EW 073 – How Leaders Can Become The Next Generation of Mentors – Winning with Ian Chisholm, CEO of Roy Group

Gordon Sheppard (00:00.97)
Ian, welcome to the show. It is just so lucky to have you here, especially for the leaders that listen to this show, because we've got someone here who has put in the decades in helping leadership development on multi-continents and put the sort of thinking into all of it. And I've only just scratched the surface because you had a chance to send me your book, Quiet Champions. Can't wait to hear more about sort of the why and the what and

CHIZ (00:02.92)
Thanks, Gord.

Gordon Sheppard (00:30.562)
what made it in there. But what strikes me is the thoughtfulness, the impact that you're having in the work that you do with the leaders that you work with would be a multiplier. It's absolutely a capacity builder. And I'm going to say probably if we reached in far enough has global implications for the way that you're going about your work in the leadership space. So I'm absolutely super excited to get into speaking with you. But there's a lot of people that haven't had a chance to meet you at all. So if you had to describe yourself, what would you say?

CHIZ (00:58.558)
Gosh, that's the toughest question of all, of course. My name's Ian Chisholm. I am one of two founders of a little company called Roy Group. We're based in Victoria. We've been working here for 22 years. And we work with our clients to develop their next generation of leaders. But the way we do that is to help those senior teams become our next generation of mentors.

Gordon Sheppard (01:27.0)
Tell me about this unique spin that you just put in there. You just said, okay, we're not just developing leaders. We want them to become the next generation of mentors. And there's something distinct in there. So what's the thinking behind that statement and why did you arrive to this approach?

CHIZ (01:41.182)
Yeah, I think we learned from both positive and negative examples over the last 20 years that if the people that you work with, if your bosses, for lack of a better word, earn the word mentor in your life, you're going to have a very, very special culture, capable of incredibly high performance. It's going to be engaged and people are going to always be learning. And so I think

The negative examples that we learned from is if we were working with the next generation cohort of leaders, we would get to this moment where they would say, this is really great. This is exactly the kind of leader I dreamt I might be. But I just need to tell you it's not the way they lead up there in the C-suite. At that moment, we call it the Cinderella punch. The experiment is over. Because now, if they kept

learning about leadership and practicing it, they'd have to live this double life of also emulating the people that they work for. So we've just found it better to work with a senior team first, get everybody earning the word mentor, and then we can work with them to develop their next generation of leaders. And that capacity stays inside the company.

Gordon Sheppard (02:58.328)
I am completely in alignment with what you're talking about and I love your unique approach. I can't wait to recommend it out in the world because this thing I've earned the word mentor and the discipline that, you know, having gone through your book and picked out some of the highlights, the discipline that you're taking towards making this happen is absolutely unique and you're getting it done. Like it's really remarkable to see that you're getting it done. And I'm so glad to hear also about this starting at the top piece because there simply isn't enough of the capacity building there.

CHIZ (03:05.374)
Great.

Gordon Sheppard (03:27.914)
as folks are often in their busyness, I'm gonna say, just in leadership and not taking the time, but earn the word, earn the title mentor. What a wonderful sentiment. I mean, to arrive at that, what got you to arrive at that sort of specific wonderful phrasing?

CHIZ (03:45.854)
It was really a mentor of mine named Bob Sharche who talked about gift words and that there's some words that you can't call yourself. You have to, they're gifted by somebody else. And if you've played the role of mentor in the story of somebody else's life, it's up to them to identify that, not you. And that one little constraint I think makes all the difference. All the right people get hungry to earn the word.

when you put it up on the top shelf where grandma keeps the gift words.

Gordon Sheppard (04:19.054)
where grandma keeps the gift words. Sorry, I'm sitting in my grandmother's kitchen in Verdun, Montreal. There's a coffee mug on the top shelf there that I always remember looking up at. That was a very special one. You're reminding me of that very moment. And again, the eloquence already bursting through in the conversation and how lucky. In terms of your own journey, I need to really get a feel for your pedigree, if you don't mind. Start me off sort of in those early 20s and just take me through a rip of maybe...

CHIZ (04:20.958)
You

Okay.

CHIZ (04:28.924)
was a special one.

