John Wilson 0:00

Adam, I can't thank you enough for being on the CO Global Network podcast with us today. I know you're a very busy man, and so thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. Let me just explain to the people listening and people watching, Adam, just a little bit about you and your background, your company. So our guest today on the CO Global Network podcast is Adam Gordon. He's the president of Gordon's Downsizing and Estate Services. Adam's path to running the family business. Took a couple of detours, hey, Adam, started out as a teenager as an auctioneer, then left to attend Royal Military College of Canada and served as an officer with the British and Canadian forces. From there, you were off to Queens, right, Adam? And got your MBA there. Then on to a KPMG, management consulting and strategy development. And then a stint on the leadership team at Max Sold, the auction business that Gordon spun off, and before coming back to lead the company family business that the families run since 1950s. Yeah, 1958. Yeah, 1958. Yeah, no, I've got it here, got it here. So today, Gordon's helps families, executors, and people with power of attorney through downsizing and estate settlement. Real estate, move management, appraisal, auctioneering, the whole thing under one roof. That's what's so impressive, Adam, is everything's under one roof. And usually Adam and his team are helping people, you know, in a tough time, right, in a person in a person's life when they're going through some significant change. So, Adam, I hope I got a pretty good pre see there in terms of the journey from there to here. But once again, welcome to the podcast. I'd also like to mention that your company has won several times the Canadian Business Excellence Award. And before we got on the call, we're going to see each other later in the month. And you're also a member of Larry Taylor's group and CO Global Network, right? And have been for some time now. That's right. I think I'm coming into year three. So you're coming into year three, yeah. Well, it's great to have you a part of it. It's great to have you a part of it. No, I got six questions for you, Adam. And you know, we might as well just dive in and get at them. I'm really looking forward to your responses here. You know, it's kind of focusing on leadership from your perspective, right? And so, so during your career, you've helped scale a company from 50 to more than 500 employees across 700 countries. If I read right, you went from 100 auctions a year to 7,500 auctions a year. That's rapid growth.

Adam Gordon 2:37

Yeah, it was it would have been 700 counties, probably, as opposed to countries.

John Wilson 2:41

Definitely across like all across North America. That's amazing. So, what did that experience teach you, Adam, about leading through rapid growth?

Adam Gordon 2:49

Yeah, well, I mean, there were two big things that made that experience interesting. Was Maxwell, now I think the largest online auction company in North America for people downsizing or dealing with estate stuff. It was a hard evolution for our family company because it was also represented the oldest division of our company, which is about auctioning stuff, cattle, people's farm equipment, their household goods, and whatnot. So just spinning it out was tough. And then we took it from this small town auction company in Kingston, Ontario, to all these different regions with, as you said, 500 employees when I left. Yeah, I think the biggest couple of things came to mind was just when you're growing that fast, it's very chaotic. There's lots of change happening, people's jobs are changing, roles are changing, there's new people all the time. And so I think a big part of what made it successful for us was focusing on a really like simplifying your mission and values, like making them very simple, easy to understand, easy to communicate, communicating them often. So everyone knew kind of what their north star was or their guiding light. Because in the chaos, if you can look up and just know that leadership needs us to go this direction and everything else is noise, it helps you stay focused in the chaos. It can't go away, but it can help make sure that this decisions you're making, in the absence of more controls and things that you would have in an established company, the decisions you're making, as long as they're achieving the mission and/or aligned with the core values, means that it's easier to survive that chaos, but it is definitely chaotic.

John Wilson 4:28

Yes, it would be critical to have that North Star, wouldn't it, Adam? No question. Yeah, 100%. You went from strategy consulting at KPMG to operating a fast growing business like you just mentioned. What changed most about your view of leadership once you were actually running a business as opposed to consulting to a business?

