Slack: Simplifying Business Communication One User at a Time

/in /by

slack“I love email.”

Said nobody, ever.

There’s been so much that has evolved in the last 25 years in communication.  Mobile phones have proliferated to the point of being ubiquitous. We used to use those phones for voice calls, but now they’re really used mostly to send messages and access the internet.

Every now and then we use them to make calls, but many of us use it to access email.  Email, the one piece of technology that hasn’t changed much since its inception at the dawn of the internet.  Think about how shocking that is – that you work with something so often that has fundamentally not evolved to match our digital devices.

You still have a sender, a recipient, a subject line, etc.  For most people, it’s the beating heart of their businesses, but they dread having to deal with it.  What’s worse, sometimes people use email as a crutch – as a way to avoid dealing with talking to someone, be it over the phone or in person.

When dealing with buying and selling businesses especially, it’s important to make sure that you’re choosing your words carefully.  We’ve seen deals fall apart simply because a series of emails were birthed from a misinterpreted tone, intent, or piece of content in an email that should really have been handled by a phone call or in-person meeting.

So it might be even more of a relief to hear that there’s been an evolution in messaging that has the ability to destroy the scourge of internal company emails – and beyond that – actually make communicating with your team something fun and that you can look forward to.

That’s where Slack comes in. 

Slack is an archivable, searchable, hive mind that allows you to move all of those long, terrible, threaded email conversations into various separate threads.  These conversations are accessible via mobile apps or a browser.  You can watch everyone chime in on various topics and issues without having to resort to searching through an email pile (which nobody loves).  You can even adapt Slack to use it to communicate with vendors or important clients.

What companies use Slack?
LinkedIn, Salesforce, Google, PayPal, eBay, Dropbox, and Stripe, just to name a few.

What’s the catch?  Well, Slack is part of the popular SAaS (Software As a Service) industry.  Mailchimp, a well-known SAaS product, works off the same principles: provide a basic level of service for free.  This will satisfy many people who have small teams or who don’t need a lot of technical integrations into their Slack channels.  But, should you need more features, etc., you can purchase them via a monthly per-user charge.  Many small businesses simply use the Basic Slack plan at no charge and transform the way they communicate with each other.

Yes, it will be a bit hard to change – but once you’ve adapted, you’ll wonder why you didn’t switch sooner.  And you won’t miss the massive pile of internal email you’ll have eliminated with this one simple switch.

Want to learn more? Check out Slack’s website.

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at or 913-433-2303.

Why You Should Hire for Cultural Fit First

/in /by

culture fitIf Millennials have added anything to the conversation around hiring these days, it’s the idea that cultural fit matters.

You shouldn’t simply hire people who are competent and willing to do the work, but also who are excited to be with you and fit well into your established company culture.

What is a cultural fit?

An employee who is a cultural fit for your company is far more likely to be a “great” employee who has a future with you rather than the “good” employee who just manages to fill a role. This is because the employee who is a cultural fit is in alignment with the goals, beliefs, and attitudes of the company itself.

Your company culture may be a mirror of its customer-facing self. For anyone who’s ever flown Southwest Airlines, for example, it’s clear that the staff knows how to have fun and that they’re given full permission by the company to do just that. If you still need convincing, check out this safety announcement from a Southwest flight attendant, delivered in late 2016.  

But perhaps your clients don’t get to see your staff in the highly personal way that Southwest employees interact with their clients. In that case, make sure you have a good sense of what the company culture is and how it impacts your company brand. If you can’t answer that right away, no worries!  Think about the top three or four behaviors that are critical for success at your firm.  That’s a good base to start from.

What are some interview approaches to use?

Hopefully, you’re not one of those employers who uses absolutely useless cliche interview questions like, “Tell me your greatest weakness,” etc. But apart from asking good and thoughtful questions, you may not realize that it’s important to ask unexpected and unusual questions as well. Here are a few suggestions:

  • What does a typical weekend look like for you?
  • What values are important to you?
  • What type of team do you thrive in?
  • Based on what you’ve seen and heard so far, how would you define our company’s culture?
  • Why does the role you’re applying for have meaning for you?

In addition to questions, perhaps consider adding a personality test to the process, or even allow for some “white space” time in the interview, where you allow the candidate to guide and even lead the discussion. See how they perform in the absence of direction.

Why does this matter?

