Jason had the job of his dreams. He was mostly working with people aligned with his values. Working for people who were considered vulnerable and in need. And was responsible to a board of directors who, for the most part, were cheering him on and providing the insight and support that he needed to lead this important organization towards its vision.
Daily Jason was meeting with team members and stakeholders.
Weekly Jason was holding leadership meetings to cast vision, follow up, and implement important details of their work all aligned with their mission and values.
Jason was visiting the work sites to encourage, train, audit, understand, strategize, and lead. Jason was learning more than he had ever learned, struggling through more than he had ever slugged through, and was truly working within his skillset and growing his skillset.
Jason also had a helpful team to delegate things to and run new ideas. Periodically there was frustration and misalignment, but it usually was worked through with intentionality and unity.
On an extended trip to a few of the work sites, Jason had decided to perform a simple audit of operations for the different sites. He ran through operational process, financials, and culture alignment.
Of course, as with any organization Jason found that some things needed special attention, a little extra fertilizer, and some time to grow and improve.
Jason brought the full audit to the CHairman of the board of the organization.
After a series of surprising discussions within the Board, the audit actually outed some other things that were happening that neither Jason or the majority of the board new were happening behind the scenes. Nothing illegal, but not healthy either...and even more than that, the Board felt mis-informed by some of its members.
An internal Board battle ensued, the majority of the board made a decision to resign on the spot, dissolve Jasons’ executive role due to by-law issues, and there Jason was.
Thirty nine years old, married, three kids, and totally unemployed. Silence. The tide of Jasons’ professional life had just gone out.
In life, the tide comes in and the tide goes out. The sun goes up, and the sun comes down. The clouds roll in, and the clouds roll out.
For many of us right now it feels like the tide is out and for many of us, we have never seen a tide that appears this low...or that at least seems to be getting lower by the hour.
Unknown and unexpected things have a way of breeding anxiety and uncertainty.
All of the sudden schools are out and now YOU are the homeschool teacher trying to juggle kids, a job, a home, and relationships.
All of the sudden your business is ordered to close down and YOU are the employer trying to juggle finances, employees, families, customers, banks, creditors, vendors, and inventory.
All of the sudden your throat starts to get sore and it makes you wonder…”has it come to me?”
Today I have a very simple goal: to persuade you to not live in a sesspool of fear and anxiety, worry and hopelessness, AND instead live in the bright light of belief, empathy, capability, and a sound mind.
My goal = “work on the dock while the tide is out”
We will NOT live in fear...but we will live believing that amazing things are just beyond the storm.
It is true...for many of you, your tide is going out right now.
The stock market looks like this, but all you hear is this:
RIGHT NOW you have a choice.
Will you mourn the loss of the tide? Will you be saddened over the possible lack of luxury and wealth found in money, expensive stuff, and overextended housing in our subtle effort to impress people we don’t even really like?
OR…
Will you find NEW wealth in a walk around the block with your spouse, in four straight nights of dinner at home around your rickety table eating on mis-matched plates, cups, and plastic wear?
Will you find NEW wealth in a lingering conversation with a friend? New wealth in a quiet moment standing on a marsh flat throwing a fly rod? New wealth playing four rounds of ping pong at home because there is really nothing else to do?
When the tide is out...there is either mourning and sadness...OR there is opportunity and hope.
In the Business On Purpose community we are making a declaration, planting our flag in the ground that THIS will be a community of hope...THIS will be a community of opportunity...and
THIS will be a community where the anxious find freedom
There are three real challenges to acknowledge when the tide goes out in your life:
BUT, There are also three subtle opportunities to acknowledge when the tide goes out in your life:
When you work on the dock while the tide is out it affords you time to RE-INVEST in the things that matter most
While the tide is out we must…
While the tide is out…
While the tide is out, and as long as you are a member of the Business ON Purpose family and community…
While the tide is out, and when the tide comes back in (and it will come back in)...
While the tide is out, we will plan well for when the tide comes back in.
We will not speculate...we will build a simple 12 week plan.
We will not moan and grumble...we will build a simple 12 week plan.
And when news breaks tomorrow...we will go back to our 12 week plan.
And when the news breaks next week...we will go back to our 12 week plan.
Earlier I told you about Jason and where we left Jason was in a place of confusion, despair, loneliness, and not knowing what was coming for himself, his wife, and his three kids.
I lied, his name was not Jason.
Just over five years ago on Friday February 27, 2015, I walked out of a North Texas boardroom unemployed.
On Monday March 2, 2015 we started The On Purpose Group LLC...or what you know as our DBA Business On Purpose.
Mollie Sandman sat across the bank desk and opened our bank accounts.
Chris Dalzell, Justin Harvey, and Gerrick Taylor all risked a coaching fee and a long 12 hour day in a small conference room to determine their vision...and today Business On Purpose has had the privilege of walking with hundreds of heroic business owners in over 40 countries around the world.
All for one purpose, to liberate heroic business owners from chaos.
For many of you this time feels like chaos.
Please let me persuade you otherwise and encourage you with this…
The tide is out…NOW is the time to make old things new
NOW is the time to work on your dock and in the words of Michele Williams let’s begin asking a simple question…
“What does this make possible”
TAKE 5 MINUTES TO WRITE DOWN EITHER BY YOURSELF, or WITH YOUR TEAM new ideas, new dreams, new visions that you have because the shift that we are living...and in 5 minutes I’ll give you instruction on your 12 week plan and then we will send you off to spend 1 hour working on the tactics of your 12 Week Plan
Starting out in the survival stage of your business meant you spent most days dreaming, doing, and making sure that everything is being held together.
Growth slowly (sometimes not so slowly) begins to creep in and before you know it you are maxed out not knowing how to get it all done in a 24 hour day.