CHIZ (04:41.95)
Sure.

Gordon Sheppard (04:46.4)
some of those credentials, because I think they're substantial. So take me just through maybe a highlight reel to get me located with you.

CHIZ (04:52.51)
I was very lucky. I left our family Graham farm when I was 16 and represented Canada at the United World College in New Mexico. That was a very meaningful experience for me. Came back to the University of Alberta, was desperate to get into med school. They took one look at my chemistry marks and said, we can never let you be a doctor. So I know this is supposed to be about my credentials, but it's.

Maybe the best thing that never happened. I was then lost in the wilderness a little bit. I had worked in the summers for the American Management Association based out of New York, but they had several Canadian offshoots. And they would hire me for a couple months every summer to work for them in a program called Operation Enterprise. That's, in retrospect, that was where...

I kind of took the off ramp for a brave new adventure. When I didn't get into med school and was heartbroken, they brought me down to New York. It sounds glamorous, it wasn't. It was setting up a lot of meeting rooms and picking speakers up at the airport. And then over time ended up in a leadership role there. And that's the executive win that we're going to talk about today happened early on in my career when

an organization and really a person in Scotland heard about the work that we were doing with young people from tough realities in North America and asked if I would come over and see something that he was building. So, and then that took it from there.

Gordon Sheppard (06:35.243)
And that took it from where I saw these big chunky moments of like, want to be a doctor? Thankfully it didn't work out for you and all the people you've helped along the way. Got involved with a good practice scenario that allowed you to get some good chops under your belt early on that led to a lever point in a sense to take that practice to another part of the world. And yeah, we are going to hear about that piece coming up. And then you got your last couple of 22 years here. And I don't mean to overly simplify those things. There's a lot of earned moments.

good nights and bad nights through all that time. And it's funny, you're taking me back to my early days in the early nineties when I was a production assistant on film sets in Toronto. And that would be, I could bore you to tears. I'd take you back there too. There you go. Not the glamorous stuff that we're looking for. So I love, thank you for that setup and thank you for earning the title mentor. just, this is a great start in terms of getting a flavor for what we're walking into. So it leads me to my first question here, which is, if you had to describe your biggest win, what would that win be and how would you describe it?

CHIZ (07:13.864)
not glamorous, but super important.

CHIZ (07:35.794)
Yeah, so it was a connection with a very charismatic gentleman named Norman Drummond. And he had heard about our work and we had heard about his work. And so there was a communication back and forth to say, would you come? What was happening was Norman had raised a tremendous amount of money to build

a leadership center at the north end of the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland. It's about five hours from either Edinburgh or Glasgow. So a bit of a tough proposition in addition to being a community center and a restaurant and a pulse at the heart of the local community, that's what he always used to call it, for revenue, it would also bring groups of young people from the city.

and from what we coined the term tough realities, to come up to the Isle of Skye to reflect outward bound, inward bound, to think about the leadership that might be theirs. We had this belief in New York that young people from tough socioeconomic realities actually had a lot of great raw material for leadership positions. And so that's what Norman had heard about. He had built this center.

There were some very clear philosophical ideas at play, but he didn't know how to operationalize and the clock was ticking. And so we needed to get this thing up and running fast. So we had between January 1st and June 3rd of 2000 to get up and running. And that's the executive win I'd love to tell you about.

Gordon Sheppard (09:24.493)
Well, and it's fun because I think in our pre-interview, we talked about there's a moment in time where this offer comes in and you had to go, was it interview? What was the interview process?

CHIZ (09:33.896)
Yeah, that's true. I think it was in October 1999, there was three or four finalists for the position. We flew over to Glasgow, did the five hour drive and walked into a dinner where all four final candidates were kind of interacting with each other. We didn't really know that that's what was gonna happen.

So yeah, that was just a very long trip to end with a high stakes dinner.

Gordon Sheppard (10:06.795)
And this is you and your partner wife at that time and you're stepping into that situation. Did you know you had the job or was it an interview like at the dinner, like you showed up with the other candidates? What happened?

CHIZ (10:09.446)
Yes, Embry.