Ultimately this is an end-to-end issue, meaning, it’s just as important for the employee to be a cultural fit for you as it is for your company to be a cultural fit for the employee. When people are aligned with the values and practices of a company, they’re less likely to see work as some disconnected part of their day: a location they go to in order to earn a paycheck.

They’ll see their work as an extension of their life. They’ll stay with you longer…and they’ll inspire employees around them to greater heights. All of these results can only enliven and strengthen your company culture.

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at  or 913-433-2303.

Should You Have a Business Partner?

/in /by

“A contract isn’t in place for when things go right.
It’s to account for the possibility that things might go wrong.”

partnershipYou can google the title of this article and you’ll find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of articles, many of which take a position as to why you should “never” have a partner or “always” have a partner.

We’re not going to do that today, not only because we think such a binary answer to a question that involves humans, who are pretty complex in general, never mind when it comes to business, isn’t useful, but also because we really want you to step back and look at the larger issues in place when you consider a business partnership.

Have an agreement in place

Figure out how decisions are going to be made, who’s going to do what, what happens in the case of a death, a sale, or someone just getting tired of it all and wanting to quit. You’ll find that just the exercise of coming to an agreement as a valuable first proof of whether you should have a partnership…and whether you should have a partnership with this particular person.

What are your track records during tough personal situations?

If you aren’t well acquainted with a possible business partner, ask to speak to former employers and close friends and ask the tough questions. Difficulties are going to arise while running your business, and you need to know what’s going to happen to this person when the going gets tough. It’s easy to say, “I’ll hang in there,” but your past performance is your best indicator of future reactions.

Do you both feel equally strong about the business?

We know that sometimes in relationships one person feels stronger than the other. Try to avoid that here. You need to find someone who is enthusiastic about the business for their own reasons, not just because they get caught up in your excitement and get pulled along in your wake.

Are you friends already?

And are you willing to possibly sacrifice this friendship for this business? This is the non-business risk that you take when getting into a partnership with a friend. Things could end very badly, ending not just your partnership and business, but a friendship too. This obviously goes back in line with everything else we’ve discussed above.

Can you do this without each other?

Do you really need a partner? Or do you just need to hustle longer and harder? Sometimes people think they need a partner, but what they really need is to contemplate if they could do the business alone and calculate the possibilities.

Remember that anyone who tells you that you should “always” or “never” have business partners is going for an easy, oversimplified answer to a complicated question. The correct answer is…It depends, just as much on you as the potential partner.

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at or 913-433-2303.

Extreme Ownership: Apply This Technique Today To Improve Your Business

/in /by

The concept of “Extreme Ownership” was coined by former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink. Jocko spent 20 years in the SEALs and retired in 2010 after serving as the commander of a SEAL Task Unit in Iraq.

Origin of the term

During an operation in which he was the commander, there was a friendly fire incident which resulted in the death of a member of the Iraqi military at the hands of one of his own SEALs.

The operation was immediately shut down and everyone came back to base. As Jocko spoke to different troops in order to get a bird’s eye view of what had happened moment by moment, he realized that it hadn’t been one particular thing that had gone wrong, but rather a number of things.  Troops had gone to the right locations at the wrong times, or gone to the wrong locations at the right times, for example.

With less than 20 minutes to go before the briefing, Jocko realized the answer: he was the single point of failure. He was the commander of the operation and if anything bad had happened, it was down to him. What he would later go on to call Extreme Ownership was realized, and he defines it as:

“An attitude of not ever making excuses or blaming others. When problems arise you take ownership and solve them.”

Jocko WillinkApplication in your Business

What Jocko experienced when he implemented this strategy in his life can have significant benefits for your business, not just because it’s unexpected, but because it causes your colleagues and staff to pause and think.

When something goes wrong with a marketing campaign, or a customer service issue, or a product launch, instead of pointing the finger at a subordinate and letting the righteous anger flow, you can say, “It was my fault.”

What you’ll find is that your staff will more than willingly refuse to allow you to take all the blame yourself, and then willingly identify ways that they could have improved.

When you create a culture in which those at the very top are willing to take the blame for mistakes, you allow and encourage your staff to strive not to make those mistakes again. The entire company can be oriented towards positive resolutions of poor outcomes, rather than playing the old blame game, which has never been listed as a business principle to be lauded.

President Truman famously had a “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk.  Extreme Ownership allows you to fold a tangible daily practice of that saying into your business.

Jocko Willink is on Twitter.

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at  or 913-433-2303.