Description
"A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization."
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Transcription
Welcome to What Leaders Want, the podcast series that features leaders in the finance industry. Today, we'll have a discussion with Lucas Hancock, who is Vice President of Product North America at SBS since January 2025. Hi Lucas, thank you for being with us and sharing your time. So first things first, can you please introduce yourself?
Yeah, of course. My name is Lucas Hancock, as you mentioned. I'm the Vice President of Product at SBS here in North America. I joined the team in January, as you also stated. I've come to the team with about 15 years of automotive finance experience. So I graduated college at Indiana University in Bloomington here in Indiana. I graduated in 2008 and just kind of stumbled into the industry, and I've been there since. So I worked with one floor plane company, helped various roles and uh joined the team like you stated in January. I'm very excited to be here and everybody's been very welcoming. So thanks. And thanks for having me.
So what exactly is your role at SPS?
I think my number one mission is to, because I'm in North America, is to make sure that the products that we're creating are fit for purpose here and that we can scale. So what I've been doing is meeting with clients and trying to make sure that the products that we have solve their problems. And many of them do. Many of them do, and we have really great products. But there are some small tweaks and things that we can add that I think can really take us to the next level. I think this isn't part of my mission, but I think it's part of the company's mission, and I want to help us achieve it. We have a relatively—it's not small, but smaller than the rest of the globe footprint in North America. And I think we have the best product compared to our competitors. I think if there's any goal or mission of mine, it's for us to have a much larger footprint in North America. And the only way we can do that is to make sure our products are solving the problems of our clients. So for me, it's making sure that we have all those boxes checked.
And what is your assessment after seven months?
Yeah, we're good. I think, like I said, very small things, but I think the organization's very young in North America. And we're coming together. The team is eager. They're hungry. They're a group of really great people. So I think there's a lot of really great things to come.
So that's great to hear. Now, let's go back to the very beginning. What first got you interested in finance?
I would say it like this. It was a complete accident. So I went to business school and I did study finance, but by no means was I in college saying. my gosh, I want to go do accounting or I want to get into finance. That was actually the last thing I ever thought I would do. So when I graduated college, I had graduated with a degree in business management and public affairs. So I wanted to go work for the government. And we have an agency here in the US called the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and I wanted to save the planet. So I went to go work for the EPA in 2008. And they were like, look, The economy's a little unstable right now, so we're not hiring. And they said, why don't you check with your local state agency, which was called the Indiana Department of Environmental Management? So I was like, OK. So I go knock on the door. They say, yeah, I want a job. This is what I went to school for. And they said, we're also not hiring. So I said, OK, no problem. And I was like, I need a job. I just graduated college. So I had a friend that was like, I'm working at this small startup company. They do finance. and uh Or he actually didn't even tell me they did finance. He just said he was working in a small startup company. And he said they did floor planning. He used the term floor planning. So I went in. I did an interview. I really liked the guy that interviewed me. But he really didn't tell me anything about the job. And I was really early and young in my career. So I didn't do all the things you were supposed to do, like research the company before you go out and do an interview. So he gives me the job. And there was no training. And he just handed me a phone. And he's like, here, you're going to start talking to our customers. second. I get a phone call and the first person on the phone says the word VIN. And I'm like, wait a minute. I was like, I thought we were selling tile floor or linoleum or wood or laminate floors that you put in. And then I realized floor planning was financing for car dealers. So I learned. Truly by accident, and I started a job completely by accident. And I am not a car guy, I didn't even own a car. I was like, I rode a bicycle, so just totally outside of my element. So when I say getting interested in finance, I am interested in it now, but I got interested in it by complete accident. I truly stumbled in the door, took a job unknowingly in finance, and thought I was selling floors. just because I needed a job. And that was like right out of college. So and I stayed with that company for 15 years. So got an opportunity to learn a lot.
Did you experience the beginning as a honeymoon period?
Yeah, yeah, this is the beginning. Yeah. If we talk if we want to talk a little bit about what it was. So the beginning, I stumbled in like entry level job, and it was a startup company. And startups that are successful, they grow really fast, they kind of explode. And um For people that are early in their career, that's really great because when a company grows really fast, it normally means opportunity for you to do things quickly. So I think I was there for maybe four months, and I've always been a hard worker. This is who I am. I like to work hard. I enjoy it. And so I worked really hard. I'd been there for three months, and they were like, we need leaders. And it was growing so fast, they didn't even have enough people applying for the leadership roles. So I got a leadership role. just because I was working hard. It wasn't anything else like that. It was so early in my career. I think I'd only been there three months when I took my first leadership job there. And then it was a small role. I had a small team of like 12 people, but I was really, really young. And I made all the mistakes really, really early. I learned all the things I had to do. And then I was able to kind of parlay that into a lot of other roles. I think I probably held eight to ten roles there before I left. So, but that was the honeymoon. That was the early part.
Good for you that you were at the right place at the right moment and you were able to grow fast. So what kind of person were you professionally at that time?
I like to learn. And I don't know if this is the right term, but I'm secure in... not being the smartest person in the room. So I've never been ashamed to say I don't know something or I don't understand something. And I also am not ashamed of being wrong or trying something. So when I look back at my early career, I was somebody to ask a lot of questions. I was somebody who was very vocal when I didn't know something. And then I was very open to trying something. So if something wasn't working, I was always going to try to find a solution for the problem. even if there wasn't one defined. So when I think of my early career, probably I would say a sponge, a listener, and again, somebody that was secure and being not very smart at the time or not knowing enough about the industry, if you get what I'm saying.
Yeah, I get it. A lot has happened since then. And I'm wondering, was there a turning point? point that shaped your career path at some point?
Yes. There's kind of twofold. So I think early in my career, my first job at the company I did, and I fell in love with people, like leading people and being around people. And I had a small team, as I mentioned, I think I had 12 people or something like that. And as with any job, technology came in and we kind of developed some new technology that took over the responsibility of the team I was managing. And I remember I was told really early in that job that all of those people, they're like, hey, they're going to be displaced. They're either going to be asked to leave the company or we're going to have to sever them or do something like that. I remember thinking, I'm like, we're a growth company. I've got six months to figure this out. I can bear down and get them jobs. So I got everybody placed within the company. They all stayed I got them all jobs within the organization. And then I was sitting there thinking, I'm like, oh, no, what does that mean about me? You know, I've just placed my whole team. And I realized really quickly that that meant I wasn't going to have a role either. And that was my first leadership role at the company. And they came to me and they're like, we love you. We want you to do this job over here. And it is it is a sales role. And I was like, oh, I hate sales. I don't want to do sales. That's the last thing I want to do. And they're like, well, it's the only job we have. And it's a sales manager role. So I went and took the job. And I loved it. And it was the most fun I'd ever had. So early in my career, I would say the thing that really changed me was. Don't go into anything with preconceived notions or any roles or areas of a business or parts of an organization thinking that you're not going to like something because you may be surprised. And you may be surprised at what you're capable of doing, even if it isn't something that you've traditionally been strong at. So I went over there and helped create and build our company's wholesales organization. And it was something that I thought I would absolutely not want to do, nor be good at. I loved it and I was good at it. So it was one of those things where I was like, OK, as a leader and being asked to do these things, instead of going into things with this locked and loaded preconceived notion of how it's going to be, just go into things with like a little more of an open mind, a clean slate and just try. So I would say that was probably the biggest change early in my career.
That's a great advice, actually, not to come with. preconceived notions. Now, I want to go back to when you had to take on a leadership role at a very young age and help your team members find new jobs. I'm curious to know how your view of leadership has evolved over the years since then.
I think as you start to get more stable and secure in what you're doing and you start to just like understand the X's and O's of management, you kind of start to understand that. People are at the heart of everything you do. So like everything you're carrying out, whether technology or process is involved, there are still people involved. And you really need to have a high functioning team to be successful. So some things that I learned early that changed were good leaders aren't the ones with all the responsibility. So I noticed really quickly that non-functioning teams typically had a bottleneck. So they had a leader at the top that said, every decision needs to flow through me. I need to be the one that makes all the decisions. I have all the power. I am the one that is going to be the end-all, be-all. A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization. And I found that that was important for two reasons. One, your people were bought in because they felt like they had a say in what was going on. And your clients got a much better experience because they weren't calling in and saying, well, I can't make that decision or I have to go talk to so-and-so or I have to go do this. If you can get all the decision-making down to the front line, you have empowered people, they stand behind their decision, and you as a leader, if you're doing a good job, and you're training, and you're empowering your teams, they're going to make the right decision. And if they don't make the right decision, you need to be the one that stands behind them and supports them whenever it is the wrong decision, and help coach them along the way. The other thing that I noticed really early that I was like, hey, I have to change this, or it's maybe a characteristic that I was like, oh, I don't necessarily like this, was you have to be vulnerable as a leader. You have to show some vulnerability. So if you're not good at something, you can't pretend to be good at it. If you don't know something, don't pretend you don't know it. Just be open about where you are in the process. Oftentimes, when you take on a new leadership role, the people that you're working with are better than you at what you're trying to do. They know more than you do. If you go out and you try to be bogus and say, I know this or I understand this, you get found out really quickly. You lose credibility. If you sit beside somebody and you just say, I don't know, can you help me? And they teach you, that openness encourages openness both directions and creates a lot more what I would call functional team. The other thing was, I saw a lot of leaders have difficult conversations with people. And I think people struggle with that. That is just a natural thing. Nobody, well, there are people out there that are okay being mean. But most people don't want to be mean at their core. Most people don't want to be confrontational. And what I found was, you can have a very difficult conversation, and it can be respectful. It does not have to ever cross the line. And. A lot of people struggle with that. A lot of people struggle with being respectful and having a difficult conversation. So early in my career, I learned. Figure out how to have the difficult conversation in a respectful manner. And if the other person has trouble doing that, that's more than okay. But you don't have to get on anybody else's level. You can always be yourself. And then the last thing was, when you're leading big groups, it's very important not to take things personally. And I learned this really early. You're working with people and people are struggling in life sometimes. And sometimes the things that are going on outside of the workplace are much bigger. or impactful than you could ever know or understand. And so when people are coming in and they're struggling, oftentimes it isn't about you or it isn't about the organization. Oftentimes they're going through something. And if you can treat them with respect, even though they're struggling and they're going through something, you will get a much more, again, functional team and somebody that's willing to work and put in the effort. The views that I changed, and I wouldn't necessarily say there were changes, but things that I adopted really early were decision making needs to be pushed down as low as it possibly can and empowering teams. Don't be scared to be vulnerable. Be vulnerable and be honest. Always be respectful, no matter who you're talking to, whether it's the president or the person that's taking out the trash, even if they don't work for your company. And then don't take things personal. So I would say those were like the big. big core things for me early in my career.
Do you have an example of a time when you had to take responsibility for a bad decision?
For sure. It happened. It didn't happen a lot, but it happens sometimes. So in a previous role, one of the things that we had to do on a daily basis was to assess risk. And when you're assessing risk, you're basically deciding whether you need to default an account or not. And if you make that decision at the wrong time, You could lose money for the organization, maybe more today than you could have yesterday. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the longer you delay the decision, the more money you're likely losing. And that was a decision that I pushed down in the organization because, again, that's just kind of my philosophy. And we had an individual that was a highly functional team member that we trusted a lot that made the wrong decision. and we ended up losing more money than. we initially expected and when you lose more money than it initially is expected there are always some questions asked and so when they went back and asked they looked at the situation and when i talked to the team member they explained to me the rationale on why they held off on making the decision and although i i thought maybe it wasn't necessarily the right decision i understood where they were coming from uh so what i talked to him about was hey here here's maybe a better way to make the decision or a better way to look at it and kind of showed them, I wouldn't say better necessarily, a different way of looking at it and showed them why I thought the way I did. And they were like, okay. And I said, hey, maybe next time when this happens, let's try it this way and let's see how things fare. And then when I went back and talked to the leader, I said, hey, this is a decision that I supported. I supported them in the decision they made. We lost a little more money. We both learned from it. Here's what we're going to do next time. I explained what we thought we could do to improve the situation. They agreed and we all moved on. And the next time the situation came up, they made a different decision, fared well for us and worked. So it was kind of a learning moment for all of us and we moved forward. And the reason that I decided to say there was a decision that I made again was, had we placed that team member in a position of fear, they're probably less likely to make the right decision or a good decision next time because they're almost scared to make a decision.