CHIZ (10:15.974)
Yeah, think the other three candidates had been interviewed that day, ending with dinner. And because I had come from overseas, my interview was the next morning.

Gordon Sheppard (10:27.113)
And so were you on pins and needles? Did you know it was going to happen?

CHIZ (10:33.522)
You know, I think the pins and needles probably happened after we were offered the job, because now it was real. Are we moving our life? And we had two sons at that point. Are we moving our life to the Isle of Skye? Or do we have perfectly good jobs back in the States, which we did? And yeah, there's a very deep memory of

We were staying in a B &B up in the attic and I went down the stairs to phone the committee to say that we were not going to accept. And I tried that three times and kept coming back up the stairs and Anne-Marie said, if we say we're going to take this job, do you think you'll be able to make the call? And I said, I think so. Like, I think I do actually want to be a part of this.

Gordon Sheppard (11:27.327)
isn't that wonderful. an instinctive moment, again, another one of those sort of moments where you're just like, whatever the instinct wins out over anxiety or whatever it is that you have going forward and you take this chance and a great partner, right? Yeah, like, right, that team aspect in your relationship, able to support that and take your family over there for an adventure. Because you had all kinds of options at that time for sure with the pedigree that you would have had, you could have.

CHIZ (11:35.518)
And a great partner. And a great partner who was prepared to go for this way.

Gordon Sheppard (11:54.177)
gone in many different directions. That's really wonderful. So now you've got this understanding of how to help young leaders coming from certain socioeconomic backgrounds that you mentioned. So you're loaded for bear for that. You're getting some support arriving at this center. You've got this six month, eight month, whatever, six month ramp up really, really quickly to receive cohorts, I'm assuming, of these kids to come into the situation. So what kind of happened next in this situation there? You got them up and running and started to get a feel for the programming that you were doing?

CHIZ (12:23.046)
Yeah, I mean, we've done all kinds of programs in the States. So the program part of it was not new for me, but I like doing things really well. And I think that was, I've been told by the committee that it was when I used the word impeccable that my expectations for what would happen inside this beautiful center were gonna be impeccable. That's the way we had run the program out of New York. And that's the way I just really believe you have one chance.

to send a message to people's hearts that the work that we're going to do here together is important. And that's all about quality.

Gordon Sheppard (13:00.182)
Well, and I'm right in there with you because I could just only reflect on the Roy Group branding alone as sort of an example of impeccable. Honestly, I can say if I have been through your website, I've looked at your book, I've seen the things that are in there and you can feel the high standard that you're bringing at least to that. And then again, I can hear that you brought it to that moment in time as well.

CHIZ (13:05.188)
very kind of you.

CHIZ (13:19.292)
What I didn't have is a lot of operational or financial background, like I was 27 years old.

Gordon Sheppard (13:23.861)
you

Mmm.

CHIZ (13:27.454)
And so there was certainly lots of imagination and lots of vision and lots of energy. That's the nice thing about being young is that you can work long days and you can really put the elbow grease into something. But I think, and we had lots of imagination, I would say that we were able to start with academies right away. So groups of 24 with maybe a few chaperones, we were ready.

June 3rd, Princess Anne agreed to be the patron of the charity. And so all of a sudden we had a royal opening, which makes all the construction companies get things done on time. It's actually a very effective strategy to make sure things are done on time. And we had this code. We had this code of six values, awareness, focus, creativity, integrity, perseverance, and service.

And we knew that all of our programming could kind of stem from those things. And we really believed those things deeply. They were on our jackets. We had the values on our jackets, you know, on our sleeves. So we just began. We just started an incredible board of directors. One of the things that Norman had done, in addition to choosing a very young and inexperienced CEO, he surrounded that CEO with one of the most

effective and influential boards in all of Scotland. Amazing experience to report into those folks four times a year to argue, to challenge each other and to convince each other of the best way forward. So yeah, that was really one of the key successes was that we were able to get going right away and we did that. And there was this wonderful constellation of governance.

and mentorship around me and my very young team.

Gordon Sheppard (15:24.812)
lucky to have this great soup mix to describe this and I'm gonna do something painful for just a second and just say you know in about a sentence or two let's sort of let's summarize the win is the win getting the role or getting this program up and running just summarize it for me in a sentence or two yeah

CHIZ (15:29.145)
Yeah, do it.

