In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Paul Akers, the Founder and President of FastCap which started in Paul's garage in 1997 when he simply "fixed what bugged him" and developed his first product: the Fastcap Cover Cap. From humble beginnings, FastCap has thousands of distributors worldwide in over 40 countries.
He wrote his first book, 2 Second Lean, about creating a fun, lean culture which is now available in 15 languages. In 2015, he wrote his 2nd book, Lean Health, in 2016, he wrote Lean Travel and in 2019, he wrote Lean Life and Banish Sloppiness. In 2016, Paul's book, 2 Second Lean, was recognised by the Shingo Institute and won the Research and Professional Publication Award.
In today's episode, Paul talks about:
- The concepts of lean and how it changed his business
- How he took a 45-minute process to five minutes
- The eight deadly sins of waste
- His unique approach to recruiting people
- His simple test to identify star players
- Developing and learning together as a team
- The three characteristic traits of great leaders
- Three pieces of practical advice for growing your people.
Listen Out For:
- Lean is the ability for someone to tap deeply into their weaknesses and address them aggressively
- Lean is the greatest green concept in the world. If you become a lean thinker then you're going to save the planet
- We have a very mature culture. It's like a university for us where we talk about our problems, we show our solutions and look at other leading companies around the world
- Every day, for the first two hours of business, we just develop our people and the way we think
- I have a daily ritual and it's simple. I treat every person that I meet with respect and dignity. Be kind and appreciative. Don't feel like anybody ever owes you anything
- Recruitment - We don't accept resumes. They are all lies. We ask for 60 second videos. If we like the potential candidate, we bring them in for a paid test day. We then ask for the opinions of eight or nine staff and if we don't get 100% of those people indicating that they want to work with them, we don't hire. It's a bulletproof system
- Our people get more done in six to eight hours than the average person gets done in 48. I'll take six hours of my people against 40 hours of anybody else
- We don't have a marketing, sales or HR department and our CFO works 4 days a month. We have six people in our office managing a very complex business with 800 products around the world. In any other business there would be 50 people managing what we do with six.
About the Host
Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.
https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team