Speaking of the team, what kind of person do you enjoy working with?
Like people, this is weird. I have a specific, like I have a specific type of person I really gravitate to. So I like people that have a big, have a big passion about, like a big care about what they do. And I met somebody. early on in my career here. And I just, he's a really unique individual because he's been here for a really long time. And he's, I wouldn't say he's like a super social person or anything like that, not a super people person, but I identified really quickly that he has a deep passion about SPS and our success. And it was one of those things where I'm like, dude, I gravitate to this guy. Like, so I gravitate to people that really want to win. They care about what they do every day and want things to be better. Benjamin Darling's the guy's name. He works in the US, he's in delivery. But he's one of those guys that you meet and you're just like, God, this guy really cares about what he does. He's really awesome at what he does. what he does, and he cares about it. So those are the type of people I gravitate to.
We've talked about your role as a leader, and I'm wondering, are there any leaders who have inspired you?
Yes. I mean, there have been multiple people. I would almost say every leader I've ever worked with has shaped me in some way, shape, or form, whether it's they did a lot of things that I thought were wonderful and beautiful and I wanted to replicate them, or they did things that I was like, ooh, I'm never going to do that. I'm like, you know, that's something I don't want to do. You know, oddly, I think I've learned more from the people. This sounds wild, but I've learned more from the not what to do, probably, scenarios than I have the, wow, that's a beautiful thing. And I'm not saying that I've seen more of the wrong things, but for some reason, they stuck with me more. I really do believe that product is important. I think it's what drives organizations forward. But I do believe. passionately that if you have the right people and you create and foster the right environment, you can be infinitely more successful. So when I say those bad things stuck out to me probably more from an impactful standpoint, there were a few leaders that I found that really hampered an organization's ability to be successful. And those leaders exhibited very similar characteristics. And what I found was in watching them navigate things, they usually made people feel a certain way or a group of people feel a certain way. And oftentimes it was they either made somebody feel bad about a decision they made, they made people's psychological safety, they made them feel uncertain psychologically, right? They wanted them kind of in this off kilter way. And for some reason they thought that that created a more functional environment. But what I found in watching that part of the organization work in those ways was the people that were in a scenario where they weren't psychologically safe or they were uncertain about their future or what was going on, they didn't tend to perform better. It wasn't like you were getting more out of them or we were getting these types of things. And what I found was it started to shut the team down in a way that made them less creative. Because when you're only worried about. saving your job or your preservation, you stop doing all the things that make a company great. The ideas and the creativity start to stifle. They start to go way down because everybody is in this insular mode of, I don't want to do anything wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. So I learned a lot in watching those people. And what I found was a lot of them, although they were usually the loudest person in the room, although they were usually I had a pretty high position and a lot of people followed them around. They were the type of people that I would say, if you ask them a question and they said it once and you said, well, how am I supposed to do this? They would just say the same thing again, only say it louder. Those type of people, I found that they were actually probably the most insecure people. They were probably the most deeply insecure people. And I found that most of the time they created this persona because they were probably scared themselves. And there was no way for them to dismantle this character that they had created as a leader. And they couldn't be authentic. There was no authenticity in what they were doing. And they were creating this culture of fear and uneasiness that everybody looked at. They're like, ooh, they're a bullish leader. They're a real bulldog. They really bulldoze walls. I'm like, we can accomplish the same thing. and not be jerks about it. Or we could accomplish the same thing and not make everybody feel rattled and uneasy when they go home. And we could get a lot more creativity and production out of the team. So I learned more out of what not to do from those people, I think, than the what to do. So the leaders that impacted me the most were probably the ones that I looked at and I was like, ooh, I don't like that. I don't like that culture that they're creating. And I remember thinking to myself, God, don't be that person. Just be the guy that's like, You don't know. It's OK to be insecure and feed into your team. Don't don't make them feel uneasy about what they're doing. That's I guess that's my answer to that question.
So we've talked a lot about what you've learned, but what is something that you had to unlearn?
Sometimes you make assumptions of what people know and what they don't know, or you make assumptions of what people's capabilities are, what they're not. And if you make assumptions and you move quickly, You can inadvertently shut people down. You can inadvertently make people feel a certain way. So for me, early on, I was fast about everything. I was like, we need to make this change. We can make this change tomorrow. Because in my mind, it's as simple as do it. Not everybody else moves at that pace nor understands that pace. So what I learned was I have to slow down significantly. I have to look at what I'm doing. I have to think about it a little more. And I have to. talk about it with the team before I do it. And if you do that and you slow down just a little, you get a little more buy-in. And oftentimes, I've found people were more open to the change and more receptive to change management if you just slow down the pace a little bit. And the other thing I would say is a lot of places change for the sake of change. And what I mean by that is... When organizations move and new leaders come into different roles, everybody feels like they have to hit a home run. Everybody's like, I got a new job. I got to show you who I am. I got to show you what I'm made of. Watch me do this. Watch me change everything. And what I found early in my career was it's not always the right thing to do to come in and change something. So back- to the speed, what I learned was assess the situation before you go try to hit your home run. It's not all about the home run. It's not all about that. Sometimes it's just about creating a healthy environment for people to work in and maintaining a little stability. Sometimes doing something the same way for a long time yields good results. It doesn't always, we don't always have to change every five minutes if it's not going our way. So I think slow down.
Is that also the way you handle pressure?
No, no. I've taken a lot of tests on this. Like in the leadership things, you have to do like a lot of to do like a lot of personality tests. And. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with them, but my personality tests always said that I stayed the same during pressure. My personality really didn't change. I'm typically a more creative person. I tend to live in big picture. I like to talk high level. I tend to live up here. I tend to stay there when I feel pressure. I don't tend to change. It's not like I over index and say, show me all the data. I don't say, let's talk about the facts. I don't get, I don't. tend to like over index on on any of those things but i think a lot of that is like for me it's kind of understanding your place in the world um nothing i've ever done is going to save the world i'm not a doctor um i didn't get to join the epa and save the planet um you know i'm not i'm not doing anything like that and So when it comes to pressure, a lot of pressure is self-induced. So you get self-induced pressure. And so what I have to remind myself and what I always try to tell myself is, we're doing matters. It's very important to care about the organization you work for and the people of the organization you work for. But at the end of the day, if what I'm bringing to the organization isn't valued, and they don't value me or I don't value them, there are plenty of other places that we can go where we are valued, our skill sets will be valued. So it kind of just keeps me grounded in what I'm doing to be like, look, although this is important, nobody's life's at stake. We're just making decisions. And it helps you be a little more creative in the moment if you can kind of stifle the pressure that way. There have been moments where I've succumbed to pressure. I think everybody has in their career, but it's pretty few and far between for me. So. For me, it's always reminding myself what I'm doing, the stakes of what we're doing, things of that nature. And again, going back to kind of what I'm passionate about, behind everybody, there's people. People matter. And so just kind of pour into that. So it's never really been too bad for me. There are things that I guess, the other things of pressure. There are things that I don't necessarily like doing that I've had to do my whole career that caused me a little bit of anxiety, but I've always been fine at them. And the longer I've done it in my career, the less the anxiety is, right? So like.
For instance, something like this. I'm not necessarily these types of things may give me a little bit of anxiety, but I do them and I think it makes me better.
Me too. I feel anxious every time I'm about to interview new guests.
We laugh because it's like 90% of people won't tell you that. And I will almost guarantee you 90% of people are have a little anxiety around whatever it may be, whether it's public speaking or, or podcasts. And early in my career, I was always nervous to tell people like, oh, this gives me a little stress or anxiety or whatever it is. And I'll never forget, I was going to talk in front of a lot of people one time, like a pretty big group. And I was a little nervous about it. And I was in my head. And I'd spent the early part of my career being like, nah, I'm good. You know, I'm not nervous. Because I thought telling myself that I wasn't nervous was actually better. And then I learned that I would just tell people. No, no. Yeah, I'm just a little stressed and anxious about this. And then after that, early in my career, I felt so much better about doing things because I was just honest about how I felt. There was like some authenticity in it. And so it felt better. And I usually performed better.
To wrap up this episode, a few more questions. Is there a problem that you solved that made you proud?
For sure. So, yeah, we have a real nasty pain point. at my previous job. And it was like, we did physical audits and we drove our clients nuts. Like we were driving around and like people would show up on their lot every 30 days to touch inventory. And I was like, how can we change the way the industry audits? Like they've all, like the industry has been the same since like 1984. And I don't want to say like, I'm the only person that solved this. There were colleagues that I worked with that were very influential in this, but like, I just got to be part of the team that did it. And it was very fun. and we were very creative in the way we did it so we assessed and looked for data in the market so like we were looking for sold data points and things like that so we incorporated all this like unique data and we could get away from physically doing the audit and then we actually uh in my previous job we partnered with sbs uh to use their digital audit solution so we did this really creative like use of data and this new digital audit tool that sbs had created to solve this problem that's actually how i met you guys was through that. But that was something I was really proud of because it was nobody else in the industry was doing it. We tackled the problem in a really unique way of pairing data in this new digital audit tool. And we were able to walk away from a vendor that we had been with that I have a ton of respect for, by the way. But we were able to walk away from them and not have this big physical audit field for us and gave our clients a better experience and changed the way the industry re-audited it. So I thought it was really cool.
Outside of work, what helps you maintain balance?
Family. Yeah, I'm a family guy. So my wife and daughter. So I have a two-year-old daughter. Her name's Naomi. My wife's name's Lydia. So we just spend a lot of time with family. And I grew up really, really small family, only child. My wife has a huge family. And early on, I think for me, that was one of those things was kind of jarring, being an only child and getting adopted adopted by this big family almost. But I've really come to love it. And then I love music. I've always loved music. I love to create music. I love to listen to music. I love it.
So what advice would you give someone not about building a career, but about building a life through that career?
I think it goes back to what I said earlier about like the people that I didn't gravitate to and the people I do gravitate to. And to set yourself up for success, you have to be authentic. So I would say above all else, like when you jump into your career, there are going to be expectations put on you. And you're going to look at other people succeeding and you're going to say, I need to be like that. I need to do those things. I would strongly suggest not to do that. And what I would suggest is to continue to be who you are at your core and do not create a character. Do not become someone you're not. don't create these things that you have to maintain. If you create a character or somebody that you're not, or you put yourself in a position doing something that drains your energy, you are not going to be good at life or work. Because when you're at home with your family, you're going to be so exhausted from trying to keep up with whoever this person you've created at work is. And then when you're at work, you're a jerk because you're insecure because you're being somebody you're not. So for me, it is literally all about authenticity. And I'll say it like I said it earlier. If the people that you work with don't like who you are authentically, or you don't fit the organization, there is one for you. You will be valued somewhere else. Your character and who you are as a person will be valued somewhere. Go find it.
There's one last question I usually ask all guests on what leaders want. It's, in your opinion, what do leaders really want?
Personally, I want people that want to work and I want people to feel psychologically safe and excited about coming into a job. I want people to come in and have the space to be creative. And I think if people have the freedom and space to be able to create and perform. and they have the ability to make decisions and be accountable for those decisions, you will achieve whatever result that you're after. So for me, a high-functioning team that feels excited to come in and work.
Thank you so much, Lucas, for being with us and sharing your time and your insights. It was really great to hear. Thank you again and see you around.
Good. You did great, by the way. So thanks for having me.
Description
"A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization."