CHIZ (15:38.578)
The win was probably over the course of the Center's first five years, getting it a firm financial foothold and a reputation for excellence so that that five-hour drive was not a barrier anymore.

Gordon Sheppard (15:57.163)
and you are on a rocket, the learning curve is the steepest learning curve you can identify because you're arriving, you're good for programming, but then you gotta go deal with a board and then you gotta deal with these expectations. And I'm sure there's sort of little blips here and there along the way, if that makes sense.

CHIZ (16:11.64)
and run a restaurant and a facility and be in a totally different culture. 75 % of my neighbors English was not their first language, Gaelic was. this is like, which amazingly you'll love this in the Gaelic language, there's not really a word for leadership. There's like directorship and

stewardship, but there we were running this international center of leadership in a place that didn't have a word for that in its its home language. So, and I was a brand new dad and a brand new husband. It was all, yeah, it was.

Gordon Sheppard (16:52.726)
Wow, so pick a five year stretch where you don't feel like sleeping much in terms of all the things that would have gone on with it. And yet the win is over the five year period, I'm gonna say delivering essentially on what that promise was. And you got to get that done, massive win.

CHIZ (17:05.596)
Yeah, the organization had made a big promise to the world. And yeah, in thinking about your equation for an executive win, just, it was really my job and my team's job to deliver on that promise.

Gordon Sheppard (17:21.6)
And you delivered. And so what's great is it gets us into the anatomy of the win, which is to talk about the strategy, the work plan, people, operations and results behind the win. Strategically, if we think about vision, mission, values, goals, this kind of thing, you mentioned six values were in play. Do you know what mean? That would have been sort of one of the guideposts, for example. You've mentioned the strategy discussions that you would have at a high level with this really robust board that you've described. Any other sort of strategic highlights that you'd like to?

CHIZ (17:25.426)
Never.

CHIZ (17:38.974)
That's it.

Gordon Sheppard (17:49.622)
Point two when you think about pulling off this win to deliver.

CHIZ (17:53.456)
Yeah, and even just thinking about our talk today has made me think about it. It's now, you know, more than 20 years out. I think partnership, because we were so far away from everywhere, there were a number of key partnerships along the way. The first was with the Greater Easter House Development Company. They were doing work with young people, the same young people that we wanted to work with, the same profile.

and they were in their community and we had this incredible experience up on Skye. So even though it looked like we were maybe competitors, we got in the room together and banged out something called the WOW program, which stood for What Other Way. And it was a series of months in Easterhouse, a week up on Skye, and then follow up for six months back in Glasgow. Now we were really connected to a community wanting to...

position its young people to take on the responsibility of leadership. was...

Gordon Sheppard (18:58.058)
that partnership piece being in there and you could hear then that would come up at the board discussions. It would be coming up in your discussions. It would be coming up in your relationship building that you were doing. And then to get impact, it's one thing to go to camp. You know what I mean? In a sense, or go ways to a center and have an experience. Another thing to have that multi-month integration opportunity to give it legs to get those things into practice. Well, that is just a.

wonderful piece of the puzzle to hear because if I hear partnerships being essential to the strategy, anytime we have a strategy, you know, we need a work plan. And so we've heard about this sort of five-year horizon. There's sort of, I'm going to say somewhere in 2000, you say, yes, I'm going to do this. And then over the 60 months or whatever it is, that might be the time horizon that we're looking at. Any highlights along that, you know, if got the timeline out, we marked the significant moments along the way. Is it just sort of surviving in the first year or was it, and then any big moments along the way and that kind of thing?

CHIZ (19:50.95)
I think it was surviving in the first year, year and a half, and also being honest about that. Not trying to save face, but this board of directors, particularly some of the members on it, you you shut the door and it's honesty time. We're not trying to look impressive. We're not trying to, and that was a great learning for me, that I didn't need to be intimidated or try to impress these folks.

the sooner we could get to really honest reporting about what had happened, what needed to happen. So after about 18 months, we realized, even though what we were doing was very impactful, it wasn't financially sustainable. We had stopped the bleeding of kind of the operational startup, but now we were dragging along the bottom. We were never going to be able to reconcile, at this point, some pretty sizable debt.

that we had taken on.

