https://youtu.be/Fka2npq2Kjg
Marcus Hamaker, CEO of [bu:st] USA, is driven by a passion for helping small businesses find their pursuit of value by simplifying projects, optimizing processes, and streamlining operations for sustainable growth.
We learn about Marcus’s journey from growing up in a family business to leading [bu:st] USA, where he applies lean principles to help organizations improve alignment, communication, and execution. He explains the 5 Steps to Finding Value framework—Organizational Alignment, Communication, SOPs, Change Management, and Project Controls—guiding businesses to remove inefficiencies and drive sustainable growth. He also shares how the Boost Method ensures teams operate with clarity and purpose, emphasizing fastest time to value as a key metric for success. He highlights key leadership lessons and the mindset shifts entrepreneurs need to scale effectively.
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Pursuit Value with Marcus Hamaker
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Marcus Hamaker, the CEO of [bu:st] USA, a consulting firm that helps you simplify your projects, optimize your processes and streamline your organization. He is also the host of The Pursuit of Value Podcast. Marcus, welcome to the show.
Hey, Steve, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I am super pumped to have you. It's going to be a great episode and we are going to start as usual with the 'Why', because that's what powers great entrepreneurs. They have a strong 'Why'. So what is your personal 'Why', Marcus, and what are you doing to manifest it in [bu:st] or any of your businesses?
Yeah. So, my personal 'Why' is just to make companies better. Ever since I was younger, growing up in the family business, watching my dad work hard. I'm very intrigued by business and it's really interesting to me why one business can succeed exponentially and another business really struggles to get off the ground. And so what we do at [bu:st] USA, what my podcast is about, The Pursuit of Value, is really helping small businesses be better.Share on X Real simple. And I also believe that small business has the power to change the world. I believe that business is and can be the greatest force for good in the world today because of just the entity and the formation of it. Also, not only what you can do with your employees internally, but how you can embrace the environment that you're in. Wherever that's in Italy, whether it's here in the United States, you have the ability and the responsibility and the opportunity to impact wherever your business sits. And so I really love small business.
Yeah. And small businesses are always exposed to market forces and there's no way to take it easy and you always have to strive to be competitive and make a profit and definitely is a powerful force for reducing waste. And I'm making this point because one of the things that [bu:st] does is to apply Lean principles. Tell me a little bit about the [bu:st] method that your company, your group developed, and how do you bring in Lean?
Yeah, so when we talk about Lean, it really has to do with value and it has to do with defining what is valuable to the company. So what's valuable to a manufacturer might be very different to what's valuable to a service company, right? So in our [bu:st] method, we always want to start with defining the future picture. What is success to that company? Or more simply, what is the solution to the problem that they're running into? So you define the future picture, you define the targets, you build the roadmap.
And through that whole process of defining the value, you also want to throw out what's not valuable. And that's where it lines up with Lean. And we always really try to focus on making every step, every process as efficient as possible. And that's what's really important. And that's what we do really well at [bu:st] USA.
So what's the process for improving the process?
Well, again, it really depends on each person's issue. Oftentimes we're brought in to solve a problem and that usually happens at the project level. Sometimes we're brought in just for strategic planning and so on, but it really depends on what specifically is going on and oftentimes, and just full disclosure, the problem is really just a lack of alignment or communication within a team. It's not necessarily this big, glaring thing. It's the fact that not everybody's on the same page, not everybody has the same motivation, roles and responsibilities aren't defined and they're not clear. And then the communication platform is not efficient. So, really, it's just getting everybody on the same page and saying, okay, are we all tracking the right way? Are we all heading in the right direction? If not, let's stop. Let's make some adjustments and move forward. So it's very problem specific. It's very organizational specific. What we've learned over the years is organizational alignment and communication are two of the biggest issues. It's not necessarily the project. That's not necessarily the thing that they're working on.
So how is the [bu:st] method different from EOS and Scaling Up and I don't know, McKinsey & Company for management consulting. So, what's the unique attribute of the [bu:st] process?
Again, personal opinion. I'm not familiar with all of them, but what I've seen in my consulting career is that what we do with the [bu:st] method is we approach everything at the project management level. We approach everything as project managers, and it's very much that we view everything through a project management lens—PMP, Lean, and CAPM. Our project managers, our consultants are certified, so we look at it differently. We're not just stepping into it going, okay, we're going to fix this. We're very specific on the roadmap, what's valuable, what's lean, what's necessary, what's not necessary. So it's very methodical on how we approach it. And then each and every week, we have a session with all the stakeholders where we're aligning everybody.
It's never just a report that we send out. We come together and we are talking strategic alignment with every single stakeholder. And then we're allowing the people, the stakeholders that we're talking to, we enable them to report up to their executives, to the people that they report to. So it's very methodical and how we do it. It's not just a, hey, we're doing this, throwing it out at you. There's always a purpose behind what we do. Again, because we're always focused on what's going to bring value.Share on X We understand that there's a lot of noise, and so when we step into a company as a third party, we certainly do not want to add to the noise, we want to add value as fast as possible. And that's one of our metrics.
What is the fastest time to value when we step into a corporation? And oftentimes, just no need to hide the secret sauce here. It's just helping people communicate better.
Fastest time to add value. So how do you figure that out? Is this that you have multiple problems that could potentially solve and then the low hanging fruit that you're going to start with or how does that work?
Logically, going after the low hanging fruit is the easy part, and we see that in the discovery sessions. We see that relatively quickly. But what we really want to quantify is can we see a difference in how the team, the stakeholders are behaving? And I'll use an example. We had one project recently where we went into a large project, multiple stakeholders over. It's going to end up being roughly a 2-3 year project. And right from the beginning, we saw that nobody was aligned. I mean, this guy didn't know what this person was doing. She didn't understand what was going on there. Then there's people over there going, who is this? Who's this company [bu:st]? What are they doing here? It's like, hold on a second, bring them all together. And one of the simplest things we did is we developed a template for them to run a meeting. Simple. It was that simple.
So when they were to start a meeting, we gave them a very specific set of protocols to go through, laying out the agenda, touching on what happened the last meeting, any calls to action that needed to get done. And so we were able to see that they came to value quickly because the next meeting that we observed, they went right through it. Then the next one, they went right through it. And so all of this chaos that was going on really subsided just in a very simple, you know what, let's give them a methodology, let's show them how to use it, why it's important. And so that was one of our fastest time to values is because everybody went from chaos mode to like, oh, okay, this meeting is going to actually make a difference. We're having it for a specific purpose and what we want to get out of it, we will get out of it as opposed to most readings where they just kind of show up, people come together, they waste time, they walk away, like, what just happened there? And that's not what we want.
That's great. So, Marcus, the way you approach clients, you told me about the 60 minute discovery session that you run, and you said that it had a very specific structure, I think there were 5 steps to it? Can you share this with our audience what it looks like and how it's powerful?
Yeah, well, it's really 5 areas that we focus on, and I touched on two of them already. The first one is organizational alignment. And that's typically a company at the end of the year, they'll establish their next year goals, strategic plan. And who does that go out to, if you're not in the company, let's say the CEO puts it together and maybe the executive team gets it, but maybe the people in manufacturing or wherever, not everybody sees the executive plan, or if everybody does see it, they don't know how it applies to them each and every day. So,