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
Welcome to What Leaders Want, the podcast series that features leaders in the finance industry. Today, we'll have a discussion with Lucas Hancock, who is Vice President of Product North America at SBS since January 2025. Hi Lucas, thank you for being with us and sharing your time. So first things first, can you please introduce yourself?
Yeah, of course. My name is Lucas Hancock, as you mentioned. I'm the Vice President of Product at SBS here in North America. I joined the team in January, as you also stated. I've come to the team with about 15 years of automotive finance experience. So I graduated college at Indiana University in Bloomington here in Indiana. I graduated in 2008 and just kind of stumbled into the industry, and I've been there since. So I worked with one floor plane company, helped various roles and uh joined the team like you stated in January. I'm very excited to be here and everybody's been very welcoming. So thanks. And thanks for having me.
So what exactly is your role at SPS?
I think my number one mission is to, because I'm in North America, is to make sure that the products that we're creating are fit for purpose here and that we can scale. So what I've been doing is meeting with clients and trying to make sure that the products that we have solve their problems. And many of them do. Many of them do, and we have really great products. But there are some small tweaks and things that we can add that I think can really take us to the next level. I think this isn't part of my mission, but I think it's part of the company's mission, and I want to help us achieve it. We have a relatively—it's not small, but smaller than the rest of the globe footprint in North America. And I think we have the best product compared to our competitors. I think if there's any goal or mission of mine, it's for us to have a much larger footprint in North America. And the only way we can do that is to make sure our products are solving the problems of our clients. So for me, it's making sure that we have all those boxes checked.
And what is your assessment after seven months?
Yeah, we're good. I think, like I said, very small things, but I think the organization's very young in North America. And we're coming together. The team is eager. They're hungry. They're a group of really great people. So I think there's a lot of really great things to come.
So that's great to hear. Now, let's go back to the very beginning. What first got you interested in finance?
I would say it like this. It was a complete accident. So I went to business school and I did study finance, but by no means was I in college saying. my gosh, I want to go do accounting or I want to get into finance. That was actually the last thing I ever thought I would do. So when I graduated college, I had graduated with a degree in business management and public affairs. So I wanted to go work for the government. And we have an agency here in the US called the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and I wanted to save the planet. So I went to go work for the EPA in 2008. And they were like, look, The economy's a little unstable right now, so we're not hiring. And they said, why don't you check with your local state agency, which was called the Indiana Department of Environmental Management? So I was like, OK. So I go knock on the door. They say, yeah, I want a job. This is what I went to school for. And they said, we're also not hiring. So I said, OK, no problem. And I was like, I need a job. I just graduated college. So I had a friend that was like, I'm working at this small startup company. They do finance. and uh Or he actually didn't even tell me they did finance. He just said he was working in a small startup company. And he said they did floor planning. He used the term floor planning. So I went in. I did an interview. I really liked the guy that interviewed me. But he really didn't tell me anything about the job. And I was really early and young in my career. So I didn't do all the things you were supposed to do, like research the company before you go out and do an interview. So he gives me the job. And there was no training. And he just handed me a phone. And he's like, here, you're going to start talking to our customers. second. I get a phone call and the first person on the phone says the word VIN. And I'm like, wait a minute. I was like, I thought we were selling tile floor or linoleum or wood or laminate floors that you put in. And then I realized floor planning was financing for car dealers. So I learned. Truly by accident, and I started a job completely by accident. And I am not a car guy, I didn't even own a car. I was like, I rode a bicycle, so just totally outside of my element. So when I say getting interested in finance, I am interested in it now, but I got interested in it by complete accident. I truly stumbled in the door, took a job unknowingly in finance, and thought I was selling floors. just because I needed a job. And that was like right out of college. So and I stayed with that company for 15 years. So got an opportunity to learn a lot.
Did you experience the beginning as a honeymoon period?
Yeah, yeah, this is the beginning. Yeah. If we talk if we want to talk a little bit about what it was. So the beginning, I stumbled in like entry level job, and it was a startup company. And startups that are successful, they grow really fast, they kind of explode. And um For people that are early in their career, that's really great because when a company grows really fast, it normally means opportunity for you to do things quickly. So I think I was there for maybe four months, and I've always been a hard worker. This is who I am. I like to work hard. I enjoy it. And so I worked really hard. I'd been there for three months, and they were like, we need leaders. And it was growing so fast, they didn't even have enough people applying for the leadership roles. So I got a leadership role. just because I was working hard. It wasn't anything else like that. It was so early in my career. I think I'd only been there three months when I took my first leadership job there. And then it was a small role. I had a small team of like 12 people, but I was really, really young. And I made all the mistakes really, really early. I learned all the things I had to do. And then I was able to kind of parlay that into a lot of other roles. I think I probably held eight to ten roles there before I left. So, but that was the honeymoon. That was the early part.
Good for you that you were at the right place at the right moment and you were able to grow fast. So what kind of person were you professionally at that time?
I like to learn. And I don't know if this is the right term, but I'm secure in... not being the smartest person in the room. So I've never been ashamed to say I don't know something or I don't understand something. And I also am not ashamed of being wrong or trying something. So when I look back at my early career, I was somebody to ask a lot of questions. I was somebody who was very vocal when I didn't know something. And then I was very open to trying something. So if something wasn't working, I was always going to try to find a solution for the problem. even if there wasn't one defined. So when I think of my early career, probably I would say a sponge, a listener, and again, somebody that was secure and being not very smart at the time or not knowing enough about the industry, if you get what I'm saying.
Yeah, I get it. A lot has happened since then. And I'm wondering, was there a turning point? point that shaped your career path at some point?
Yes. There's kind of twofold. So I think early in my career, my first job at the company I did, and I fell in love with people, like leading people and being around people. And I had a small team, as I mentioned, I think I had 12 people or something like that. And as with any job, technology came in and we kind of developed some new technology that took over the responsibility of the team I was managing. And I remember I was told really early in that job that all of those people, they're like, hey, they're going to be displaced. They're either going to be asked to leave the company or we're going to have to sever them or do something like that. I remember thinking, I'm like, we're a growth company. I've got six months to figure this out. I can bear down and get them jobs. So I got everybody placed within the company. They all stayed I got them all jobs within the organization. And then I was sitting there thinking, I'm like, oh, no, what does that mean about me? You know, I've just placed my whole team. And I realized really quickly that that meant I wasn't going to have a role either. And that was my first leadership role at the company. And they came to me and they're like, we love you. We want you to do this job over here. And it is it is a sales role. And I was like, oh, I hate sales. I don't want to do sales. That's the last thing I want to do. And they're like, well, it's the only job we have. And it's a sales manager role. So I went and took the job. And I loved it. And it was the most fun I'd ever had. So early in my career, I would say the thing that really changed me was. Don't go into anything with preconceived notions or any roles or areas of a business or parts of an organization thinking that you're not going to like something because you may be surprised. And you may be surprised at what you're capable of doing, even if it isn't something that you've traditionally been strong at. So I went over there and helped create and build our company's wholesales organization. And it was something that I thought I would absolutely not want to do, nor be good at. I loved it and I was good at it. So it was one of those things where I was like, OK, as a leader and being asked to do these things, instead of going into things with this locked and loaded preconceived notion of how it's going to be, just go into things with like a little more of an open mind, a clean slate and just try. So I would say that was probably the biggest change early in my career.
That's a great advice, actually, not to come with. preconceived notions. Now, I want to go back to when you had to take on a leadership role at a very young age and help your team members find new jobs. I'm curious to know how your view of leadership has evolved over the years since then.
I think as you start to get more stable and secure in what you're doing and you start to just like understand the X's and O's of management, you kind of start to understand that. People are at the heart of everything you do. So like everything you're carrying out, whether technology or process is involved, there are still people involved. And you really need to have a high functioning team to be successful. So some things that I learned early that changed were good leaders aren't the ones with all the responsibility. So I noticed really quickly that non-functioning teams typically had a bottleneck. So they had a leader at the top that said, every decision needs to flow through me. I need to be the one that makes all the decisions. I have all the power. I am the one that is going to be the end-all, be-all. A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization. And I found that that was important for two reasons. One, your people were bought in because they felt like they had a say in what was going on. And your clients got a much better experience because they weren't calling in and saying, well, I can't make that decision or I have to go talk to so-and-so or I have to go do this. If you can get all the decision-making down to the front line, you have empowered people, they stand behind their decision, and you as a leader, if you're doing a good job, and you're training, and you're empowering your teams, they're going to make the right decision. And if they don't make the right decision, you need to be the one that stands behind them and supports them whenever it is the wrong decision, and help coach them along the way. The other thing that I noticed really early that I was like, hey, I have to change this, or it's maybe a characteristic that I was like, oh, I don't necessarily like this, was you have to be vulnerable as a leader. You have to show some vulnerability. So if you're not good at something, you can't pretend to be good at it. If you don't know something, don't pretend you don't know it. Just be open about where you are in the process. Oftentimes, when you take on a new leadership role, the people that you're working with are better than you at what you're trying to do. They know more than you do. If you go out and you try to be bogus and say, I know this or I understand this, you get found out really quickly. You lose credibility. If you sit beside somebody and you just say, I don't know, can you help me? And they teach you, that openness encourages openness both directions and creates a lot more what I would call functional team. The other thing was, I saw a lot of leaders have difficult conversations with people. And I think people struggle with that. That is just a natural thing. Nobody, well, there are people out there that are okay being mean. But most people don't want to be mean at their core. Most people don't want to be confrontational. And what I found was, you can have a very difficult conversation, and it can be respectful. It does not have to ever cross the line. And. A lot of people struggle with that. A lot of people struggle with being respectful and having a difficult conversation. So early in my career, I learned. Figure out how to have the difficult conversation in a respectful manner. And if the other person has trouble doing that, that's more than okay. But you don't have to get on anybody else's level. You can always be yourself. And then the last thing was, when you're leading big groups, it's very important not to take things personally. And I learned this really early. You're working with people and people are struggling in life sometimes. And sometimes the things that are going on outside of the workplace are much bigger. or impactful than you could ever know or understand. And so when people are coming in and they're struggling, oftentimes it isn't about you or it isn't about the organization. Oftentimes they're going through something. And if you can treat them with respect, even though they're struggling and they're going through something, you will get a much more, again, functional team and somebody that's willing to work and put in the effort. The views that I changed, and I wouldn't necessarily say there were changes, but things that I adopted really early were decision making needs to be pushed down as low as it possibly can and empowering teams. Don't be scared to be vulnerable. Be vulnerable and be honest. Always be respectful, no matter who you're talking to, whether it's the president or the person that's taking out the trash, even if they don't work for your company. And then don't take things personal. So I would say those were like the big. big core things for me early in my career.
Do you have an example of a time when you had to take responsibility for a bad decision?
For sure. It happened. It didn't happen a lot, but it happens sometimes. So in a previous role, one of the things that we had to do on a daily basis was to assess risk. And when you're assessing risk, you're basically deciding whether you need to default an account or not. And if you make that decision at the wrong time, You could lose money for the organization, maybe more today than you could have yesterday. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the longer you delay the decision, the more money you're likely losing. And that was a decision that I pushed down in the organization because, again, that's just kind of my philosophy. And we had an individual that was a highly functional team member that we trusted a lot that made the wrong decision. and we ended up losing more money than. we initially expected and when you lose more money than it initially is expected there are always some questions asked and so when they went back and asked they looked at the situation and when i talked to the team member they explained to me the rationale on why they held off on making the decision and although i i thought maybe it wasn't necessarily the right decision i understood where they were coming from uh so what i talked to him about was hey here here's maybe a better way to make the decision or a better way to look at it and kind of showed them, I wouldn't say better necessarily, a different way of looking at it and showed them why I thought the way I did. And they were like, okay. And I said, hey, maybe next time when this happens, let's try it this way and let's see how things fare. And then when I went back and talked to the leader, I said, hey, this is a decision that I supported. I supported them in the decision they made. We lost a little more money. We both learned from it. Here's what we're going to do next time. I explained what we thought we could do to improve the situation. They agreed and we all moved on. And the next time the situation came up, they made a different decision, fared well for us and worked. So it was kind of a learning moment for all of us and we moved forward. And the reason that I decided to say there was a decision that I made again was, had we placed that team member in a position of fear, they're probably less likely to make the right decision or a good decision next time because they're almost scared to make a decision.