And so the second, like the work plan, in retrospect, of course, it sounds like it was all planned. There was an incredible moment where one of my directors pulled me aside and, you know, we had talked about how we weren't coming out of debt. And she said, I really think you should spend a morning with my husband. I was like, great. You know, if my director tells me I'm going to spend a day with her husband, great.

So I went to their place on a Saturday. And he was an incredible gentleman. John Macarevy, there was a desk, there was a laptop, and there was a chair for me. And I didn't know that this is what he was doing, but he started this like asking me questions and building a spreadsheet at the same time. And so he knew that I spoke the language of concept and program.

CHIZ (21:50.16)
and even philosophy, right? How to make this philosophy come alive. But he was literally translating that into the language of business, into a cash flow. And after about four or five hours of that interrogation, he told me to go away for a few hours. And I came back a few hours later, and he said, there's good news and bad news.

The good news is, in the bottom right-hand corner, there's a sum there. And you can leave that. If you've got four years left in your contract, you can leave that amount of money times four for the next CEO. And that would unquestionably be an ideal scenario. I mean, that would be a very healthy organization in its first five years of startup. The bad news, he said, is that there's six cells in this spreadsheet that do not exist.

I was like, whoa, what are they? He's like, I don't know, but you have to create something that's worth X amount with this much profit, and you need to do it six times a year to get to that ideal scenario. Now, the money involved, what he was really telling me is if I stayed the course that I had set as a young CEO, I was going to bankrupt the business. But he didn't say it that way to me. He made it so that it was a game. You got to go out.

and find something that's worth 60,000 pounds. It's got to have 20 % profit points on it. And you've got to do it six times a year to kind of bring the nose out of this. And so he just sent me into the world knowing what I was looking for, which it didn't take long to find at all.

Gordon Sheppard (23:37.578)
Remarkable. And it's funny. So with all of your work on the mentorship side, and again, we're going to catch up with this at the end of the interview with what you're doing now. That's one of those moments that would have been informative to the formation of your work. you describe, and isn't that interesting? Isn't that remarkable, like a day? How lucky that you as a leader could spend a day with someone that could shift the course of an organization. Because you were at the right moment to listen. Crisis, you know, don't waste a good crisis, Mr. Churchill.

CHIZ (23:48.026)
Incredible. Incredible. Total change of course.

day.

Gordon Sheppard (24:05.779)
And then we get into that moment and it gives you not a brow beating, a of whatever it is, a set of breadcrumbs to follow along in a sense where you could take that out. Isn't that, so first year we're surviving, we know we're not on the financial right track. We hit a moment where it's just like, and then the pathway becomes clearer to you. And you can then take on that next set of leadership skills or whatever it was that you needed to sort of ramp up on, which was again around the profit side of things. And you had a pathway to do it. Is that what I'm hearing?

CHIZ (24:10.908)
Right.

CHIZ (24:34.334)
Yeah, and more so partnership for us to create a program that was worth that amount of money. We were going to need some, if I had been a baseball team, I needed some serious talent.

Gordon Sheppard (24:47.795)
Yeah, you wrote that you wrote that the free agent market was looking good and you were going out there to go and find your next your next slugger.

CHIZ (24:52.358)
And we knew that that was the way out of this was to invest in some great partnerships. So we were able to work with some incredible practitioners. They brought what they did as a living to our philosophy and this incredible place. And we created something called the Gemini Project, which was in Scotland. This was a very big deal because what we were doing was taking 10 young people who had graduated from our academies.

and pairing them with 10 executives from the finance sector in Edinburgh. So Glasgow and Edinburgh. Like, there's this awesome, the kids from Glasgow will tell you that a funeral in Glasgow is more fun than a wedding in Edinburgh. This is the rivalry they have. So yeah, 10 executives from the banks in Edinburgh and 10 young, savvy, street smart leaders from the streets of Glasgow.

