INTERVIEW | Make Money by Rethinking Leadership, Turning Rejection Into Results, and Building Better Teams with Larry Coval

0:00your listening to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. Where it's a mission to help you make more money on this episode of the show. I have a new friend, Larry Koval. There he's a veteran technology and telecommunications executive who spent nearly four decades leading sales organizations, business units, and billion dollar operations. He held senior roles at AT&T, telegent telecom, epoch internet, global, crossing, and Cox business where he turned around underperforming groups, drove growth and developed future executives. He's the author of Miss Let, why almost everything around our leadership is wrong and how to fix it, while challenges conventional leadership, thinking and presents a practical approach grounded in accountability, trust, influence, and employee development. And I love hearing from people who write books about stuff that they have decades of experience in. This is, I find value in both research and in expertise from experience,

1:01but there's always something a little bit more compelling to me about somebody who's actually been there, done that, bought the t-shirt a few times. So, the super excited to have him on the show today, Larry, what's up, man? Welcome. Hey, thank you for having me, appreciate it. So we mentioned one or two recognizable names there in our intro. And I think a lot of people's questions about companies like this is, how do you even get a foot in the door? Where do you even get started? So let's go all the way back in time here. Let's talk like pre-college. Like you're still living at home, you're 16, 17 years old. What do you think you're going to be doing with your life at that time? It's a good question, because in high school, I excelled in math and science. So I actually got asked to help redesign the science curriculum in my school district when I was in high school. And when you were in high school? Yeah, that was part of a commission with teachers from all around Alameda County that that's where I grew up. And yeah, it was a pretty interesting experience for somebody, you know, 16, 17 years old. Very cool, but also started giving me an insight

2:02into what I didn't want to do, which was go wear a lab coat, that kind of thing. So I always thought myself as a people person. And for, I don't know, five years in college, I really kind of meandered. And at some point, when I graduated, I came out thinking, okay, maybe sales, maybe something along those lines. And just on a whim, I was waiting in the UCLA Career Center for a friend of mine to be done with his interview. And someone walked out of an interview that had not gone well and ended quickly. Sat down next to me, we struck up a conversation. And before too long, he said, you know, you need to take a flight out to New Jersey and meet with our people at Bell Labs and then talk to people about what we're doing because we have a new college program. Sure enough, three months later, I was working at AT&T. Wow, I love the idea that you were meandering because I think we put too much pressure on young people to have their entire lives figured out.

3:03I mean, like there's like 54-year-olds that don't know what they want to do with their life. And we think this like 17-year-old kid is gonna have that type of clarity. It's crazy expectations. It's okay to strike out too. I mean, I think, you know, you have to kind of fail to learn things at times. And my book that you mentioned earlier is all about all the failures. I was in professional life. So, you know, it's kind of an open kimono about all those things I did wrong. And the lessons I learned that helped me figure out what to do right. You also mentioned that you had a good enough expertise in science and math as a teenager to get asked to redevelop this curriculum. But then you also said that you looked at yourself as being good with people. I find those two things are typically in opposition to each other that people who are good at math and science have this type of a brain and people who are gonna people have this type of a brain. It seems like you had a little bit of both of those early on. Do you find that to be atypical? It is atypical. My father was a scientist.

4:03My mother was a teacher. So, kind of gives you a sense as to where the genetics came from. And then socially, I grew up playing sports. So, that really kind of made me understand the value of teamwork and the camaraderie that comes with that. And I fell in love with sports. I watched it, I played it. I did everything I could to stay close to it. Because I think there's a lot of parallels to things in life, but also things in business that come from the sports world. Absolutely. The reason that I pushed down on that a little bit more is because I think young people oftentimes are, they hear this advice about developing a skill or developing early competence, which is really sound and strong advice. But I find that oftentimes the thing that makes you uniquely valuable to the marketplace is not a single skill, but rather multiple skills stacked on top of each other, skill stack, if you will. And that's why I wanted to touch on that. Because I think that that is a really valuable piece of your story, essentially, which is that you were a well-rounded young person. It wasn't just this complete and utter focus in one path

5:06to get good at this one thing. It's like, well, there's lots of people who are good at people. There's lots of people who are good at math. There's lots of people who are good at science. Lots of people who are good at sports. But if you can be kind of good at a lot of these, then you sort of stack these skills on top of each other. And that skill stack is uniquely valuable to Larry Koval. Like, it's very difficult to replicate in a bunch of other people, which inherently brings more value to the marketplace if you're an entrepreneur or the workplace if you're trying to have a career. Spod on. And I've interviewed probably thousands of people in my career for jobs. And I'll tell you that the ones that stand out are the ones who know themselves. They have a really well-developed understanding of what they bring to the table. And they don't just list it. They show it to you in the way that they answer questions and the stories that they tell and the way they kind of almost mesmerize interviewers so that you look at them as something very different from the pack of people interviewing for those jobs. They distance themselves from their peers