Speaking of the team, what kind of person do you enjoy working with?
Like people, this is weird. I have a specific, like I have a specific type of person I really gravitate to. So I like people that have a big, have a big passion about, like a big care about what they do. And I met somebody. early on in my career here. And I just, he's a really unique individual because he's been here for a really long time. And he's, I wouldn't say he's like a super social person or anything like that, not a super people person, but I identified really quickly that he has a deep passion about SPS and our success. And it was one of those things where I'm like, dude, I gravitate to this guy. Like, so I gravitate to people that really want to win. They care about what they do every day and want things to be better. Benjamin Darling's the guy's name. He works in the US, he's in delivery. But he's one of those guys that you meet and you're just like, God, this guy really cares about what he does. He's really awesome at what he does. what he does, and he cares about it. So those are the type of people I gravitate to.
We've talked about your role as a leader, and I'm wondering, are there any leaders who have inspired you?
Yes. I mean, there have been multiple people. I would almost say every leader I've ever worked with has shaped me in some way, shape, or form, whether it's they did a lot of things that I thought were wonderful and beautiful and I wanted to replicate them, or they did things that I was like, ooh, I'm never going to do that. I'm like, you know, that's something I don't want to do. You know, oddly, I think I've learned more from the people. This sounds wild, but I've learned more from the not what to do, probably, scenarios than I have the, wow, that's a beautiful thing. And I'm not saying that I've seen more of the wrong things, but for some reason, they stuck with me more. I really do believe that product is important. I think it's what drives organizations forward. But I do believe. passionately that if you have the right people and you create and foster the right environment, you can be infinitely more successful. So when I say those bad things stuck out to me probably more from an impactful standpoint, there were a few leaders that I found that really hampered an organization's ability to be successful. And those leaders exhibited very similar characteristics. And what I found was in watching them navigate things, they usually made people feel a certain way or a group of people feel a certain way. And oftentimes it was they either made somebody feel bad about a decision they made, they made people's psychological safety, they made them feel uncertain psychologically, right? They wanted them kind of in this off kilter way. And for some reason they thought that that created a more functional environment. But what I found in watching that part of the organization work in those ways was the people that were in a scenario where they weren't psychologically safe or they were uncertain about their future or what was going on, they didn't tend to perform better. It wasn't like you were getting more out of them or we were getting these types of things. And what I found was it started to shut the team down in a way that made them less creative. Because when you're only worried about. saving your job or your preservation, you stop doing all the things that make a company great. The ideas and the creativity start to stifle. They start to go way down because everybody is in this insular mode of, I don't want to do anything wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. So I learned a lot in watching those people. And what I found was a lot of them, although they were usually the loudest person in the room, although they were usually I had a pretty high position and a lot of people followed them around. They were the type of people that I would say, if you ask them a question and they said it once and you said, well, how am I supposed to do this? They would just say the same thing again, only say it louder. Those type of people, I found that they were actually probably the most insecure people. They were probably the most deeply insecure people. And I found that most of the time they created this persona because they were probably scared themselves. And there was no way for them to dismantle this character that they had created as a leader. And they couldn't be authentic. There was no authenticity in what they were doing. And they were creating this culture of fear and uneasiness that everybody looked at. They're like, ooh, they're a bullish leader. They're a real bulldog. They really bulldoze walls. I'm like, we can accomplish the same thing. and not be jerks about it. Or we could accomplish the same thing and not make everybody feel rattled and uneasy when they go home. And we could get a lot more creativity and production out of the team. So I learned more out of what not to do from those people, I think, than the what to do. So the leaders that impacted me the most were probably the ones that I looked at and I was like, ooh, I don't like that. I don't like that culture that they're creating. And I remember thinking to myself, God, don't be that person. Just be the guy that's like, You don't know. It's OK to be insecure and feed into your team. Don't don't make them feel uneasy about what they're doing. That's I guess that's my answer to that question.
So we've talked a lot about what you've learned, but what is something that you had to unlearn?
Sometimes you make assumptions of what people know and what they don't know, or you make assumptions of what people's capabilities are, what they're not. And if you make assumptions and you move quickly, You can inadvertently shut people down. You can inadvertently make people feel a certain way. So for me, early on, I was fast about everything. I was like, we need to make this change. We can make this change tomorrow. Because in my mind, it's as simple as do it. Not everybody else moves at that pace nor understands that pace. So what I learned was I have to slow down significantly. I have to look at what I'm doing. I have to think about it a little more. And I have to. talk about it with the team before I do it. And if you do that and you slow down just a little, you get a little more buy-in. And oftentimes, I've found people were more open to the change and more receptive to change management if you just slow down the pace a little bit. And the other thing I would say is a lot of places change for the sake of change. And what I mean by that is... When organizations move and new leaders come into different roles, everybody feels like they have to hit a home run. Everybody's like, I got a new job. I got to show you who I am. I got to show you what I'm made of. Watch me do this. Watch me change everything. And what I found early in my career was it's not always the right thing to do to come in and change something. So back- to the speed, what I learned was assess the situation before you go try to hit your home run. It's not all about the home run. It's not all about that. Sometimes it's just about creating a healthy environment for people to work in and maintaining a little stability. Sometimes doing something the same way for a long time yields good results. It doesn't always, we don't always have to change every five minutes if it's not going our way. So I think slow down.
Is that also the way you handle pressure?
No, no. I've taken a lot of tests on this. Like in the leadership things, you have to do like a lot of to do like a lot of personality tests. And. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with them, but my personality tests always said that I stayed the same during pressure. My personality really didn't change. I'm typically a more creative person. I tend to live in big picture. I like to talk high level. I tend to live up here. I tend to stay there when I feel pressure. I don't tend to change. It's not like I over index and say, show me all the data. I don't say, let's talk about the facts. I don't get, I don't. tend to like over index on on any of those things but i think a lot of that is like for me it's kind of understanding your place in the world um nothing i've ever done is going to save the world i'm not a doctor um i didn't get to join the epa and save the planet um you know i'm not i'm not doing anything like that and So when it comes to pressure, a lot of pressure is self-induced. So you get self-induced pressure. And so what I have to remind myself and what I always try to tell myself is, we're doing matters. It's very important to care about the organization you work for and the people of the organization you work for. But at the end of the day, if what I'm bringing to the organization isn't valued, and they don't value me or I don't value them, there are plenty of other places that we can go where we are valued, our skill sets will be valued. So it kind of just keeps me grounded in what I'm doing to be like, look, although this is important, nobody's life's at stake. We're just making decisions. And it helps you be a little more creative in the moment if you can kind of stifle the pressure that way. There have been moments where I've succumbed to pressure. I think everybody has in their career, but it's pretty few and far between for me. So. For me, it's always reminding myself what I'm doing, the stakes of what we're doing, things of that nature. And again, going back to kind of what I'm passionate about, behind everybody, there's people. People matter. And so just kind of pour into that. So it's never really been too bad for me. There are things that I guess, the other things of pressure. There are things that I don't necessarily like doing that I've had to do my whole career that caused me a little bit of anxiety, but I've always been fine at them. And the longer I've done it in my career, the less the anxiety is, right? So like.
For instance, something like this. I'm not necessarily these types of things may give me a little bit of anxiety, but I do them and I think it makes me better.
Me too. I feel anxious every time I'm about to interview new guests.
We laugh because it's like 90% of people won't tell you that. And I will almost guarantee you 90% of people are have a little anxiety around whatever it may be, whether it's public speaking or, or podcasts. And early in my career, I was always nervous to tell people like, oh, this gives me a little stress or anxiety or whatever it is. And I'll never forget, I was going to talk in front of a lot of people one time, like a pretty big group. And I was a little nervous about it. And I was in my head. And I'd spent the early part of my career being like, nah, I'm good. You know, I'm not nervous. Because I thought telling myself that I wasn't nervous was actually better. And then I learned that I would just tell people. No, no. Yeah, I'm just a little stressed and anxious about this. And then after that, early in my career, I felt so much better about doing things because I was just honest about how I felt. There was like some authenticity in it. And so it felt better. And I usually performed better.
To wrap up this episode, a few more questions. Is there a problem that you solved that made you proud?
For sure. So, yeah, we have a real nasty pain point. at my previous job. And it was like, we did physical audits and we drove our clients nuts. Like we were driving around and like people would show up on their lot every 30 days to touch inventory. And I was like, how can we change the way the industry audits? Like they've all, like the industry has been the same since like 1984. And I don't want to say like, I'm the only person that solved this. There were colleagues that I worked with that were very influential in this, but like, I just got to be part of the team that did it. And it was very fun. and we were very creative in the way we did it so we assessed and looked for data in the market so like we were looking for sold data points and things like that so we incorporated all this like unique data and we could get away from physically doing the audit and then we actually uh in my previous job we partnered with sbs uh to use their digital audit solution so we did this really creative like use of data and this new digital audit tool that sbs had created to solve this problem that's actually how i met you guys was through that. But that was something I was really proud of because it was nobody else in the industry was doing it. We tackled the problem in a really unique way of pairing data in this new digital audit tool. And we were able to walk away from a vendor that we had been with that I have a ton of respect for, by the way. But we were able to walk away from them and not have this big physical audit field for us and gave our clients a better experience and changed the way the industry re-audited it. So I thought it was really cool.
Outside of work, what helps you maintain balance?
Family. Yeah, I'm a family guy. So my wife and daughter. So I have a two-year-old daughter. Her name's Naomi. My wife's name's Lydia. So we just spend a lot of time with family. And I grew up really, really small family, only child. My wife has a huge family. And early on, I think for me, that was one of those things was kind of jarring, being an only child and getting adopted adopted by this big family almost. But I've really come to love it. And then I love music. I've always loved music. I love to create music. I love to listen to music. I love it.
So what advice would you give someone not about building a career, but about building a life through that career?
I think it goes back to what I said earlier about like the people that I didn't gravitate to and the people I do gravitate to. And to set yourself up for success, you have to be authentic. So I would say above all else, like when you jump into your career, there are going to be expectations put on you. And you're going to look at other people succeeding and you're going to say, I need to be like that. I need to do those things. I would strongly suggest not to do that. And what I would suggest is to continue to be who you are at your core and do not create a character. Do not become someone you're not. don't create these things that you have to maintain. If you create a character or somebody that you're not, or you put yourself in a position doing something that drains your energy, you are not going to be good at life or work. Because when you're at home with your family, you're going to be so exhausted from trying to keep up with whoever this person you've created at work is. And then when you're at work, you're a jerk because you're insecure because you're being somebody you're not. So for me, it is literally all about authenticity. And I'll say it like I said it earlier. If the people that you work with don't like who you are authentically, or you don't fit the organization, there is one for you. You will be valued somewhere else. Your character and who you are as a person will be valued somewhere. Go find it.
There's one last question I usually ask all guests on what leaders want. It's, in your opinion, what do leaders really want?
Personally, I want people that want to work and I want people to feel psychologically safe and excited about coming into a job. I want people to come in and have the space to be creative. And I think if people have the freedom and space to be able to create and perform. and they have the ability to make decisions and be accountable for those decisions, you will achieve whatever result that you're after. So for me, a high-functioning team that feels excited to come in and work.
Thank you so much, Lucas, for being with us and sharing your time and your insights. It was really great to hear. Thank you again and see you around.
Good. You did great, by the way. So thanks for having me.
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"A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization."