And we would train them separately in the city how to coach each other. And then we would bring them up to the Isle of Skye together for seven days. We'd do a simulation or an exercise every morning and every afternoon. The executives would coach the young people from Glasgow. And then after the coffee break, the kids from Glasgow would coach these executives up this wall and down again. It was fantastic. One of the most wonderful pieces of work I've ever been a part of.

Gordon Sheppard (26:19.839)
what a rewarding opportunity one to create the pond for in a sense, and then allow this cross-populating, my grandmother, my mother's from Glasgow. I've got a little bit feel for that little vibe that you're talking about, so I love it. And so then we get in here and we've got, again, another real world thing. So we have this partnership down to Glasgow in another organization. We've got a partnership out to Edinburgh. You can see the tendrils of sorts moving around.

CHIZ (26:31.9)
she is.

CHIZ (26:36.232)
Thanks.

Gordon Sheppard (26:49.545)
Scotland as a whole and I think maybe surpassing expectations of the board at this point. Is that fair the way it's going?

CHIZ (26:57.502)
The expectation was definitely not to fail. So they saw this as that we had put forward a strategy that could take us in the right direction.

Gordon Sheppard (27:08.779)
And also talking about looking for the sluggers, looking for people that can kind of participate and pay for it in a sense. So we talk about these executive level, like that sort of is a good cohort to get after in terms of leadership, leadership development, and then pulling together multiple worlds. And those executives would add great stories. It's funny, I'm just aching to hear the first name. You don't need to say the full name, but is there a first name of one of the kids that is memorable from one of those ones? I don't mean to put you on the spot if you can't, but is there a first name that you can tell a little story? I'd love to hear that.

CHIZ (27:33.15)
No, I can't say do that.

Yeah, no, I remember a wonderful young guy and he wouldn't be, he'd be, you know, he'd be 45 now, named Malky, who was not messing around, like a serious look on his face every morning. And he took it seriously that he was paired with this gentleman from Edinburgh and he was going to help him. And there was always one of us in the room so that we could provide some feedback.

on the quality of their coaching after so that people got better and better and better. So we got to witness a lot of these discussions. And Malke on one day just listened really, really carefully about, you know, a political issue that was happening in the office. And Malke listened, listened, listened. And then his first question was, so why don't you just fire this prick?

Which in explaining why he didn't want to fire this problem employee, the guy really started to dig into what this was about and Malky took it from there. But yeah, no, it was great.

Gordon Sheppard (28:42.42)
another moment of, again, what's nice here is breaking the barriers of mentorship. We don't need to be old wise and with white flowing through our hair to have mentorship. It's a two-way street. It's, you know what I mean? We can learn and it opens up that possibility as well. Strategy, work plan. We've heard some highlights along the way. There's many people involved. I heard you and your wife and your family.

are involved early. You've got the right attitude to go on an adventure. You've got the resiliency to get through the first 18 months and have those board discussions, the resiliency through then getting up the new programming and adjusting mindset around helping things to kind of get moving forward. You've got these partnerships that are occurring along the way. In terms of people and attitudes, are there highlights that you'd like to bring up for this win that I'm, yeah?

CHIZ (29:23.282)
Yeah, know the whole, and Gord, this would be, I this was the reason that I wrote the book, is because there was just so many exquisite people involved with this story. Like, the board of directors were incredible. I'm like eternally grateful for them being around me and believing that I could do this. The team, this is a part of the world where people work really hard.

They call it grafting. Your grandma would have called it grafting. They are grafters. So in that way, we couldn't go wrong. As long as we pointed people in the right direction, I knew that they would work hard. Funders, other business people on Sky that were very keen to see something like this take root. Connections. mean,

Every time we did one of these programs, we met more and more people and our network was building and they had something that they really believed in to tell others about. It was the last iteration. We came to some of the people in our network brought us to the attention of a gentleman named Sir Tom Hunter. And Tom Hunter really wants to change Scotland. And he's a very wealthy man and.

He was also very smart. He went to the Scottish executive and said, I would like to do some innovative pilots that could change society. And I'd like to partner with you on that. So 50 % government funding, 50 % my own money. I want to do some experiments. And I'm also going to pay for independent third party research. And so if these experiments that we do work, the government will roll this out going forward.

and we were brought to his attention. And it was the story of the Gemini project that he heard about. He thought that was pretty cool. But what he had us in mind for was to work with head teachers from across the country. And it makes me so happy to say that 22 years later, every head and deputy head teacher in the country goes up to sky for that experience.