6:08because they understand who they are, what they're good at. And at times it's really even more impressive when people can tell you what they're not good at and what they're doing to get better at it. And I think that's really cool when, especially young people come into a room and they can tell you that stuff. You know, you fall in love with them. You say, okay, how do I get that person into this company and work in for them? Absolutely, yeah. It's sexy. Yeah, it's funny because you think that you need to impress and not show any signs of weakness, but any leader knows every single person as a set of weaknesses and a set of strengths. And your weaknesses are not a bad thing. They're just things that exist. It is what it is. And to pretend like they don't exist is deluding yourself and trying to deceive the person interviewing you, which they're smarter than that. You can't keep giving the answer of like, well, my weakness is I care too much. You know what I mean? I work too hard or whatever. It's like, no, no, really take an account

7:09and look at, you know, bring some level of self-awareness to the game to be like, this is a weakness of mine. I struggle with this thing. However, like my strengths are very, very strong. And, you know, I tend to work on strengthening my strengths rather than worrying about my weaknesses. And it's like, well, the reason that I'm hiring you is for your strengths. You know what I mean? I'm not hiring you for your weakness. I'll find somebody else whose strength is your weakness and they'll fill that role. You know what I mean? I'm not worried about you making mistakes. I'm just worried about you being the type of person who can learn from those mistakes and strengthen up some of those, some of those, you know, chinks and armor. We can find answers for anything online now, but looking something up isn't quite the same as knowing what you're doing. Forming a business yourself, it looks simple, but a small mistake can mean plenty of headaches down the road. Well, legal zoom helps you get it right the first time, saving you time and fees down the road. The internet influencers are a good starting point, but they don't know your exact situation. Legal zoom has helped launch more than 5 million businesses nationwide with experience forming businesses in every state.

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10:16and mention Travis makes money for your first month of scribe capture for you on select plans. That's sc-ribe.how-tnm. Slash-tnm. It's funny you bring that up because, you know, after almost 40 years of working in leadership across five different companies, one of the things that I found was that most leaders did not understand what they were good at and what they were not good at. And they struggled to really talk about the areas of improvement that they needed to focus on. And a lot of those folks, because leadership can become an ego-driven environment, almost distanced themselves from the feedback that they needed. The unfiltered feedback that they needed to identify where their gaps were. So they didn't invest the time and energy into becoming better at those things. And one of the things I talk about very often is that, you know, for the last 35 years, this leadership development environment we've been in

11:19has focused on emotions. You're not empathetic enough. You're not vulnerable enough. You don't bring your whole self to work or you're not emotionally intelligent. Whatever those things are, like you're deficient in your emotional states. When all the data we get from employee surveys through the companies like Gallup and DDI and Robert Haff and you name it, they all say the same thing. Are people want leaders who are skilled? They have the skills to help us be more successful at our job than we would be without them. But the leaders aren't getting those role model bosses that will help them get there. And they're not getting the feedback from any other place to help them see what they need to do. So, you know, they keep trying to become more vulnerable. And, you know, it's great. You bring your whole self to work. You speak your truth to power. You say, you know, sorry, I don't have all the skills I need to help you all dig out of your results whole. But I hope you make it because if not, we're gonna have to let go three people. Right. At some point your people say, you know, that's great that you have your long list

12:20of shortcomings, but we need you to actually shorten your list of shortcomings. Shortcomings. Yeah, we follow you because you develop, you have exhibited some form of competence that says that you are somebody who can proceed with some level of certainty here and you're trustworthy enough for me to follow and give my time and career to. You nailed it. Yeah, 100%. To get back in the story a little bit, Larry, so let's start piecing together some of these things and timeline this out a little bit. So initial job opportunity to move, does it move you across the country? What exactly happens? No, it was actually in LA, so that was good. I didn't have to move. I was, my first job was managing a group of nine people, all of which had been at that company longer than I'd been alive. And so it was really easy first task. Yeah, talk about like a baptism by fire. And, you know, really quickly everybody understood that I didn't know what the heck I was doing, including me. And luckily I had a boss that invested time and energy in me helped me get really good skills

13:24in a short time. That created a confidence level on my part that actually made me confident. And I think when leaders become confident, that's when the uniqueness that they bring to the table starts to come out because they're not trying to template everything. They say, okay, I know I can do this. Now let me throw my little version of, you know, stake salt on this thing so we can, you know, grill up something good. And that's exactly what happened to me. And it kicked off, you know, as I said, a 40 year career leading people, lots of different organizations, tons of different levels and jobs and areas of the business. So we saw a lot and that's what allowed me to write about it. Of all the experience that you had, tell me the position that you really feel like you cut your teeth in. Like you look back on that time, maybe it was difficult, maybe it was a struggle, but also you look back on it as like, if I did not go through that particular job experience, I probably would not be the leader that I am today.

