How to Hire the Right Number Two Leader and Integrator with Alec Broadfoot

Alec Broadfoot leads Vision Spark, a consulting firm specializing in executive placement for mid-sized companies, especially when the role is critical to scale leadership or operations. They have completed over 200 number two leader searches for entrepreneurial companies, many of which run on EOS, and dozens of searches for other key team members, with a 98 percent placement rate. He is a member of Strategic Coach, a sought-after speaker, and the author of the number one Amazon bestseller Hiring Your Right Number Two Leader.

A number two leader is someone who actually runs your company. They could be the president, the COO or the chief of staff, but they run the company and everybody reports to them. When you have the right number two, visionaries and entrepreneurs and owners are free to spend more time in their areas of superpower, where they can really make an impact, whether that is new client relationships, inventing, creating, or solving new problems. The number two runs the business, runs the day-to-day, oversees staff, and executes the business plan.

Most of the time owners are not the right person to run their own company. If you think about the talent they have, owners are usually creative and entrepreneurial. They see the needs in the market, they understand the customers, they understand marketing, and they create the business, or they are second generation and inherit it. Their skill set is in the creation, not necessarily in running the business.

When an owner creates something or starts a company, they are going to hit a ceiling eventually. Maybe the ceiling is $500,000 in sales, maybe it is $50 million in sales, but at some point it goes beyond their capability. When you are approaching that ceiling, you really need to be thinking about having a manager who can run the business.

Alec describes himself as definitely a number one. He does not mind being behind the scenes and serving others, but he is not good at managing other people, holding people accountable, or being objective. He is a people person and a galvanizer. He likes creating and inventing new relationships and new areas for the business to go, and he is more of an evangelist for his brand and culture, but definitely not a manager.

He learned that the hard way. Twenty years ago, when he had the mailing and printing company, he would have said he was a manager. He did not realize he was not good at it. He liked the data and the numbers, but when it came to managing people, holding people accountable and leading other leaders, he was not good at that.

His entrepreneurial journey started with his MBA. After graduating from undergrad in Ohio, where he is from, the economy was not good, and he got a full ride to get an MBA right after. The program was good at training people to be corporate executives and corporate leaders, and they ran optional Saturday programs, one of which was dress for success. One Saturday they had a panel of three entrepreneurs, and it blew him away. He decided he wanted his own business rather than corporate America.

The plan was to work for Bank One at their Columbus headquarters, save money, and start a business in his 40s with the savings. Two years into the banking program, an opportunity came up to buy a small business with a business partner. He has been an entrepreneur since he was 25, so about 30 years.

The first was a small publishing company. They published a self-published reference book and sold it directly through mail order as well as in stores. It was a great little business where he learned about pricing and distribution, and about employees and hiring the wrong employees. A few years after that he got into the mailing business, processing mail for big companies like Chase Mortgage and others in Columbus, Ohio.

Owning his own business was everything he thought it would be and then some. It was rewarding and a lot of hard work, but the impact you can make is different. At Bank One, if you wanted something done you filled out a form and needed five vice presidents above you to sign off, and it took several weeks. In a small business, if you want to change the price of your product from $21.95 to $23.95, you do it. You get it done and you see the results instantly. He loved that ability to get results and get them quickly.

The publishing company got as high as about ten employees. The mailing company got as high as 30.

He always thought he was a pretty good business person, since he had an MBA. At the mailing company he did some self-reflecting during a period of employee issues and concluded that hiring was an area he was not good at. They were firing seven out of ten people they hired. They paid well and had a good culture, and he knew there had to be a better way. Business school never taught him how to hire, how to interview or how to evaluate.

So he reached out to a mentor and asked what he was doing wrong. The mentor asked whether he was using any sort of assessment or science or data in his hiring, or just going with his gut. He was going with his gut, and the mentor told him that was where he was wrong. They started incorporating an assessment tool into the hiring process, and it transformed how they hired. Instead of firing seven out of ten, they retained seven out of ten. Productivity grew, retention grew, customer service improved. It improved in all facets.

Around that time he needed an executive assistant. They were still not good at interviewing and not great at attracting talent, so the role was hard to fill. A woman came in for an interview and did fantastically. He had her take the assessment, and the results came back horrendous. It said she would be a slow learner, she would be disorganized, she would have no attention to detail, she would need a lot of hand holding, she would not remember things, and she would be a social butterfly.