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Transcription
Welcome to What Leaders Want, the podcast series that features leaders in the finance industry. Today, we'll have a discussion with Lucas Hancock, who is Vice President of Product North America at SBS since January 2025. Hi Lucas, thank you for being with us and sharing your time. So first things first, can you please introduce yourself?
Yeah, of course. My name is Lucas Hancock, as you mentioned. I'm the Vice President of Product at SBS here in North America. I joined the team in January, as you also stated. I've come to the team with about 15 years of automotive finance experience. So I graduated college at Indiana University in Bloomington here in Indiana. I graduated in 2008 and just kind of stumbled into the industry, and I've been there since. So I worked with one floor plane company, helped various roles and uh joined the team like you stated in January. I'm very excited to be here and everybody's been very welcoming. So thanks. And thanks for having me.
So what exactly is your role at SPS?
I think my number one mission is to, because I'm in North America, is to make sure that the products that we're creating are fit for purpose here and that we can scale. So what I've been doing is meeting with clients and trying to make sure that the products that we have solve their problems. And many of them do. Many of them do, and we have really great products. But there are some small tweaks and things that we can add that I think can really take us to the next level. I think this isn't part of my mission, but I think it's part of the company's mission, and I want to help us achieve it. We have a relatively—it's not small, but smaller than the rest of the globe footprint in North America. And I think we have the best product compared to our competitors. I think if there's any goal or mission of mine, it's for us to have a much larger footprint in North America. And the only way we can do that is to make sure our products are solving the problems of our clients. So for me, it's making sure that we have all those boxes checked.
And what is your assessment after seven months?
Yeah, we're good. I think, like I said, very small things, but I think the organization's very young in North America. And we're coming together. The team is eager. They're hungry. They're a group of really great people. So I think there's a lot of really great things to come.
So that's great to hear. Now, let's go back to the very beginning. What first got you interested in finance?
I would say it like this. It was a complete accident. So I went to business school and I did study finance, but by no means was I in college saying. my gosh, I want to go do accounting or I want to get into finance. That was actually the last thing I ever thought I would do. So when I graduated college, I had graduated with a degree in business management and public affairs. So I wanted to go work for the government. And we have an agency here in the US called the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and I wanted to save the planet. So I went to go work for the EPA in 2008. And they were like, look, The economy's a little unstable right now, so we're not hiring. And they said, why don't you check with your local state agency, which was called the Indiana Department of Environmental Management? So I was like, OK. So I go knock on the door. They say, yeah, I want a job. This is what I went to school for. And they said, we're also not hiring. So I said, OK, no problem. And I was like, I need a job. I just graduated college. So I had a friend that was like, I'm working at this small startup company. They do finance. and uh Or he actually didn't even tell me they did finance. He just said he was working in a small startup company. And he said they did floor planning. He used the term floor planning. So I went in. I did an interview. I really liked the guy that interviewed me. But he really didn't tell me anything about the job. And I was really early and young in my career. So I didn't do all the things you were supposed to do, like research the company before you go out and do an interview. So he gives me the job. And there was no training. And he just handed me a phone. And he's like, here, you're going to start talking to our customers. second. I get a phone call and the first person on the phone says the word VIN. And I'm like, wait a minute. I was like, I thought we were selling tile floor or linoleum or wood or laminate floors that you put in. And then I realized floor planning was financing for car dealers. So I learned. Truly by accident, and I started a job completely by accident. And I am not a car guy, I didn't even own a car. I was like, I rode a bicycle, so just totally outside of my element. So when I say getting interested in finance, I am interested in it now, but I got interested in it by complete accident. I truly stumbled in the door, took a job unknowingly in finance, and thought I was selling floors. just because I needed a job. And that was like right out of college. So and I stayed with that company for 15 years. So got an opportunity to learn a lot.
Did you experience the beginning as a honeymoon period?
Yeah, yeah, this is the beginning. Yeah. If we talk if we want to talk a little bit about what it was. So the beginning, I stumbled in like entry level job, and it was a startup company. And startups that are successful, they grow really fast, they kind of explode. And um For people that are early in their career, that's really great because when a company grows really fast, it normally means opportunity for you to do things quickly. So I think I was there for maybe four months, and I've always been a hard worker. This is who I am. I like to work hard. I enjoy it. And so I worked really hard. I'd been there for three months, and they were like, we need leaders. And it was growing so fast, they didn't even have enough people applying for the leadership roles. So I got a leadership role. just because I was working hard. It wasn't anything else like that. It was so early in my career. I think I'd only been there three months when I took my first leadership job there. And then it was a small role. I had a small team of like 12 people, but I was really, really young. And I made all the mistakes really, really early. I learned all the things I had to do. And then I was able to kind of parlay that into a lot of other roles. I think I probably held eight to ten roles there before I left. So, but that was the honeymoon. That was the early part.
Good for you that you were at the right place at the right moment and you were able to grow fast. So what kind of person were you professionally at that time?
I like to learn. And I don't know if this is the right term, but I'm secure in... not being the smartest person in the room. So I've never been ashamed to say I don't know something or I don't understand something. And I also am not ashamed of being wrong or trying something. So when I look back at my early career, I was somebody to ask a lot of questions. I was somebody who was very vocal when I didn't know something. And then I was very open to trying something. So if something wasn't working, I was always going to try to find a solution for the problem. even if there wasn't one defined. So when I think of my early career, probably I would say a sponge, a listener, and again, somebody that was secure and being not very smart at the time or not knowing enough about the industry, if you get what I'm saying.
Yeah, I get it. A lot has happened since then. And I'm wondering, was there a turning point? point that shaped your career path at some point?
Yes. There's kind of twofold. So I think early in my career, my first job at the company I did, and I fell in love with people, like leading people and being around people. And I had a small team, as I mentioned, I think I had 12 people or something like that. And as with any job, technology came in and we kind of developed some new technology that took over the responsibility of the team I was managing. And I remember I was told really early in that job that all of those people, they're like, hey, they're going to be displaced. They're either going to be asked to leave the company or we're going to have to sever them or do something like that. I remember thinking, I'm like, we're a growth company. I've got six months to figure this out. I can bear down and get them jobs. So I got everybody placed within the company. They all stayed I got them all jobs within the organization. And then I was sitting there thinking, I'm like, oh, no, what does that mean about me? You know, I've just placed my whole team. And I realized really quickly that that meant I wasn't going to have a role either. And that was my first leadership role at the company. And they came to me and they're like, we love you. We want you to do this job over here. And it is it is a sales role. And I was like, oh, I hate sales. I don't want to do sales. That's the last thing I want to do. And they're like, well, it's the only job we have. And it's a sales manager role. So I went and took the job. And I loved it. And it was the most fun I'd ever had. So early in my career, I would say the thing that really changed me was. Don't go into anything with preconceived notions or any roles or areas of a business or parts of an organization thinking that you're not going to like something because you may be surprised. And you may be surprised at what you're capable of doing, even if it isn't something that you've traditionally been strong at. So I went over there and helped create and build our company's wholesales organization. And it was something that I thought I would absolutely not want to do, nor be good at. I loved it and I was good at it. So it was one of those things where I was like, OK, as a leader and being asked to do these things, instead of going into things with this locked and loaded preconceived notion of how it's going to be, just go into things with like a little more of an open mind, a clean slate and just try. So I would say that was probably the biggest change early in my career.
That's a great advice, actually, not to come with. preconceived notions. Now, I want to go back to when you had to take on a leadership role at a very young age and help your team members find new jobs. I'm curious to know how your view of leadership has evolved over the years since then.
I think as you start to get more stable and secure in what you're doing and you start to just like understand the X's and O's of management, you kind of start to understand that. People are at the heart of everything you do. So like everything you're carrying out, whether technology or process is involved, there are still people involved. And you really need to have a high functioning team to be successful. So some things that I learned early that changed were good leaders aren't the ones with all the responsibility. So I noticed really quickly that non-functioning teams typically had a bottleneck. So they had a leader at the top that said, every decision needs to flow through me. I need to be the one that makes all the decisions. I have all the power. I am the one that is going to be the end-all, be-all. A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization. And I found that that was important for two reasons. One, your people were bought in because they felt like they had a say in what was going on. And your clients got a much better experience because they weren't calling in and saying, well, I can't make that decision or I have to go talk to so-and-so or I have to go do this. If you can get all the decision-making down to the front line, you have empowered people, they stand behind their decision, and you as a leader, if you're doing a good job, and you're training, and you're empowering your teams, they're going to make the right decision. And if they don't make the right decision, you need to be the one that stands behind them and supports them whenever it is the wrong decision, and help coach them along the way. The other thing that I noticed really early that I was like, hey, I have to change this, or it's maybe a characteristic that I was like, oh, I don't necessarily like this, was you have to be vulnerable as a leader. You have to show some vulnerability. So if you're not good at something, you can't pretend to be good at it. If you don't know something, don't pretend you don't know it. Just be open about where you are in the process. Oftentimes, when you take on a new leadership role, the people that you're working with are better than you at what you're trying to do. They know more than you do. If you go out and you try to be bogus and say, I know this or I understand this, you get found out really quickly. You lose credibility. If you sit beside somebody and you just say, I don't know, can you help me? And they teach you, that openness encourages openness both directions and creates a lot more what I would call functional team. The other thing was, I saw a lot of leaders have difficult conversations with people. And I think people struggle with that. That is just a natural thing. Nobody, well, there are people out there that are okay being mean. But most people don't want to be mean at their core. Most people don't want to be confrontational. And what I found was, you can have a very difficult conversation, and it can be respectful. It does not have to ever cross the line. And. A lot of people struggle with that. A lot of people struggle with being respectful and having a difficult conversation. So early in my career, I learned. Figure out how to have the difficult conversation in a respectful manner. And if the other person has trouble doing that, that's more than okay. But you don't have to get on anybody else's level. You can always be yourself. And then the last thing was, when you're leading big groups, it's very important not to take things personally. And I learned this really early. You're working with people and people are struggling in life sometimes. And sometimes the things that are going on outside of the workplace are much bigger. or impactful than you could ever know or understand. And so when people are coming in and they're struggling, oftentimes it isn't about you or it isn't about the organization. Oftentimes they're going through something. And if you can treat them with respect, even though they're struggling and they're going through something, you will get a much more, again, functional team and somebody that's willing to work and put in the effort. The views that I changed, and I wouldn't necessarily say there were changes, but things that I adopted really early were decision making needs to be pushed down as low as it possibly can and empowering teams. Don't be scared to be vulnerable. Be vulnerable and be honest. Always be respectful, no matter who you're talking to, whether it's the president or the person that's taking out the trash, even if they don't work for your company. And then don't take things personal. So I would say those were like the big. big core things for me early in my career.
Do you have an example of a time when you had to take responsibility for a bad decision?
For sure. It happened. It didn't happen a lot, but it happens sometimes. So in a previous role, one of the things that we had to do on a daily basis was to assess risk. And when you're assessing risk, you're basically deciding whether you need to default an account or not. And if you make that decision at the wrong time, You could lose money for the organization, maybe more today than you could have yesterday. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the longer you delay the decision, the more money you're likely losing. And that was a decision that I pushed down in the organization because, again, that's just kind of my philosophy. And we had an individual that was a highly functional team member that we trusted a lot that made the wrong decision. and we ended up losing more money than. we initially expected and when you lose more money than it initially is expected there are always some questions asked and so when they went back and asked they looked at the situation and when i talked to the team member they explained to me the rationale on why they held off on making the decision and although i i thought maybe it wasn't necessarily the right decision i understood where they were coming from uh so what i talked to him about was hey here here's maybe a better way to make the decision or a better way to look at it and kind of showed them, I wouldn't say better necessarily, a different way of looking at it and showed them why I thought the way I did. And they were like, okay. And I said, hey, maybe next time when this happens, let's try it this way and let's see how things fare. And then when I went back and talked to the leader, I said, hey, this is a decision that I supported. I supported them in the decision they made. We lost a little more money. We both learned from it. Here's what we're going to do next time. I explained what we thought we could do to improve the situation. They agreed and we all moved on. And the next time the situation came up, they made a different decision, fared well for us and worked. So it was kind of a learning moment for all of us and we moved forward. And the reason that I decided to say there was a decision that I made again was, had we placed that team member in a position of fear, they're probably less likely to make the right decision or a good decision next time because they're almost scared to make a decision.