14:25Yeah, believe it or not, it wasn't even a leadership job. It was my job knocking on doors and trying to get people to buy things from me. And I love that answer. My producer is rolling his eyes right now, listening to this because I did five years of door to door before I jumped into the online world. So yeah, you've peaked my interest, Larry. If you haven't done that, you haven't truly lived. Let me just say that. So yeah, I think it was that that really gave me an appreciation for just how hard that grind can be, but also how rewarding it can be when, you know, you've learned how to do things better and you've found ways to kind of decrease the number of nose that you get before you get that first yes. Or maybe it's just evaluating yourself in different ways and saying, look, I'm not gonna take no as no, I'm gonna take no as not yet or not now. And that alone can help change your trajectory. And it was those lessons that I used when I, you know, started to move up in the ranks to help others grow.

15:28And it was really kind of like changing for me because you fail a lot in door door sales. And it's not a bad thing. You know, each one of those things is reps, right? And reps help you get better at stuff. And so some of the most painful lessons are the most memorable ones. And I can't say enough about that. Yeah, it's a baptism by fire in terms of learning how to deal with rejection. And teaching you that it's part of the game. It's not something, it's not an obstacle to avoid. It's a wall to push through. And you, you know, that's why I used to train my reps when I was doing this a bunch was just like, instead of looking at the rejections as rejections, I used to do this like little mind trick and was just like every time you get a door close in your face, somebody cusses you out, you get a no, whatever, even if it's a polite one. Just grab some imaginary money out of the air, say thank you and move on to the next house because if you look at your averages, you know what I mean?

16:30Say it takes you 100 doors to find the get a deal. It's like, okay, well, I didn't make whatever the commission structure is, $500 on that one door. I essentially made $5 a door. You know what I mean? So it's like all I gotta do is just go add to that equation. You know, every rejection is basically money in my pocket because eventually somebody's gonna say yes. It just means that the, you know, dollars per door is a lot lower than counting it as a single sale. But it teaches you like little tricks and little habits like that that will carry in a rest of your career because rejection is absolutely part of success and you cannot avoid it, you have to learn how to deal with it. You know, one of the things that I started doing when I became a leader was I started rewarding people for the number of nose they brought back, right? So if you got 50 nose, I gave you, you know, 20 bucks. If you got 100 nose, I gave you 50 bucks. It was like, it was like rewarding people for just grinding through that, pushing through those walls as you said. And you know, it's amazing what can happen when you add kind of an element of fun or gamification

17:31into some of the more frustrating parts of a job. And believe it or not, I incorporated that into my leadership repertoire throughout my career after that. So again, you know, it was just understanding how difficult and challenging that door to door job could be. And then moving into a leadership role where I had those same kind of people working for me and what I was able to do to help them push through those walls. All right, I'll tell me the experience that you look at is maybe the part of your career that you would look back on and be like, I am most proud of this stretch of work that I did here. You know, that's a tough one because, you know, there are things I regret and things I'm proud of in every stop. And I think just in general, the thing that I, you know, feel like it has something to do with legacy is that I had a lot to do with people growing their careers and moving into executive roles. And because I led very differently than my peer group,

18:35I was imparting that different style of leadership, an employee centric kind of leadership onto a lot of different people. And I felt how that type of leadership grew within the organization, how it was kind of spreading its tentacles. And you know, if you've worked in corporate America at all and worked for multiple companies, you've probably seen the difference between culture to culture to culture. And that aspect of it, the ability to kind of really morph how people viewed leadership, I felt had an impact on that company's culture that was bigger than anything I did to create, you know, new records in terms of productivity or things like that, which we did, but if you ask me, Travis, what, you know, numbers we hit in 2013 or something like, I couldn't tell you. But if you ask me about the people that I was able to help grow, I can list them. We can find answers for anything online now, but looking something up isn't quite the same as knowing what you're doing,

19:37forming a business yourself, it looks simple, but a small mistake can mean plenty of headaches down the road. Well, legal zoom helps you get it right the first time, saving you time and fees down the road. The internet influencers are a good starting point, but they don't know your exact situation. Legal zoom has helped launch more than 5 million businesses nationwide with experience forming businesses in every state. They know all the ins, outs and technicalities. 25 years of experience means they've seen it all and know what they're doing and can protect you from mistakes other new owners make. It is America's number one online legal service company. Every time I go to start a new LLC, almost every single time at legitimately, I have used legal zoom for it. It's super, super simple and it can be done in a matter of a few minutes. Plus, once your business is up and running, they're great for the personal stuff too, like wills and trusts with access to independent attorneys. Whenever you need one, so when you need a legal hand, visit legal zoom. Go to legalzoom.com to get started. Legal zoom provides access to independent attorneys