He did not believe it could be true. He asked her for references, and since he also did not know how to ask good reference questions, he decided to hire her. Within a couple of weeks they had fired her. Everything the assessment said was spot on, down to the social butterfly and the need for affirmation and hand holding and the low attention to detail. He decided never again.

He was involved in a Christian business owner peer group at the time, and noticed his friends making the same hiring mistakes: hiring based on gut and instinct, hiring people like themselves, hiring people they liked, hiring people who made them feel good to hire. They had the same issues. That is when the seed was planted for him to do something about it.

On why the interview and the assessment told such different stories, he quotes something he read years ago: a typical interview is a conversation between two liars. He was probably embellishing how great the company was, and she was definitely embellishing what she could do. They were not asking good interview questions or getting examples, just typical interview questions. He liked her as a person, thought she would fit in, and could see her in the role because she smiled and was professional.

He calls that the Achilles heel of entrepreneurs. They are really good at seeing the needs in the marketplace and what the customer needs, and really bad at hiring, because they go with emotion and empathy rather than objectivity.

On what separates a good interview question from a typical one, one of his favorite ways to start is tell me about a time when. He sets it up first: would you describe yourself as someone who is a good communicator? That is a yes or no question, and 99 percent of the time the answer is yes. You position it that way for your own benefit, because now the candidate knows a question about communication is coming and their mindset is ready. Then the question: tell me about a time when a breakdown in communication created a difficult situation for you. Now you are forcing them to think of an example.

A bad answer sounds like this: it all comes down to communication, we have to communicate really well, whether in person or in writing or with my teams or with my family, communication is so important, I believe strongly we have to be really good communicators. A good answer sounds like this: let me tell you about something that happened yesterday in my leadership team meeting, we had a situation where a customer was asking for a discount on our services, I shared that it was okay to provide a customer discount, but they misunderstood what I was saying and it created an issue I had to deal with later. That is a much better example. There is a date, the people involved, the situation, and they actually listened and answered the question.

Most people think they are a good judge of character. If you ask the average person on the street whether they are good at interviewing and a good judge of character, they will say yes. But if you ask how many of their people, knowing what they know now, they would rehire, the answer is usually two or three. His analogy: if his accountant were only accurate 20 percent of the time, he would not be a very good accountant. The general population is not good at interviewing.

For most entrepreneurs and business owners who are not self-aware, the assumption is that it is the other person's fault. How often do we hire someone and a few weeks later say that was not the person I interviewed?

When he had his business he felt stuck. He had an attorney on speed dial and would call to ask whether he could fire this person, trying to get permission. He learned in the mailing business that you had to be fast to fire. He learned later that you had to be slow to hire.

The assessment Vision Spark uses is a version of what they have used for the last 15 years, and the most recent version is called the TIP, the Talent Impact Profile. Several things make it different from assessments like Enneagram, DISC, Myers-Briggs, Culture Index or Kolbe.

First, there are benchmarks. You can see what the success patterns are for a particular role. If you are hiring a salesperson, you can see what the pattern should be and where the scores should fall within the brackets. The same for a CFO or a controller.

Second, and increasingly why clients love it, there is a measurement they call the BS meter. They can determine whether someone is trying to convey someone they are not. A candidate thinking they know what Alec wants and answering the questions that way can be detected.

Third, it measures mental aptitudes. There are six, and the first is mental acuity, meaning someone's learning style and whether they are a hands-on or conceptual learner. That measures their ability to do critical thinking, strategic thinking, planning, problem solving and innovating, and it is the first of the 16 dimensions they look at. The other mental aptitudes are communication ability, memory retention, vocabulary and attention to detail.

Fourth, there are ten personality dimensions, looking at organizational skills, process orientation, whether someone is thick-skinned, creative, assertive or a risk taker. He says it would not be great for a team building event, but it will tell you whether you should hire this person and whether you have the right person in the right seat.

Matching requires more than the role. Every client is different, so hiring a number two for one client does not mean the same type of person for somebody else. Every owner and visionary is unique and every culture is unique, so it is not boilerplate. His team has to understand the hiring manager, the culture of the organization, and what success looks like. Out of the hundreds they have done, no two job descriptions are the same.

That includes the leaders' own assessment results. If the hiring manager is highly assertive, knows what they want and can make decisions, and the candidate reporting to them is also highly assertive, there are going to be fireworks. He had a friend who took the TIP for her organization and was excited about a salesperson she was hiring, calling her one of the best. He told her, because he cared about her, that it probably was not going to work out, and showed her the red flag about both of them being assertive. Three months later she told him he had been right and that it was there in black and white. So they need to understand the personality of the leader to make sure the person coming in has complementary skills.