Speaking of the team, what kind of person do you enjoy working with?
Like people, this is weird. I have a specific, like I have a specific type of person I really gravitate to. So I like people that have a big, have a big passion about, like a big care about what they do. And I met somebody. early on in my career here. And I just, he's a really unique individual because he's been here for a really long time. And he's, I wouldn't say he's like a super social person or anything like that, not a super people person, but I identified really quickly that he has a deep passion about SPS and our success. And it was one of those things where I'm like, dude, I gravitate to this guy. Like, so I gravitate to people that really want to win. They care about what they do every day and want things to be better. Benjamin Darling's the guy's name. He works in the US, he's in delivery. But he's one of those guys that you meet and you're just like, God, this guy really cares about what he does. He's really awesome at what he does. what he does, and he cares about it. So those are the type of people I gravitate to.
We've talked about your role as a leader, and I'm wondering, are there any leaders who have inspired you?
Yes. I mean, there have been multiple people. I would almost say every leader I've ever worked with has shaped me in some way, shape, or form, whether it's they did a lot of things that I thought were wonderful and beautiful and I wanted to replicate them, or they did things that I was like, ooh, I'm never going to do that. I'm like, you know, that's something I don't want to do. You know, oddly, I think I've learned more from the people. This sounds wild, but I've learned more from the not what to do, probably, scenarios than I have the, wow, that's a beautiful thing. And I'm not saying that I've seen more of the wrong things, but for some reason, they stuck with me more. I really do believe that product is important. I think it's what drives organizations forward. But I do believe. passionately that if you have the right people and you create and foster the right environment, you can be infinitely more successful. So when I say those bad things stuck out to me probably more from an impactful standpoint, there were a few leaders that I found that really hampered an organization's ability to be successful. And those leaders exhibited very similar characteristics. And what I found was in watching them navigate things, they usually made people feel a certain way or a group of people feel a certain way. And oftentimes it was they either made somebody feel bad about a decision they made, they made people's psychological safety, they made them feel uncertain psychologically, right? They wanted them kind of in this off kilter way. And for some reason they thought that that created a more functional environment. But what I found in watching that part of the organization work in those ways was the people that were in a scenario where they weren't psychologically safe or they were uncertain about their future or what was going on, they didn't tend to perform better. It wasn't like you were getting more out of them or we were getting these types of things. And what I found was it started to shut the team down in a way that made them less creative. Because when you're only worried about. saving your job or your preservation, you stop doing all the things that make a company great. The ideas and the creativity start to stifle. They start to go way down because everybody is in this insular mode of, I don't want to do anything wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. So I learned a lot in watching those people. And what I found was a lot of them, although they were usually the loudest person in the room, although they were usually I had a pretty high position and a lot of people followed them around. They were the type of people that I would say, if you ask them a question and they said it once and you said, well, how am I supposed to do this? They would just say the same thing again, only say it louder. Those type of people, I found that they were actually probably the most insecure people. They were probably the most deeply insecure people. And I found that most of the time they created this persona because they were probably scared themselves. And there was no way for them to dismantle this character that they had created as a leader. And they couldn't be authentic. There was no authenticity in what they were doing. And they were creating this culture of fear and uneasiness that everybody looked at. They're like, ooh, they're a bullish leader. They're a real bulldog. They really bulldoze walls. I'm like, we can accomplish the same thing. and not be jerks about it. Or we could accomplish the same thing and not make everybody feel rattled and uneasy when they go home. And we could get a lot more creativity and production out of the team. So I learned more out of what not to do from those people, I think, than the what to do. So the leaders that impacted me the most were probably the ones that I looked at and I was like, ooh, I don't like that. I don't like that culture that they're creating. And I remember thinking to myself, God, don't be that person. Just be the guy that's like, You don't know. It's OK to be insecure and feed into your team. Don't don't make them feel uneasy about what they're doing. That's I guess that's my answer to that question.
So we've talked a lot about what you've learned, but what is something that you had to unlearn?
Sometimes you make assumptions of what people know and what they don't know, or you make assumptions of what people's capabilities are, what they're not. And if you make assumptions and you move quickly, You can inadvertently shut people down. You can inadvertently make people feel a certain way. So for me, early on, I was fast about everything. I was like, we need to make this change. We can make this change tomorrow. Because in my mind, it's as simple as do it. Not everybody else moves at that pace nor understands that pace. So what I learned was I have to slow down significantly. I have to look at what I'm doing. I have to think about it a little more. And I have to. talk about it with the team before I do it. And if you do that and you slow down just a little, you get a little more buy-in. And oftentimes, I've found people were more open to the change and more receptive to change management if you just slow down the pace a little bit. And the other thing I would say is a lot of places change for the sake of change. And what I mean by that is... When organizations move and new leaders come into different roles, everybody feels like they have to hit a home run. Everybody's like, I got a new job. I got to show you who I am. I got to show you what I'm made of. Watch me do this. Watch me change everything. And what I found early in my career was it's not always the right thing to do to come in and change something. So back- to the speed, what I learned was assess the situation before you go try to hit your home run. It's not all about the home run. It's not all about that. Sometimes it's just about creating a healthy environment for people to work in and maintaining a little stability. Sometimes doing something the same way for a long time yields good results. It doesn't always, we don't always have to change every five minutes if it's not going our way. So I think slow down.
Is that also the way you handle pressure?
No, no. I've taken a lot of tests on this. Like in the leadership things, you have to do like a lot of to do like a lot of personality tests. And. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with them, but my personality tests always said that I stayed the same during pressure. My personality really didn't change. I'm typically a more creative person. I tend to live in big picture. I like to talk high level. I tend to live up here. I tend to stay there when I feel pressure. I don't tend to change. It's not like I over index and say, show me all the data. I don't say, let's talk about the facts. I don't get, I don't. tend to like over index on on any of those things but i think a lot of that is like for me it's kind of understanding your place in the world um nothing i've ever done is going to save the world i'm not a doctor um i didn't get to join the epa and save the planet um you know i'm not i'm not doing anything like that and So when it comes to pressure, a lot of pressure is self-induced. So you get self-induced pressure. And so what I have to remind myself and what I always try to tell myself is, we're doing matters. It's very important to care about the organization you work for and the people of the organization you work for. But at the end of the day, if what I'm bringing to the organization isn't valued, and they don't value me or I don't value them, there are plenty of other places that we can go where we are valued, our skill sets will be valued. So it kind of just keeps me grounded in what I'm doing to be like, look, although this is important, nobody's life's at stake. We're just making decisions. And it helps you be a little more creative in the moment if you can kind of stifle the pressure that way. There have been moments where I've succumbed to pressure. I think everybody has in their career, but it's pretty few and far between for me. So. For me, it's always reminding myself what I'm doing, the stakes of what we're doing, things of that nature. And again, going back to kind of what I'm passionate about, behind everybody, there's people. People matter. And so just kind of pour into that. So it's never really been too bad for me. There are things that I guess, the other things of pressure. There are things that I don't necessarily like doing that I've had to do my whole career that caused me a little bit of anxiety, but I've always been fine at them. And the longer I've done it in my career, the less the anxiety is, right? So like.
For instance, something like this. I'm not necessarily these types of things may give me a little bit of anxiety, but I do them and I think it makes me better.
Me too. I feel anxious every time I'm about to interview new guests.
We laugh because it's like 90% of people won't tell you that. And I will almost guarantee you 90% of people are have a little anxiety around whatever it may be, whether it's public speaking or, or podcasts. And early in my career, I was always nervous to tell people like, oh, this gives me a little stress or anxiety or whatever it is. And I'll never forget, I was going to talk in front of a lot of people one time, like a pretty big group. And I was a little nervous about it. And I was in my head. And I'd spent the early part of my career being like, nah, I'm good. You know, I'm not nervous. Because I thought telling myself that I wasn't nervous was actually better. And then I learned that I would just tell people. No, no. Yeah, I'm just a little stressed and anxious about this. And then after that, early in my career, I felt so much better about doing things because I was just honest about how I felt. There was like some authenticity in it. And so it felt better. And I usually performed better.
To wrap up this episode, a few more questions. Is there a problem that you solved that made you proud?
For sure. So, yeah, we have a real nasty pain point. at my previous job. And it was like, we did physical audits and we drove our clients nuts. Like we were driving around and like people would show up on their lot every 30 days to touch inventory. And I was like, how can we change the way the industry audits? Like they've all, like the industry has been the same since like 1984. And I don't want to say like, I'm the only person that solved this. There were colleagues that I worked with that were very influential in this, but like, I just got to be part of the team that did it. And it was very fun. and we were very creative in the way we did it so we assessed and looked for data in the market so like we were looking for sold data points and things like that so we incorporated all this like unique data and we could get away from physically doing the audit and then we actually uh in my previous job we partnered with sbs uh to use their digital audit solution so we did this really creative like use of data and this new digital audit tool that sbs had created to solve this problem that's actually how i met you guys was through that. But that was something I was really proud of because it was nobody else in the industry was doing it. We tackled the problem in a really unique way of pairing data in this new digital audit tool. And we were able to walk away from a vendor that we had been with that I have a ton of respect for, by the way. But we were able to walk away from them and not have this big physical audit field for us and gave our clients a better experience and changed the way the industry re-audited it. So I thought it was really cool.
Outside of work, what helps you maintain balance?
Family. Yeah, I'm a family guy. So my wife and daughter. So I have a two-year-old daughter. Her name's Naomi. My wife's name's Lydia. So we just spend a lot of time with family. And I grew up really, really small family, only child. My wife has a huge family. And early on, I think for me, that was one of those things was kind of jarring, being an only child and getting adopted adopted by this big family almost. But I've really come to love it. And then I love music. I've always loved music. I love to create music. I love to listen to music. I love it.
So what advice would you give someone not about building a career, but about building a life through that career?
I think it goes back to what I said earlier about like the people that I didn't gravitate to and the people I do gravitate to. And to set yourself up for success, you have to be authentic. So I would say above all else, like when you jump into your career, there are going to be expectations put on you. And you're going to look at other people succeeding and you're going to say, I need to be like that. I need to do those things. I would strongly suggest not to do that. And what I would suggest is to continue to be who you are at your core and do not create a character. Do not become someone you're not. don't create these things that you have to maintain. If you create a character or somebody that you're not, or you put yourself in a position doing something that drains your energy, you are not going to be good at life or work. Because when you're at home with your family, you're going to be so exhausted from trying to keep up with whoever this person you've created at work is. And then when you're at work, you're a jerk because you're insecure because you're being somebody you're not. So for me, it is literally all about authenticity. And I'll say it like I said it earlier. If the people that you work with don't like who you are authentically, or you don't fit the organization, there is one for you. You will be valued somewhere else. Your character and who you are as a person will be valued somewhere. Go find it.
There's one last question I usually ask all guests on what leaders want. It's, in your opinion, what do leaders really want?
Personally, I want people that want to work and I want people to feel psychologically safe and excited about coming into a job. I want people to come in and have the space to be creative. And I think if people have the freedom and space to be able to create and perform. and they have the ability to make decisions and be accountable for those decisions, you will achieve whatever result that you're after. So for me, a high-functioning team that feels excited to come in and work.
Thank you so much, Lucas, for being with us and sharing your time and your insights. It was really great to hear. Thank you again and see you around.
Good. You did great, by the way. So thanks for having me.
Description
"A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization."
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Transcription
Welcome to What Leaders Want, the podcast series that features leaders in the finance industry. Today, we'll have a discussion with Lucas Hancock, who is Vice President of Product North America at SBS since January 2025. Hi Lucas, thank you for being with us and sharing your time. So first things first, can you please introduce yourself?
