unless tragedy strikes, they’re going to outlive us and I want to make sure that they are a very tight-knit and close-knit family.

Kendra Beutler (14:22): Yeah, that was always one of my biggest… I don’t know. The biggest blessing in my life is that our kids love each other. I think that’s incredible. So what was it like starting a company with a house full of… How did you balance it?

Mike Lantz (14:36): Well, I mean, when it was really crazy was when I started my first company. I started that in 2000, literally a week before my oldest son was born. I had a daughter that was one, a newborn, and then we had Mason, who you guys have met. We had him a year and four months later. And in my first business, I was doing a lot of traveling. I was gone probably three days a week. And so the only thing that got us through was I have an amazing wife. We participated in the au pair program, so there was some hands to help her. And then there was a point in time where we had five kids under six. I went with my wife to the doctor one time and she was not doing well. And this was before Amazon, and Dr. Cummings, who’s a legendary pediatrician here in town, he goes, “How can I help you?” She’s like, “Well, I have to go to the grocery store twice because I have to buy diapers and formula and all this kind of stuff, and then I go back for all the other food.” He picks up the phone and he calls his Similac rep and he calls his Pampers rep.

Mike Lantz (15:36): We had to pay for it, but for the next year they delivered Similac formula and diapers to our doorstep every week.

Kendra Beutler (15:43): Wow. Yeah.

Mike Lantz (15:44): Before Amazon.

Kendra Beutler (15:45): Before Amazon, before all of the services.

Mike Lantz (15:48): But it was a challenge. I’m grateful that I have a family that supported me in my entrepreneurial career, but it was crazy. It was absolutely crazy.

Kendra Beutler (15:56): I can’t imagine. Jason, you got any more questions?

Jason Beutler (15:58): Let’s ask our ending question. So what are you proud of that has nothing to do with revenue?

Mike Lantz (16:03): I’ll give two. I’ll give one personal and professional. I’m incredibly proud of my family. It’s not been a perfect world, perfect life. My marriage hasn’t been perfect for 28 years. Spoiler alert, when you’re married that long, you argue a bit and you don’t always see eye to eye. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of all the adults my kids have all turned into. They’ve all done really well with their lives. My youngest is about ready to be a senior in college. She’s got a career path ahead of her that she’s excited about too. And then professionally, I think it’s not what I’m proud of. I’m just honored on this. There’ve been a lot of people that have trusted me to join our journey. We have 19 people that work for us at trueU. They’re all amazing people who have bought into the vision of where we’re going and said, “I want to be a part of that.” And the same thing happened when I was back at Defenders, people that were like, “I want to go and be part of this organization, and I’m going to trust you, Mike, and your leadership, and I’m going to join you.” There are people that we still work with today in our leadership programs.

Mike Lantz (17:07): They come in and facilitate these who I hired at my first business back in 2002 or three or four, and it’s an honor to me that they’re excited about what we’re doing and want to be a part of it. I don’t know that I’ve done anything other than just show up and tried to cast a vision and give them the tools to go and be successful, and they put that with their God-given skills and abilities, and things have worked out.

Kendra Beutler (17:32): Yeah. I love the way you said that you’re honored by that. You were 14 years old, and I think back to some of the people that have been so meaningful on our journey, and were with us for a certain period of time for a certain reason, and they’re off in the world doing other things now, but definitely honored to have been part of their story at some point along the way, and they were part of our story.

Mike Lantz (17:49): There’s a guy here in town, Bryan Neale, he owns Blind Zebra. It’s a sales operating system company, and one of the things he always talks about is, “I know people aren’t going to be with my company for their entire career, but I want to make sure that their tour of duty with Blind Zebra is very meaningful for them, and that it will then better them for whatever’s in the future for their professional world.” I care about retaining my people, but at the same time, if they’ve got a bigger and better vision that they want to go and pursue, we want to help them do that.

Kendra Beutler (18:17): Yeah, absolutely. There was a point where we’ve hired a lot of recent grads over the years because we have this apprentice program where we have college students working with us, and we lost a few of them, and it was really hard. I think we eventually realized, you know what? Maybe we’re a space for those first two or three years. Developers, frankly, are senior level and five years experience, and we can’t afford to have a whole bunch of senior level people running around. But we’re really good at training. We’re really good at equipping and inspiring. I think that early part when people, they’re young and hungry and excited, and that’s kind of what we feel like is our specialization, that we love having people like that.

Mike Lantz (18:49): That’s really great. That’s great.

Jason Beutler (18:51): Mike, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for your story with us. I’m internalizing this. I can learn my way through anything idea, so for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Lantz (19:02): Absolutely. You bet. Thanks for having me on. It’s the world of you guys and your whole team at RoboSource, so thanks for all the support.

Jason Beutler (19:08): And that shift, brought to you by RoboSource. If this one hit home, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Kendra Beutler (19:14): And if you’re ready to see what automation could shift for your business, head over to processcoach.ai.