On why people disregard the data and go with their gut anyway, he says it is an emotional decision, like buying a house or a car or an outfit or the latest iPhone. We tend to justify. We want to qualify candidates for the role instead of disqualify them. Sometimes it takes a few bad hires before somebody decides to stop going with their gut and look at the data.

After the executive assistant, he made a vow never to go against the assessment results again. He was having issues with his business partner at the time and decided to sell his interest in that company, and they parted ways. He moved into consulting, helping small companies improve cash flow, get good clients, pay down debt and improve profitability. What he learned is that most of their issues came back to not having the right people, especially in leadership roles. That was a huge realization, and in 2012 he started Vision Spark to help entrepreneurs find and hire the leaders who could transform the organization, help them scale and grow, and give them the quality of life they started the business for.

The assessment is only one part, because it measures core behavior. To measure learned behavior he reached out to another mentor, Bob Spence, who he knew as an amazing interviewer who could interview high-level leadership candidates and make recommendations for companies. He told Bob he wanted to start this company and needed an interview process. Bob told him he had been looking for someone like Alec his whole life, that he had developed a system he wanted to share, and rolled out the red carpet. The questions were research-based with a response guide, so they knew the right questions to ask and the right answers to evaluate against. That combination of Bob's system and the TIP assessment is what they call the Hire With Confidence Blueprint.

For small business owners doing their own hiring, the key word is process. How you create the job description, where you post it, where applicants apply, how you look at resumes, and whether you are giving them a numerical score or just going with your gut.

You want to objectively evaluate the resumes. Then screen the top candidates, and when you screen them, do resume interrogation. Look at gaps on the resume and why they moved from one place to another. If they say it was a mutual decision that they moved on, ask what they mean by mutual, and you often find out they were let go. Then look at whether they have the essential traits to succeed.

You want a scripted screening interview with cultural fit questions, to see whether there will be a strong cultural fit, and technology questions about whether they are tech savvy and AI savvy. Then you should have an assessment tool. He recommends something that measures mental aptitudes, which he calls the key in successful hiring. When people ask how the company is so successful and how they have a 98 percent success rate, his answer is the process and the fact that they evaluate mental aptitudes.

After the assessment comes a deep dive leadership interview, about 90 minutes by phone, evaluating how they are as a leader. Then an interview day, where two or three candidates come in on the same day with group interviews throughout, and a debrief at the end to determine which candidate to move forward with. And it does not stop when they come on board, because you have to onboard them effectively too.

On resumes, he wrote an article on LinkedIn about a year ago saying that 78 percent of resumes have lies on them and 100 percent of resumes have embellishments. It has gotten bad enough that some employers are moving to a no-resume interview process. Resumes are written by AI now.

The second problem is that employers still fall in love with resumes. We think someone is going to be successful because we saw it on a two-page marketing sheet, and assume that because they did X, Y and Z in the past they will be successful in our company. That is not a good assumption. Core behaviors and mental aptitudes are what determine success.

He has seen it repeatedly with clients who hired before engaging Vision Spark. They will look at the leader and say, can we share where you are struggling with this person? You are struggling because this person cannot innovate and cannot come up with new solutions, and your company is in a new phase while they are looking at their past for what can help them in the future. They cannot pivot. You are also frustrated because they are not moving quickly enough, not executing, not implementing. Clients ask how he knows this, and the answer is that it is right there on their assessment.

A no-resume process, based on his research, uses an application, interviews and assessments along the way, without resumes. He thinks you still need a little bit of a resume. If you are hiring a president and the person has been a bartender and a mortician for most of their career, you probably need some of it. But for more junior positions, he questions whether you really need one.

In their screening interview they do resume interrogation first, and if they do not like what they see they thank the candidate for their time and end it there. If the candidate does okay, they move to a quick phone screener, about ten minutes, with questions like on what basis do you delegate to others, and would you describe yourself as a good listener, followed by tell me what a good listener is like. Over half the people do not make it through that first interview.

About 20 percent of their interview process is custom, with questions based on the client's culture and what they believe success looks like.

That means the organization needs a defined culture. Because most of their clients run on EOS or a similar operating system like Scaling Up or Pinnacle, they usually have core values defined. The work is learning what those core values are and what they mean. Sometimes they are just words on paper, or in a second or third generation business they were the parents' core values.