Yeah, of course. My name is Lucas Hancock, as you mentioned. I'm the Vice President of Product at SBS here in North America. I joined the team in January, as you also stated. I've come to the team with about 15 years of automotive finance experience. So I graduated college at Indiana University in Bloomington here in Indiana. I graduated in 2008 and just kind of stumbled into the industry, and I've been there since. So I worked with one floor plane company, helped various roles and uh joined the team like you stated in January. I'm very excited to be here and everybody's been very welcoming. So thanks. And thanks for having me.
So what exactly is your role at SPS?
I think my number one mission is to, because I'm in North America, is to make sure that the products that we're creating are fit for purpose here and that we can scale. So what I've been doing is meeting with clients and trying to make sure that the products that we have solve their problems. And many of them do. Many of them do, and we have really great products. But there are some small tweaks and things that we can add that I think can really take us to the next level. I think this isn't part of my mission, but I think it's part of the company's mission, and I want to help us achieve it. We have a relatively—it's not small, but smaller than the rest of the globe footprint in North America. And I think we have the best product compared to our competitors. I think if there's any goal or mission of mine, it's for us to have a much larger footprint in North America. And the only way we can do that is to make sure our products are solving the problems of our clients. So for me, it's making sure that we have all those boxes checked.
And what is your assessment after seven months?
Yeah, we're good. I think, like I said, very small things, but I think the organization's very young in North America. And we're coming together. The team is eager. They're hungry. They're a group of really great people. So I think there's a lot of really great things to come.
So that's great to hear. Now, let's go back to the very beginning. What first got you interested in finance?
I would say it like this. It was a complete accident. So I went to business school and I did study finance, but by no means was I in college saying. my gosh, I want to go do accounting or I want to get into finance. That was actually the last thing I ever thought I would do. So when I graduated college, I had graduated with a degree in business management and public affairs. So I wanted to go work for the government. And we have an agency here in the US called the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and I wanted to save the planet. So I went to go work for the EPA in 2008. And they were like, look, The economy's a little unstable right now, so we're not hiring. And they said, why don't you check with your local state agency, which was called the Indiana Department of Environmental Management? So I was like, OK. So I go knock on the door. They say, yeah, I want a job. This is what I went to school for. And they said, we're also not hiring. So I said, OK, no problem. And I was like, I need a job. I just graduated college. So I had a friend that was like, I'm working at this small startup company. They do finance. and uh Or he actually didn't even tell me they did finance. He just said he was working in a small startup company. And he said they did floor planning. He used the term floor planning. So I went in. I did an interview. I really liked the guy that interviewed me. But he really didn't tell me anything about the job. And I was really early and young in my career. So I didn't do all the things you were supposed to do, like research the company before you go out and do an interview. So he gives me the job. And there was no training. And he just handed me a phone. And he's like, here, you're going to start talking to our customers. second. I get a phone call and the first person on the phone says the word VIN. And I'm like, wait a minute. I was like, I thought we were selling tile floor or linoleum or wood or laminate floors that you put in. And then I realized floor planning was financing for car dealers. So I learned. Truly by accident, and I started a job completely by accident. And I am not a car guy, I didn't even own a car. I was like, I rode a bicycle, so just totally outside of my element. So when I say getting interested in finance, I am interested in it now, but I got interested in it by complete accident. I truly stumbled in the door, took a job unknowingly in finance, and thought I was selling floors. just because I needed a job. And that was like right out of college. So and I stayed with that company for 15 years. So got an opportunity to learn a lot.
Did you experience the beginning as a honeymoon period?
Yeah, yeah, this is the beginning. Yeah. If we talk if we want to talk a little bit about what it was. So the beginning, I stumbled in like entry level job, and it was a startup company. And startups that are successful, they grow really fast, they kind of explode. And um For people that are early in their career, that's really great because when a company grows really fast, it normally means opportunity for you to do things quickly. So I think I was there for maybe four months, and I've always been a hard worker. This is who I am. I like to work hard. I enjoy it. And so I worked really hard. I'd been there for three months, and they were like, we need leaders. And it was growing so fast, they didn't even have enough people applying for the leadership roles. So I got a leadership role. just because I was working hard. It wasn't anything else like that. It was so early in my career. I think I'd only been there three months when I took my first leadership job there. And then it was a small role. I had a small team of like 12 people, but I was really, really young. And I made all the mistakes really, really early. I learned all the things I had to do. And then I was able to kind of parlay that into a lot of other roles. I think I probably held eight to ten roles there before I left. So, but that was the honeymoon. That was the early part.
Good for you that you were at the right place at the right moment and you were able to grow fast. So what kind of person were you professionally at that time?
I like to learn. And I don't know if this is the right term, but I'm secure in... not being the smartest person in the room. So I've never been ashamed to say I don't know something or I don't understand something. And I also am not ashamed of being wrong or trying something. So when I look back at my early career, I was somebody to ask a lot of questions. I was somebody who was very vocal when I didn't know something. And then I was very open to trying something. So if something wasn't working, I was always going to try to find a solution for the problem. even if there wasn't one defined. So when I think of my early career, probably I would say a sponge, a listener, and again, somebody that was secure and being not very smart at the time or not knowing enough about the industry, if you get what I'm saying.
Yeah, I get it. A lot has happened since then. And I'm wondering, was there a turning point? point that shaped your career path at some point?
Yes. There's kind of twofold. So I think early in my career, my first job at the company I did, and I fell in love with people, like leading people and being around people. And I had a small team, as I mentioned, I think I had 12 people or something like that. And as with any job, technology came in and we kind of developed some new technology that took over the responsibility of the team I was managing. And I remember I was told really early in that job that all of those people, they're like, hey, they're going to be displaced. They're either going to be asked to leave the company or we're going to have to sever them or do something like that. I remember thinking, I'm like, we're a growth company. I've got six months to figure this out. I can bear down and get them jobs. So I got everybody placed within the company. They all stayed I got them all jobs within the organization. And then I was sitting there thinking, I'm like, oh, no, what does that mean about me? You know, I've just placed my whole team. And I realized really quickly that that meant I wasn't going to have a role either. And that was my first leadership role at the company. And they came to me and they're like, we love you. We want you to do this job over here. And it is it is a sales role. And I was like, oh, I hate sales. I don't want to do sales. That's the last thing I want to do. And they're like, well, it's the only job we have. And it's a sales manager role. So I went and took the job. And I loved it. And it was the most fun I'd ever had. So early in my career, I would say the thing that really changed me was. Don't go into anything with preconceived notions or any roles or areas of a business or parts of an organization thinking that you're not going to like something because you may be surprised. And you may be surprised at what you're capable of doing, even if it isn't something that you've traditionally been strong at. So I went over there and helped create and build our company's wholesales organization. And it was something that I thought I would absolutely not want to do, nor be good at. I loved it and I was good at it. So it was one of those things where I was like, OK, as a leader and being asked to do these things, instead of going into things with this locked and loaded preconceived notion of how it's going to be, just go into things with like a little more of an open mind, a clean slate and just try. So I would say that was probably the biggest change early in my career.
That's a great advice, actually, not to come with. preconceived notions. Now, I want to go back to when you had to take on a leadership role at a very young age and help your team members find new jobs. I'm curious to know how your view of leadership has evolved over the years since then.
I think as you start to get more stable and secure in what you're doing and you start to just like understand the X's and O's of management, you kind of start to understand that. People are at the heart of everything you do. So like everything you're carrying out, whether technology or process is involved, there are still people involved. And you really need to have a high functioning team to be successful. So some things that I learned early that changed were good leaders aren't the ones with all the responsibility. So I noticed really quickly that non-functioning teams typically had a bottleneck. So they had a leader at the top that said, every decision needs to flow through me. I need to be the one that makes all the decisions. I have all the power. I am the one that is going to be the end-all, be-all. A good leader, I found really quickly, was somebody that was willing to take on the accountability of the decision made, right or wrong, but to allow their team to make the decision. So to push the power down, to say, empower people at the lowest level that you can possibly empower them and push as much decision making as you possibly can to the front line of your organization. And I found that that was important for two reasons. One, your people were bought in because they felt like they had a say in what was going on. And your clients got a much better experience because they weren't calling in and saying, well, I can't make that decision or I have to go talk to so-and-so or I have to go do this. If you can get all the decision-making down to the front line, you have empowered people, they stand behind their decision, and you as a leader, if you're doing a good job, and you're training, and you're empowering your teams, they're going to make the right decision. And if they don't make the right decision, you need to be the one that stands behind them and supports them whenever it is the wrong decision, and help coach them along the way. The other thing that I noticed really early that I was like, hey, I have to change this, or it's maybe a characteristic that I was like, oh, I don't necessarily like this, was you have to be vulnerable as a leader. You have to show some vulnerability. So if you're not good at something, you can't pretend to be good at it. If you don't know something, don't pretend you don't know it. Just be open about where you are in the process. Oftentimes, when you take on a new leadership role, the people that you're working with are better than you at what you're trying to do. They know more than you do. If you go out and you try to be bogus and say, I know this or I understand this, you get found out really quickly. You lose credibility. If you sit beside somebody and you just say, I don't know, can you help me? And they teach you, that openness encourages openness both directions and creates a lot more what I would call functional team. The other thing was, I saw a lot of leaders have difficult conversations with people. And I think people struggle with that. That is just a natural thing. Nobody, well, there are people out there that are okay being mean. But most people don't want to be mean at their core. Most people don't want to be confrontational. And what I found was, you can have a very difficult conversation, and it can be respectful. It does not have to ever cross the line. And. A lot of people struggle with that. A lot of people struggle with being respectful and having a difficult conversation. So early in my career, I learned. Figure out how to have the difficult conversation in a respectful manner. And if the other person has trouble doing that, that's more than okay. But you don't have to get on anybody else's level. You can always be yourself. And then the last thing was, when you're leading big groups, it's very important not to take things personally. And I learned this really early. You're working with people and people are struggling in life sometimes. And sometimes the things that are going on outside of the workplace are much bigger. or impactful than you could ever know or understand. And so when people are coming in and they're struggling, oftentimes it isn't about you or it isn't about the organization. Oftentimes they're going through something. And if you can treat them with respect, even though they're struggling and they're going through something, you will get a much more, again, functional team and somebody that's willing to work and put in the effort. The views that I changed, and I wouldn't necessarily say there were changes, but things that I adopted really early were decision making needs to be pushed down as low as it possibly can and empowering teams. Don't be scared to be vulnerable. Be vulnerable and be honest. Always be respectful, no matter who you're talking to, whether it's the president or the person that's taking out the trash, even if they don't work for your company. And then don't take things personal. So I would say those were like the big. big core things for me early in my career.
Do you have an example of a time when you had to take responsibility for a bad decision?
For sure. It happened. It didn't happen a lot, but it happens sometimes. So in a previous role, one of the things that we had to do on a daily basis was to assess risk. And when you're assessing risk, you're basically deciding whether you need to default an account or not. And if you make that decision at the wrong time, You could lose money for the organization, maybe more today than you could have yesterday. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the longer you delay the decision, the more money you're likely losing. And that was a decision that I pushed down in the organization because, again, that's just kind of my philosophy. And we had an individual that was a highly functional team member that we trusted a lot that made the wrong decision. and we ended up losing more money than. we initially expected and when you lose more money than it initially is expected there are always some questions asked and so when they went back and asked they looked at the situation and when i talked to the team member they explained to me the rationale on why they held off on making the decision and although i i thought maybe it wasn't necessarily the right decision i understood where they were coming from uh so what i talked to him about was hey here here's maybe a better way to make the decision or a better way to look at it and kind of showed them, I wouldn't say better necessarily, a different way of looking at it and showed them why I thought the way I did. And they were like, okay. And I said, hey, maybe next time when this happens, let's try it this way and let's see how things fare. And then when I went back and talked to the leader, I said, hey, this is a decision that I supported. I supported them in the decision they made. We lost a little more money. We both learned from it. Here's what we're going to do next time. I explained what we thought we could do to improve the situation. They agreed and we all moved on. And the next time the situation came up, they made a different decision, fared well for us and worked. So it was kind of a learning moment for all of us and we moved forward. And the reason that I decided to say there was a decision that I made again was, had we placed that team member in a position of fear, they're probably less likely to make the right decision or a good decision next time because they're almost scared to make a decision.