Jason has spent years on this hamster wheel and his health and family are starting to really pay the price. Sure, he has some access to cash and resources but absolutely no time to enjoy any of it.
Part of the reason he started his business is to create margin to spend more time with his family and more time giving to the passions that he and his wife share. Instead, Jason is spending the majority of his time with other families making sure their home is maintained...neglecting his own maintenance.
How do you jump off the hamster wheel and start to grab and enjoy the margin that is so widely promoted to entrepreneurs (aka, “you can be your own boss...set your own hours…”)?
There is a high likelihood that as a business owner you have a driven personality...you’re a dreamer, a pioneer; an “out there” thinker. You take risks and often fire before ever really aiming.
Aiming is important...but you don’t have to be the one doing it all of the time.
How do you find someone to complement your skills and your responsibility as an owner?
How do you work with that person in a way that doesn’t drive them or you crazy?
For goodness sake...how do you afford them?
First, let’s just step back a minute and take a deep breath...although it may feel like your world is imploding let’s just remember that the world is not. The sun still comes up and goes down...the tide comes in and goes out...the rain comes and goes.
In most businesses that operate with great purpose there is a Visionary and another person who acts as an Implementer or what Dan Sullivan would call a Project Manager (not the same as a Construction Project Manager).
In most cases you are the Visionary which means in most cases you are on the hunt for an Implementer.
But where are they and who are they?
The role of the visionary is pretty straightforward; dream, pioneer, see, push and try your best to describe what you’ve concocted in words that the Implementer can understand.
The Implementer then takes that jumbled, fast, and often confusing collection of words, ideas, and concepts back to their workstation and goes to work in three major areas.
First, the Implementer translates all of your dreams and visions into an articulate form so others can understand it.
Next, the Implementer begins the hard work of distilling all of that vision down into a collection of systems, processes, and easy-to-digest implementables. Essentially that are “packaging” the vision into a brand that the Doers can understand and go to work IN.
Third, the Implementer embeds this new vision “package” into the rhythm of the Doer-team via team meetings, 12 week plans, dashboards, and reporting so progress can begin on the destination (aka - the vision).
Finally, the Implementer updates both the Visionary and the Doers of the progress towards the vision while the Implementer heads back out to pioneer the open country to see what other visions await in an effort to constantly exercise their mission.
So how do you afford an Implementer? You begin saving up NOW. Setup a separate bank account and title it “New Hire Account” (literally, have your bank title that account) and begin adding the salary you think you’ll have to pay an Implementer into that account every month.
If you don’t have enough each month, then you know you're not ready. But as you accrue it will help provide the confidence you need. In the meantime, be on the hunt for your Implementer.
They will be the ones dressed in the variegated colors of vision, the muted colors of process, and the pleasant colors of collaboration.
Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.
The first time I stepped foot onto Nigerian soil it was clear, “this was way different than home.”
We have been traveling in and out of Nigeria since 2006 and have developed some dear friends and partners during that time allowing us to work on important projects.
While in Nigeria the climate feels different, the food tastes different, the accents are different, the business climate is different...it’s just different.
Yet still when I look up in the evening against a dark sky what I see is exactly the same. The same stars and moon as I am used to back home.
When you coach business owners their offices look different, their teams look different, their products look different, their customers look different...they are all different.
So how do you systematically liberate business owners from chaos when everything is different?
I realized a few years back that the coaching playbook I would walk business owners through was not a set of strategies but instead a toolbox of principles. It is a toolbox that has not changed over hundreds and thousands of year.
This toolbox would have been useful to a silk trader in the Ancient Near East in 100 BC, a Middle Eastern tent-maker in 100 AD, an entrepreneurial printer in 1713 AD, and an ice cream shop owner in 2020 AD.
A toolbox of principles is differentiated from a set of strategies in regards to their change-ability. Strategies change all of the time (think of soap operas in the 1950’s vs. Facebook ads in 2020). Principles never change (think vision, mission, values, systems, and process).
The Business On Purpose Roadmap (aka Four Steps) is a system that I built while in the trench-like laboratory of coaching business owners at a pace of 800-1000 hours per year.
Each day I would sit with a heroic business owner and listen to the chaos they were submitting to. Themes tended to center around employees, lack of process, lack of clarity, and the unpredictability of people, schedule, or capital.
As we worked to situationally resolve each of their major and minor challenges a pattern began to emerge leading to the question, “what are the non-negotiable basics that every business owner must install whether they are selling art, ice cream, medical surgery, or roofing shingles?”
We were able to reduce what we saw into a construction metaphor that mapped out into three major layers.
The first layer holds the five foundational cornerstones of a business: vision, mission, unique core values, team meetings and huddles, and the hiring process.
The second layer holds around 13 ingredients which make up the “concrete slab” of a business (Dashboards, Bank Accounts, Job Roles, Org Chart, Process Roadmap, etc.)
Finally, the four major wall structures or the “systems” of the business; administration, operations, marketing, and sales.
Business owners must first commit to what’s behind the aesthetic, stop obsessing about marketing, product design, office interiors, and logos before obsessing about the foundational principles all of those strategies are sitting on top of.
To own a business is to commit to building a principled substructure that lays a predictable, stable foundation for every else that sits on top that the world sees with their eyes.
Without these layers, your business is a house of cards.
With the daily implementation of these layers your business becomes (over time) a force for sincere transformation...personal, professional, local, and global.
It’s been five years to the day since we launched Business On Purpose and the stories that are shared with us of genuine life-change are powerful...exciting...moving.
We press on with our laser-focused mission to liberate business owners from the chaos of working IN their business.
As you go, we hope that you will make time for the hard work of liberation so that others will benefit.
Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.