He was working with a second generation client on some vision casting and consulting, talking about the importance of a number two, and asked what their core values were. The client listed them. Alec told him those sounded like really good core values, but that they did not tell him the culture there or who the client wanted. The people the client really admired in the company had different behaviors and values. He asked whether the client had ever considered that his core values might be wrong. It prompted the client to think it through, and they ended up changing their core values to reflect their culture and the behavior they were looking for.

He has turned down clients over that disconnect. A company in Texas was referred to them by a marketing company for a number two search. On the phone with the owner, Alec was not getting a good vibe, and sensed the owner just wanted someone who could get the job done with a good resume rather than a cultural fit. He asked what their core values were. The owner said grit and teamwork and integrity. Alec asked him to tell him about them, and the owner said he had just told him and asked what else he wanted to know.

Alec got off the phone without presenting anything and called the person at the marketing company who had made the referral, asking how she would describe that company's culture. She said the culture was awful, dog eat dog, nobody got along, drama all over the place. He asked why she had referred them. She apologized and said she thought they needed the service. He agreed they did, but said they would not work with them, because what they needed was a recruiter who would send them resumes rather than a consultative search firm.

He says it requires the leader to be fully committed to leading a good culture. One of his favorite quotes, originally from John Maxwell, is that you teach what you know but you replicate who you are. Culture is top down. You are going to replicate who you are, and you want to hire leaders who will replicate who they are. If you truly value integrity and honesty and persistence and good character, you need to hire people who will be ambassadors of that. Vision Spark's own core values are that they grow, they get people, and they serve.

More people are realizing how important culture is, and he credits EOS with doing a great job over the last 15 or 20 years of helping its clients with core values and tools like the People Analyzer. But there are still people who just want a human in a seat. A painting company in Columbus needed a CFO on a Wednesday and wanted them in place by Friday. Alec said he was not sure they were the right partner. The owner asked why he could not just get him the CFO and offered to pay. Alec explained they were not a contingency recruiter, that it is an engagement with a retainer, and that they really want to understand you and your culture and your values. The owner said he could not care less about that and just wanted a CFO. Alec told him they were not the firm for him and wished him the best.

EOS came onto his radar through a Vistage group, a CEO peer group, back in 2013. A friend named Alex Freytag, who was a consultant helping companies with incentive plans, learned about EOS and became an implementer. Hearing Alec's frustration about wanting to work with companies that had good culture and good values, Alex told him he ought to work with EOS companies, because that is all they do. Alex also told him he should specialize in the integrator role, because three out of four companies do not have integrators and Vision Spark would be good at finding them. Around 2014 and 2015 they went all in on the integrator position.

Vision Spark runs on EOS themselves, with Roy Getz as their implementer since 2021. Alex gave him the book Traction, which he read around 2015.

On realizing he was a visionary, it took time. When he started Vision Spark he had a business partner, and they implemented EOS in their own company in 2015. The question came up of who was the visionary and who was the integrator. They both took the assessment, and he scored higher on visionary while his partner scored higher on integrator. They agreed on the plan, and then his partner thought about it and said he was not okay with it and believed he was a visionary. They had a four-hour conversation in an ice cream shop in Atlanta right after the EOS conference, which was ultimately the beginning of them parting ways. Once he bought his partner out, he was able to own the visionary seat, and in 2020 he hired his own integrator. That is when he truly learned he is a visionary, and the company has done better since he has been in his role.

He describes the period before that as extremely stressful. He was in the visionary seat, the integrator seat and the finance seat at once. Grading himself, he gave himself a B as the finance person, a D as the visionary and an F as the integrator. He was not doing any of them well, which caused team issues. They were not jelling and were not hitting their goals. So he decided to hire an integrator, which was the beginning of real change at Vision Spark. Within a couple of years, 100 percent of his staff had turned over.

He was consciously aware it did not fit his wiring. As the integrator he had to be good at communicating, holding people accountable and running meetings. In their Level 10 meetings he was more of a referee and arbitrator, trying to use diplomacy skills, and he dreaded those meetings.

He believes too many people are in the wrong seat, more than is obvious. When Vision Spark interviews for integrators and evaluates candidates with their assessment, three out of four of the top candidates do not have the ingredients to be a successful integrator, even though their entire career has been on that trajectory.

Recently he looked at his own talented people and asked, titles aside and functions aside, where they could best make a difference and where they would be happiest. They made some changes. It has been one of the harder years, but his team is happier and they are seeing results. One person knew they had more talent and wanted to be used, which made for an easier conversation. Another had been with him a long time, and he saw their strengths and weaknesses while they did not, which made for a really tough conversation that took a while. That person is now excited about their new role and wakes up a different person in the morning. A third was a good worker who represented the brand well, and after asking about her previous roles he told her she would make a great leader and promoted her.