CHIZ (31:40.456)
to this day.

Gordon Sheppard (31:42.26)
Boy, from a legacy point of view, that is massive. That is transformational.

CHIZ (31:44.86)
That was transformational. And that started because people knew us and put us in front of the right opportunities to say, they can do it. They don't do it yet. But this team will pull this off for you. That's the reputation we had.

Gordon Sheppard (32:02.622)
Sorry, thanks for not getting into med school. Do you know what I mean? Like that's just a great, like when I think about leadership, that's fantastic. And that right, and nice that he didn't fund it all privately, which I'm sure he could have. He got into that partnership thinking and understood how to do it. And then you folks had the readiness, right? You're ready to take that on and ready to have that go through and to think that there's a legacy where it's still in play. It's one thing to get things through five years or 10 years.

CHIZ (32:06.042)
Yeah.

CHIZ (32:16.786)
Yep, he was smart. Very smart.

CHIZ (32:31.326)
Right.

Gordon Sheppard (32:32.116)
to get it through multi-decade where it becomes best practice and absorbed, that's fantastic. And that does speak to that country level leadership. That's one of those ones that actually makes me super hopeful in this 2026 times where you think that that actually is in play as a guardrail for leadership and what leadership can be from what you've just described. I'm so glad that you've.

shared that little moment, strategy, work plan. There's people involved, which of course we just go on and on about. There's always operationalizing situations. So again, you got there in the first year, you're running these multiple parts of the operation. had to learn how to make money and choose different folks for your team at different moments along the way. Any other sort of operational highlights that you'd like to point out for this win along the way?

CHIZ (33:15.826)
I mean, I think we were, because the operation was so multifaceted and with these three iterations from the academies to the Gemini project to the head teacher work, there was also a restaurant happening. There was also, you know, this huge facility being taken care of. There was also the local community dynamic. In retrospect, I think how we operationalized is through people.

And we found, you we knew what we needed and we found somebody who had that gift. And we just trusted them to say like, do it, own it. This part of the operation is yours. Run it the way you want to and run it really well. Cause it's got to be part of this overall brand that's about quality and execution. So we trusted a lot of people.

Gordon Sheppard (34:06.185)
There's a wonderful leader who was on the show. The wonderful leader who's on the show, name is Bianca Jade Parsons. Her little phrase she picked up from a board member was put aces in their places. And it sounds like you did that over and over again as you sort of operationalized what you needed to do. Strategy, work plan, people, operations. Finally, there's results. Quantitative and qualitative results. Quantitatively, it's funny, I don't mean to bug you about the number, number of teachers through the program, number of young people, number of CEOs through the program. I'm not trying to nail you for the exact stats, but there's a bunch.

of all those people that have experienced any quantitative highlights that you'd like to kind of point out along the way.

CHIZ (34:40.766)
Yeah, no, I should have got the numbers for you because I'm sure that somebody in the Scottish executive knows exactly how many, but it will be thousands from the number of people that go every year in groups of 24 over 25 years.

Gordon Sheppard (34:50.771)
thousands.

Yeah. And so that instinct to poach you out of New York, right? Imagine planting that seed in 2000 and here we are quarter century later with that level of impact. It is in the thousands for sure. And then the multiplier effect, if we actually went on and took that data that was gathered, there's an exponential aspect because it would even be hard to track, but certainly not difficult to imply when those teachers go back to their world, when those CEOs go back to their world, when those young people.

CHIZ (35:19.464)
Great.

Gordon Sheppard (35:24.509)
go back to their worlds as well.

CHIZ (35:26.62)
And the key result for me, and I really hope this doesn't make me sound like a pirate, but I knew why I had been poached. And it was because I could make this thing sustainable. And so the fact that the Centre now is about a $3 million budget a year in Canadian dollars. I think that's like 1.6 million in UK pounds.