Adam Gordon 4:46

Yeah, I would say I was very lucky in that. I wouldn't say I got my leadership lessons from consulting. It's not to say consulting is a bad thing, but as you mentioned, I actually started as a very young child. Maybe I shouldn't say that for little reasons, but I started working in our family business very early, seeing the work ethic of my parents, the work ethic of my grandparents, even in our company. And my dad used to say, if you can learn to love your work, you'll never work a day in your life. And I know he wasn't the person to found that statement, but he taught it to me at a very early age. And I thought that was a great example of basically find what you're passionate about so that you can love what you do and enjoy what you're doing. So I think that's a good leadership lesson for everybody. And then after working in my parents' business, as you say, I joined the military. I would say the military is the institution for learning leadership. At least I can see about the Canadian military. Maybe I can't say for all militaries everywhere, but the Canadian military, the British military, the things I learned about leadership in those institutions was invaluable because I was getting paid to learn how to become a better leader. So thank you to all you taxpayers out there who helped fund that learning. There was just you learn about leading from the front, leading by example, and the consequences that come with your decisions. Not every decision is a good decision. And so sometimes you're left with what's the better of two bad decisions, because there's going to be consequences either way. And so most of my leadership training came from early entrepreneurship family, followed by the leadership in the military. Consulting taught me a different thing. It was learning about how can you present information to a leader in a way that gets them inspired and motivated to do something with it. That's what you want to do in consulting. You don't just want to was the joke is tell someone what time it is by their own watch. You want to deliver something that's valuable that that you hope they will take with it. But at the end of the day, if they don't, that's the end of the project, so to speak. So I would say it was interesting. At the same time, it was tough not to get to see things put into action necessarily.

John Wilson 6:57

Yeah, it would be. It really would be. Yeah, you kind of alluded to this a second ago, but what's the hardest leadership decision you've had to make where the right answer wasn't obvious?

Adam Gordon 7:08

Yeah. And I would say I got lucky in the military in that I didn't stay in long enough to get to promote to a spot where too many of those had to happen. But they did teach you in the military that as you progress in ranks, which I think is relevant to corporate, your job is to make decisions with less and less information. Because if you the longer you wait for more information or perfect clarity, the more likely it is that you've waited too long to make a decision. So I learned that early. And then taking that forward, I think for a lot of people it'll be similar. But COVID was an unplanned, unforeseen event that really changed a lot of things for a lot of people. And for us at Max Sold at the time, we shut down operations. We weren't sure, you know, we, you know, there was this whole movement around who should and shouldn't operate right now. Things are dangerous. We're operating across North America. So we had regions that were like, COVID's nothing, just keep doing everything you're doing, like no change to the other end of the spectrum, right? Which is lock down your home, don't leave, order everything and get it to your front door and everything in between. And we were in this unique space where we were helping people liquidate entire contents of homes. And the interesting thing was what we learned after pausing for a couple of weeks to figure out what we should do, which resulted in us laying off about 400 part-time people, which is the hard decision we had to make. But within a couple of weeks, we had figured out we really need to restart this. We need to get back because the only options people have to get rid of their stuff is throwing it out because donation places were almost completely shut down. Live auctions, people taking stuff to a live auction house, people weren't going to live auction through 400 people in the same room. Forget it. Estate sales, same thing. Estate sale, PB of 15 people in the house at one time, and then a lineup of 100 people out the door. So Maxhold really was a great solution for COVID in during COVID to help liquidate people's houses. And it ended up actually, once we ramped back up over two or three months or so, for the kind of two years COVID existed, Maxhold took off. Like it grew arguably more during that two-year time period than it did in the previous kind of two, three, four years.

John Wilson 9:30

But thank you. How do you modernize a long-standing business without losing what made it successful, really, in the first place?

Adam Gordon 9:43

I actually asked my grandmother this question during during an interview a couple of months ago that I did with her as a founding member of the company. I just said, you know, what are the things that you think make Gordon's? Like what and going forward, what would you want to stay say? And she said, good neighbors is an important part of being a Gordon company, like being a good neighbor. So being good in your community. And she said, making sure that every day you feel like your customers feel like you did the best you could for them with whatever their situation was. Again, lots of our situations are very difficult. So it's a tough time emotionally for people, but making sure that we did everything we could to set them up for success in whatever that looks like at that stage of their life. And I do believe that's what our communities, where we've been known the longest, feel about us as kind of a goodwill value of our brand is that Gordon's is a company you can trust. They're going to do great work for you and they're good members of the community.