On whether it is easier to see natural wiring in others than in ourselves, he agrees. Some people have a natural ability to see strengths in others, like the galvanizer personality in Working Genius or individualization in StrengthsFinder. Amy added maximizer to that list.

Asked why it is harder to see our own gifts, Amy described it as a combination of ego, insecurity and humility, and used the phrase that it is so hard to read the label from inside the bottle. After 15 years it is easy for her to talk to a business or a person and see what makes them unique and tell their story, and painful and frustrating to do it for herself, because you do not have that objective outside perspective. Alec added that doctors make the worst patients and auto mechanics will not work on their own cars, and that it is human nature in many ways.

On why right person right seat matters, he says it works on many levels. It matters for the individual because they are happier and enjoy working somewhere they can use their gifts and talents, and their families are happier because the stress is gone. The business gets the benefit of their unique abilities and productivity. When they do a search for a key role, the client is through the moon, saying it was the best decision and that their life is different and their family loves seeing more of them because they are less stressed. The candidate says they are thankful for the opportunity, that they can make a difference and are valued and get to work at a great company for a great entrepreneur, and that their family is happier. You touch lives when you do that.

Asked about his own unique ability, he names two things. The first is seeing the talents of others and getting them to use those talents in a business. The second is understanding the science of how we are created for different roles, which goes beyond the resume, including seeing it at a team level: your team is struggling here because as the business owner you are the smartest person in the room, or you do not have anyone here who values planning and wants to put plans in place. He geeks out on the science of how we are made up.

Coming to that awareness took longer than he realized, and he thinks a lot of it had to do with ego. Years ago he tried to come across as a know-it-all with facts and figures and data, profit and loss statements and trends and the detail of the numbers, putting his security in that rather than in who he was and who he was created to be. He learned it the hard way through the period of being in three seats after buying out his business partner. Strategic Coach was helpful when they started talking about unique ability, and he recognized that selling was not his unique ability, so he hired a salesperson and it made all the difference. EOS was helpful for the structure and how to organize the business, and he calls the accountability chart a phenomenal tool that solves a lot of issues.

He still makes the mistake. A year ago he decided he would lead sales and marketing, believing he could do a better job on strategy and marketing tactics to raise revenue. The first six months were amazing and the last six months were horrible. Around April, seven or eight months in, he realized it had been a dumb decision and asked himself why he would do something outside his unique ability.

The reason it worked at first and then stopped is that the early part was ideas rather than execution. He had the ideas on improving revenue, profitability, pricing, marketing, where to spend the budget and the direction to go. What he was not good at was managing the people and the process, following up, holding people accountable, and getting his own committed to-dos done. He thought about hiring a sales support person, which they did, and then realized someone on his team would be even better at taking over sales and marketing. That happened in July and it has been great since.

On goals, one is to end the year well. Q1 was unusually high, Q2 was lower than they wanted, and Q3 was okay, so they want to finish strong. They have openings they want to fill, and they want to hit their three year picture while continuing to be a company where employees love to come to work, get to do what they want to do every day, and make an impact.

Vision Spark made the Inc. 5000 three years in a row, in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Only about 10 percent of companies manage three consecutive years. To be on the list you need sales of $2 million or more and you submit your financials to be rated on growth rate. Some of the top companies on it have growth rates in the thousands of percent.

He does not identify as a recruiter. People call and tell him up front that they do not like recruiters, and he tells them he does not like recruiters either, which surprises them, and then explains that Vision Spark is a retained executive search firm. It is a flat fee, they do the search for that fee, they give a guarantee, and it is much more consultative. They vet the candidates, sometimes starting with several dozen and narrowing to two or three, and they do a lot of the work for the client. Recruiters will sometimes just send resumes or see if people are interested, which can be more transactional. There are great recruiters out there and there are others who give the industry a bad name.

Vision Spark has three uniques. The first is a fixed fee. A lot of firms charge a percentage of first year compensation, and Vision Spark tells the client the fee before entering the arrangement, so whether the person is paid $150,000 or $300,000, the fee is the same. Clients see them as a trusted advisor because of it. The second is the Hire With Confidence Blueprint, since no other search firm has that leadership interview combined with the TIP assessment. The third is that they customize with care, treating every business as unique rather than a number, and doing whatever it takes to give a great client experience.