Gordon Sheppard (35:31.433)
You

CHIZ (35:54.792)
for a little town of 500 people to have a nation building brand in its little town creating those jobs. Yeah, that was a stretch to make that feasible. I certainly didn't do it by myself. And I think there's been 20 years of work since Anne-Marie and I left there that's made it more and more grounded and more and more founded.

Gordon Sheppard (36:24.723)
But I like you said, essentially what you're saying is I did that. And I think, I'm glad you said it because I can tell you 60 plus leaders that I've had on this show, the leaders aren't saying it enough. And it's not bragging. It's just, know what? I did that part of that moment. And we don't have to aw shucks that. You just have to say, yeah, yeah, you did that. And look at again, the legacy and impact of what that means along the way. And qualitatively, how's it feel?

CHIZ (36:24.84)
Thank you.

CHIZ (36:48.466)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I,

I would say I am so proud that we made that choice up in the attic of the B &B to like, let's go down the stairs and do this. The only thing that makes me prouder is how hard people have worked since we left and what they've been capable of. And yeah, you get a chance every once in a while, you get a chance to be part of a big story and that was definitely a huge opportunity.

Gordon Sheppard (37:21.737)
Well, I'm massive and I love the first name. You know what I mean? Hearing this young person come in and change a senior leader's life. And I'm sure that again, if we went on and we're drinking wine, there'd be dozens of those sort of things. I need to read, I'm holding your book. Thank you for sending it to me. Quiet Champions, a way forward for mentors in turbulent times. I need to speak about this now. It's funny. We normally end the interviews right about here, but I think this book is important to speak about and I want people to know about it. So they reach out, get it, get to know you, get to know what you're doing. I just need to leave in the last.

CHIZ (37:32.422)
No, there's lots. There's lots.

Gordon Sheppard (37:49.898)
of why did I write this book? I'll read this back and I don't expect you to remember it. Becoming these quiet champions for the next generation together represents the greatest influence our lives will have on steering humanity towards a better place. When you wrote the book, that was real.

What's that sentiment?

CHIZ (38:14.718)
I think it's looking back even over what we've just talked about. If a constellation of mentors hadn't come out to play for me the way they did, the results would have been compromised and I would not be the person that I am. And there's some interesting math. We did this at the book launches across Western Canada last November, is to think about somebody who's earned the word mentor in your life.

And that comes very quickly to people. And then you ask some questions. how old were you when they really stepped up for you and you felt that difference? There's a pattern, late 20s, early 30s. Like, there's a ballpark. And then the question is, and how old was that person when they stepped up for you that way? Like, 50s. And then the last question is, and how old are you now?

And they suddenly, the penny suddenly drops and they realize, wow, as much as I really held that person in high regard and really thought that they had a perfect way of doing this, they were as old as I am now, which means it's our turn to step up this way and pay it forward. So I think it's just math coming from the non-financial guy.

Gordon Sheppard (39:39.042)
Well, it's a lot more than math, for sure. Bruce Barrett, I was 16. My dad had died young when he was 51 years old. And he helped mentor me and get me through those last years of high school, not in number of hours, but in right moments. And thank you for getting me to get a chance to think about Bruce. I just can't get enough of him in terms of remembering how important he was. And I've got another few in my mind that are just, you just said it, lightning in a bottle and that chance to earn the title.

mentor along the way. Okay. Well, we could talk for hours. This is just so lucky to have you here. I always, when I get wonderful leaders on like yourself, if you had a few sentences for the next leader that's listening to this podcast right now, what's something that you'd like to pass along in a few sentences to make sure they know and they can put into action?

CHIZ (40:28.668)
Yeah, just, I think from a single spark comes a raging fire. It's that simple. That's what human beings do. You take those few sparks, maybe you make them yourself, maybe they, you know, that's how it starts. It doesn't look impressive. It looks almost impossible. And from those few sparks comes something that you never know where it will go and what difference it will make. So.

Just stick to your knitting.

Gordon Sheppard (41:02.299)
and get those sparks going. And I'm going to say be impeccable as often as you can. Ian, thank you so much for being on the show.

CHIZ (41:09.618)
Great, thank you so much.

Gordon Sheppard (41:15.368)
I didn't expect to get mentored in that thing. That was just crazy good.