20:38and its law firm, LZ Legal Services. Legal zoom is not a law firm. It does not provide legal advice. The most valuable workflows are often the hardest to document. When they span people, systems, judgment calls, they can stay undocumented, leaving teams, guessing, creating inconsistency and holding AI back. Well, that's exactly the problem that today's sponsor, Scrib, was built to solve. Scrib is a specialized intelligence platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500. That captures workflows as work happens and automatically generates step-by-step guides with screenshots and instructions. So no one has to sit down and write documentation from scratch. Teams can review, edit, and share the guides for onboarding, training, software rollouts, and day-to-day work. Scrib also automatically redacts sensitive info like names, account numbers, emails from screenshots. You know all the stuff you don't want other people saying. And as an admin, you control and enforce that across the whole team. Once a guide is reviewed, anyone can launch real-time on-screen guidance

21:38that shows exactly where to click inside the actual tool. So critical processes can get done right every time. And because most AI was trained on the internet, not your company's way of working, Scrib helps power your AI agents with real context, giving them a foundation built on how work actually happens. Not just guesses. Learn more at scribe.how-tnm and mention Travis makes money for your first month of scribe capture free on select plans. That's SCRIBE.how-tnm. You know, chapter in verse. Yeah, yeah. So the book, Miss Lynn, tell me a little bit about why you wrote it, why now, what do you hope people gain from this? Yeah, I would say we're in a leadership crisis right now and the data all points to it being, you know, one that's almost cataclysmic. We've got decade low employee engagement and we've got even worse cratering of manager engagement.

22:38So when you think about that, we know that managers are the keys to employee engagement, that relationship between manager and their employees, boss and subordinate, that kind of thing. And when it's not good, employee engagement starts to stink. If managers are only as engaged or less engaged as the people they lead and those are the people we depend on to dig us out of this hole, we're in trouble. And so, you know, we've got more manager burnout, more manager disengagement, more managers wanting to go back into individual contributor roles because it's never been more difficult and, you know, satisfying than now to be a leader. And so we've got to go fix that. And part of it is getting back to what makes a great leader. And that is learnable, practicable skills and making sure you're not displaying horrible behaviors with your people. Yeah, yeah. So the book is this, how much of a labor of love was this?

23:39Like how much time do you spend working on this, thinking about this, researching this to finally get this book to come out to the world? Yeah, some days it was a labor of love and other days it was just labor. It was like two years in my life spent on this. Two years. Yeah, and, you know, it required me to reconnect with a lot of people because I'm going back many, many years that you know, I had to make sure that my recollection of something that happened 25, 35 years ago was, you know, right on target. And so that was cool that I got to, you know, cock to people that I haven't talked to in a long time. But yeah, it, look, I have three adult children. They have been in the working world for three, five and seven years so far. And they've all experienced bad bosses. And I think I know why that is. It's because we're so focused, as I said, on trying to get people to fit into this emotional box. And those leaders don't have the tools they need to help their people be successful.

24:39So they're going to their stress behaviors. They're not bad people. They're not emotionally bereft of, you know, positive things. It's really about the fact that they're just not equipped. And we haven't focused enough on the things they need to be successful and help their people be successful. So I wrote the book as more of a manifesto at first, but quickly it transitioned into a user manual, right? This is a guide for first time leaders all the way up to seasoned executives because you can actually see who you are as a leader and who your people need you to be. And that distance can be crossed. And if you step back from, you know, your ego for a second, allow yourself to take up a gut punch there and focus on the things you need to focus on to be better. That's what the book's about. The book is Miss Lead by Larry Kovall. Go pick up a copy of that book. If you find yourself in a leadership position in the show, odds are that's probably you.

25:41So, oh, it's yourself to go pick up a copy of this book from somebody who's actually out there doing it, not just somebody who reads about it in research papers. So Larry, I appreciate the time that you've taken to put the book together, but also to come on the show and spend some time here with us today. Everybody else tuning in. If you are somebody who's looking to get booked on some more podcasts similar to what Larry's doing here, we got a book you got something you want to promote. Reach out to us, travelshapel.com slash chat. See if it might be a good fit for you. It might seem well, if you get booked on a bunch of good podcasts and doing this for a really long time. And everybody tuning in, remember money only solves your money problems, but it's easy to resolve the rest of your problems. You've got some money in the bank. So let's start there here on the Travis Makes Money Podcast. Let's tune in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.