John Wilson 10:38

No, that's great counsel. Just great counsel. Uh as you mentioned, I mean, your business often serves families during these difficult times during their life. How has that shaped the way you think about trust, empathy, and leadership? Has that an impact on you?

Adam Gordon 10:55

Yeah, in lots of different ways. And I would say that this is a journey I would say we're going to be on forever. This is a big part of our company's journey, is not assuming we know everything there is to know about how to serve this customer base and what to do. There's so much more we could be doing. A great book my dad told me to read actually about 10 years ago was called The Healing Organization. And it was a book, I can't remember the authors. There were two of them. But one of the key learnings is it was that, and I think Richard Branson has said this, but your team members are actually your primary customer. And I think in any business where you're serving emotional challenges for a customer, your team member is the most important customer because they need to be on their A game emotionally, physically, mentally every day to make sure that the customer gets taken care of. You can't take care of someone if you're stressed or you're frustrated with your job or you don't feel you're being supported in your role. Like you need your frontline team to be ready to deal with because the other thing that happens is clients will have emotional outbursts. So it won't be at you, right? But they'll you'll catch them at a bad time or you'll have to give them some crappy news about something. And in order to help keep them moving forward, you're gonna have to navigate those conversations with them. So I think it's a great book for anyone who's in the business of dealing with customers in a very hands-on way, as opposed to selling a product or whatnot. But like a service that's very hands-on, the healing organization is great. I would say additionally, the other challenge we have is if you're calling Gordons and you said it earlier, but you're typically dealing with not just one, but a few of the top five most traumatic life events people have. So the top five is a death, a relationship breakdown, a serious illness or injury, a financial crisis, and or a relocation. So, like our customers are usually dealing with at least three of those at any given time. And it means that every project has a great deal of emotions attached to it and needs to be handled with care. And I don't want to pretend, as I said, that we've done everything we can to ensure our team members are emotionally ready in every situation. But every day we strive to learn more, make improvements, and figure out what our team needs next to be successful as we grow.

John Wilson 13:12

Yeah, no, good for you for that. One last question for you, Adam, and then we'll wrap up. Okay. Uh, but looking back at the companies and the teams that you've helped grow over the years, what separates leaders, in your opinion, who can scale with a business from those who eventually become a bottleneck and can't scale a business?

Adam Gordon 13:32

Yeah, I can't say for certain if ego is the problem, but it's part, I think it's part of the problem. You need to be willing to say, I need to hand over responsibility first. I need to trust someone else to do this. I need to be willing for them to make mistakes. And when they make the mistake, I need to be there to not scold them, but support them and coach them. And if I'm not the right person, because I've given them a responsibility that maybe is outside of even my expertise, I need to get them coaching from whoever is the person in that role. And eventually, once you do that, you then need to be willing to hand over accountability. You need to give it to someone else to own completely and let them manage the people down, so to speak. So if you always think I'm the best person for this job, I'm the smartest, I'm the one that's gonna get this done, nobody can do this better than me. That may be true, but you can't scale yourself, not in a people organization anyway. Maybe if you're developing an app or something that's more possible, but we're a boots on the ground company. And every day we want to grow, if we want to serve more customers, we need more and more people. And those people get more and more trust, responsibility, and accountability. So leaders need to make themselves or parts of their role redundant through hiring, coaching, and training. And they need to be what's the next thing? They need to find the next thing for them to learn and lead within the company. Because as soon as you grow, you hand off something a bottleneck, there's some other new thing. Like we're at a spot right now where we're growing where it's like IT security needs to be a bigger part of what we're doing because we're gonna become a bigger target for those kinds of situations. But that's something that like 20 or 30 years ago, my parents weren't thinking, like, hey, we need to figure out how to protect our cloud-based system because that didn't exist or whatever, right? So you got to keep scaling so you can take on the next challenge.

John Wilson 15:28

Yeah, 100%. Adam, I could ask you questions and learn from your experience for another hour or so for sure. I just want to thank you so much for being with us. I found it to be a fascinating conversation with you. And, you know, we appreciate you sharing your leadership lessons and thank you for what you do. Uh, you know, it's an extremely essential service that helps so many people. So thank you very much. Thanks, Sean. Great seeing you again. Take care.