Speaking of the team, what kind of person do you enjoy working with?
Like people, this is weird. I have a specific, like I have a specific type of person I really gravitate to. So I like people that have a big, have a big passion about, like a big care about what they do. And I met somebody. early on in my career here. And I just, he's a really unique individual because he's been here for a really long time. And he's, I wouldn't say he's like a super social person or anything like that, not a super people person, but I identified really quickly that he has a deep passion about SPS and our success. And it was one of those things where I'm like, dude, I gravitate to this guy. Like, so I gravitate to people that really want to win. They care about what they do every day and want things to be better. Benjamin Darling's the guy's name. He works in the US, he's in delivery. But he's one of those guys that you meet and you're just like, God, this guy really cares about what he does. He's really awesome at what he does. what he does, and he cares about it. So those are the type of people I gravitate to.
We've talked about your role as a leader, and I'm wondering, are there any leaders who have inspired you?
Yes. I mean, there have been multiple people. I would almost say every leader I've ever worked with has shaped me in some way, shape, or form, whether it's they did a lot of things that I thought were wonderful and beautiful and I wanted to replicate them, or they did things that I was like, ooh, I'm never going to do that. I'm like, you know, that's something I don't want to do. You know, oddly, I think I've learned more from the people. This sounds wild, but I've learned more from the not what to do, probably, scenarios than I have the, wow, that's a beautiful thing. And I'm not saying that I've seen more of the wrong things, but for some reason, they stuck with me more. I really do believe that product is important. I think it's what drives organizations forward. But I do believe. passionately that if you have the right people and you create and foster the right environment, you can be infinitely more successful. So when I say those bad things stuck out to me probably more from an impactful standpoint, there were a few leaders that I found that really hampered an organization's ability to be successful. And those leaders exhibited very similar characteristics. And what I found was in watching them navigate things, they usually made people feel a certain way or a group of people feel a certain way. And oftentimes it was they either made somebody feel bad about a decision they made, they made people's psychological safety, they made them feel uncertain psychologically, right? They wanted them kind of in this off kilter way. And for some reason they thought that that created a more functional environment. But what I found in watching that part of the organization work in those ways was the people that were in a scenario where they weren't psychologically safe or they were uncertain about their future or what was going on, they didn't tend to perform better. It wasn't like you were getting more out of them or we were getting these types of things. And what I found was it started to shut the team down in a way that made them less creative. Because when you're only worried about. saving your job or your preservation, you stop doing all the things that make a company great. The ideas and the creativity start to stifle. They start to go way down because everybody is in this insular mode of, I don't want to do anything wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. So I learned a lot in watching those people. And what I found was a lot of them, although they were usually the loudest person in the room, although they were usually I had a pretty high position and a lot of people followed them around. They were the type of people that I would say, if you ask them a question and they said it once and you said, well, how am I supposed to do this? They would just say the same thing again, only say it louder. Those type of people, I found that they were actually probably the most insecure people. They were probably the most deeply insecure people. And I found that most of the time they created this persona because they were probably scared themselves. And there was no way for them to dismantle this character that they had created as a leader. And they couldn't be authentic. There was no authenticity in what they were doing. And they were creating this culture of fear and uneasiness that everybody looked at. They're like, ooh, they're a bullish leader. They're a real bulldog. They really bulldoze walls. I'm like, we can accomplish the same thing. and not be jerks about it. Or we could accomplish the same thing and not make everybody feel rattled and uneasy when they go home. And we could get a lot more creativity and production out of the team. So I learned more out of what not to do from those people, I think, than the what to do. So the leaders that impacted me the most were probably the ones that I looked at and I was like, ooh, I don't like that. I don't like that culture that they're creating. And I remember thinking to myself, God, don't be that person. Just be the guy that's like, You don't know. It's OK to be insecure and feed into your team. Don't don't make them feel uneasy about what they're doing. That's I guess that's my answer to that question.
So we've talked a lot about what you've learned, but what is something that you had to unlearn?
Sometimes you make assumptions of what people know and what they don't know, or you make assumptions of what people's capabilities are, what they're not. And if you make assumptions and you move quickly, You can inadvertently shut people down. You can inadvertently make people feel a certain way. So for me, early on, I was fast about everything. I was like, we need to make this change. We can make this change tomorrow. Because in my mind, it's as simple as do it. Not everybody else moves at that pace nor understands that pace. So what I learned was I have to slow down significantly. I have to look at what I'm doing. I have to think about it a little more. And I have to. talk about it with the team before I do it. And if you do that and you slow down just a little, you get a little more buy-in. And oftentimes, I've found people were more open to the change and more receptive to change management if you just slow down the pace a little bit. And the other thing I would say is a lot of places change for the sake of change. And what I mean by that is... When organizations move and new leaders come into different roles, everybody feels like they have to hit a home run. Everybody's like, I got a new job. I got to show you who I am. I got to show you what I'm made of. Watch me do this. Watch me change everything. And what I found early in my career was it's not always the right thing to do to come in and change something. So back- to the speed, what I learned was assess the situation before you go try to hit your home run. It's not all about the home run. It's not all about that. Sometimes it's just about creating a healthy environment for people to work in and maintaining a little stability. Sometimes doing something the same way for a long time yields good results. It doesn't always, we don't always have to change every five minutes if it's not going our way. So I think slow down.
Is that also the way you handle pressure?
No, no. I've taken a lot of tests on this. Like in the leadership things, you have to do like a lot of to do like a lot of personality tests. And. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with them, but my personality tests always said that I stayed the same during pressure. My personality really didn't change. I'm typically a more creative person. I tend to live in big picture. I like to talk high level. I tend to live up here. I tend to stay there when I feel pressure. I don't tend to change. It's not like I over index and say, show me all the data. I don't say, let's talk about the facts. I don't get, I don't. tend to like over index on on any of those things but i think a lot of that is like for me it's kind of understanding your place in the world um nothing i've ever done is going to save the world i'm not a doctor um i didn't get to join the epa and save the planet um you know i'm not i'm not doing anything like that and So when it comes to pressure, a lot of pressure is self-induced. So you get self-induced pressure. And so what I have to remind myself and what I always try to tell myself is, we're doing matters. It's very important to care about the organization you work for and the people of the organization you work for. But at the end of the day, if what I'm bringing to the organization isn't valued, and they don't value me or I don't value them, there are plenty of other places that we can go where we are valued, our skill sets will be valued. So it kind of just keeps me grounded in what I'm doing to be like, look, although this is important, nobody's life's at stake. We're just making decisions. And it helps you be a little more creative in the moment if you can kind of stifle the pressure that way. There have been moments where I've succumbed to pressure. I think everybody has in their career, but it's pretty few and far between for me. So. For me, it's always reminding myself what I'm doing, the stakes of what we're doing, things of that nature. And again, going back to kind of what I'm passionate about, behind everybody, there's people. People matter. And so just kind of pour into that. So it's never really been too bad for me. There are things that I guess, the other things of pressure. There are things that I don't necessarily like doing that I've had to do my whole career that caused me a little bit of anxiety, but I've always been fine at them. And the longer I've done it in my career, the less the anxiety is, right? So like.
For instance, something like this. I'm not necessarily these types of things may give me a little bit of anxiety, but I do them and I think it makes me better.
Me too. I feel anxious every time I'm about to interview new guests.
We laugh because it's like 90% of people won't tell you that. And I will almost guarantee you 90% of people are have a little anxiety around whatever it may be, whether it's public speaking or, or podcasts. And early in my career, I was always nervous to tell people like, oh, this gives me a little stress or anxiety or whatever it is. And I'll never forget, I was going to talk in front of a lot of people one time, like a pretty big group. And I was a little nervous about it. And I was in my head. And I'd spent the early part of my career being like, nah, I'm good. You know, I'm not nervous. Because I thought telling myself that I wasn't nervous was actually better. And then I learned that I would just tell people. No, no. Yeah, I'm just a little stressed and anxious about this. And then after that, early in my career, I felt so much better about doing things because I was just honest about how I felt. There was like some authenticity in it. And so it felt better. And I usually performed better.
To wrap up this episode, a few more questions. Is there a problem that you solved that made you proud?
For sure. So, yeah, we have a real nasty pain point. at my previous job. And it was like, we did physical audits and we drove our clients nuts. Like we were driving around and like people would show up on their lot every 30 days to touch inventory. And I was like, how can we change the way the industry audits? Like they've all, like the industry has been the same since like 1984. And I don't want to say like, I'm the only person that solved this. There were colleagues that I worked with that were very influential in this, but like, I just got to be part of the team that did it. And it was very fun. and we were very creative in the way we did it so we assessed and looked for data in the market so like we were looking for sold data points and things like that so we incorporated all this like unique data and we could get away from physically doing the audit and then we actually uh in my previous job we partnered with sbs uh to use their digital audit solution so we did this really creative like use of data and this new digital audit tool that sbs had created to solve this problem that's actually how i met you guys was through that. But that was something I was really proud of because it was nobody else in the industry was doing it. We tackled the problem in a really unique way of pairing data in this new digital audit tool. And we were able to walk away from a vendor that we had been with that I have a ton of respect for, by the way. But we were able to walk away from them and not have this big physical audit field for us and gave our clients a better experience and changed the way the industry re-audited it. So I thought it was really cool.
Outside of work, what helps you maintain balance?
Family. Yeah, I'm a family guy. So my wife and daughter. So I have a two-year-old daughter. Her name's Naomi. My wife's name's Lydia. So we just spend a lot of time with family. And I grew up really, really small family, only child. My wife has a huge family. And early on, I think for me, that was one of those things was kind of jarring, being an only child and getting adopted adopted by this big family almost. But I've really come to love it. And then I love music. I've always loved music. I love to create music. I love to listen to music. I love it.
So what advice would you give someone not about building a career, but about building a life through that career?
I think it goes back to what I said earlier about like the people that I didn't gravitate to and the people I do gravitate to. And to set yourself up for success, you have to be authentic. So I would say above all else, like when you jump into your career, there are going to be expectations put on you. And you're going to look at other people succeeding and you're going to say, I need to be like that. I need to do those things. I would strongly suggest not to do that. And what I would suggest is to continue to be who you are at your core and do not create a character. Do not become someone you're not. don't create these things that you have to maintain. If you create a character or somebody that you're not, or you put yourself in a position doing something that drains your energy, you are not going to be good at life or work. Because when you're at home with your family, you're going to be so exhausted from trying to keep up with whoever this person you've created at work is. And then when you're at work, you're a jerk because you're insecure because you're being somebody you're not. So for me, it is literally all about authenticity. And I'll say it like I said it earlier. If the people that you work with don't like who you are authentically, or you don't fit the organization, there is one for you. You will be valued somewhere else. Your character and who you are as a person will be valued somewhere. Go find it.
There's one last question I usually ask all guests on what leaders want. It's, in your opinion, what do leaders really want?
Personally, I want people that want to work and I want people to feel psychologically safe and excited about coming into a job. I want people to come in and have the space to be creative. And I think if people have the freedom and space to be able to create and perform. and they have the ability to make decisions and be accountable for those decisions, you will achieve whatever result that you're after. So for me, a high-functioning team that feels excited to come in and work.
Thank you so much, Lucas, for being with us and sharing your time and your insights. It was really great to hear. Thank you again and see you around.
Good. You did great, by the way. So thanks for having me.
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