Welcome to this online tutorial for How to own your fitness...and not get discouraged! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here, so this year at BoP we’re spending a good chunk of time on you, the business owner or key leader, as a person and not just in a business role. We want to touch on every area of life...and that has to start with your health...and your fitness.
The first thing I will say is if you knew me in the past you would laugh that I might be teaching a tutorial on this. I led an active lifestyle, I loved all things outdoors and loved to move as long as it was attached to an activity.
But...going for a run? Nope, not unless I’m being chased. Working out? Couldn’t have thought of a worse way to spend an hour of my day. I wanted it to be fun and exciting and to see results instantly.
Friends of mine used to actually make fun of me as I would work out for about 6 weeks a year, get bored and decide it’s just not worth it. Rinse and repeat for the next 8-10 years until...I was married and had a kid...or had two kids.
All of a sudden, I realized I want to be around for years. I realized that my future health affects people around me. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t just affect me 25-30 years from now, no it affects me today. Of course, I want to be around for a long time. I want to know my grandkids and teach them to hunt and fish, but I can’t just stay motivated by something 25 years in the future. No, I need some positive reinforcement today.
Here’s what I’ve realized through this process of beginning to own my fitness...it’s lowered the stress levels I have running throughout the day. I get a good workout in the morning and I respond to life differently. The way I can play with my kids and chase them around with more energy. The clarity with which I move through the day and the sleep I get at night is all improved. I’m a better husband, dad, friend and employee because I’m getting moving and getting in really good shape.
I’ve heard it said that, “When you are healthy, you have 1,000 dreams, when you’re not healthy, you only have one...GET HEALTHY!”
And it’s so true!
So, what holds us back from taking ownership of our fitness?
The first thing I think we struggle to do is find the right motivation. For me, it was making sure I’m around for a long time for my wife and my kids. So, everytime I’m trying to decide if I’m going to wake up, I picture their life without me in the future, but it’s the motivation I need to get my tail out of bed and get in there at 6 am.
One of my favorite things Dave Ramsey asks his call in guests is, “Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Obviously he’s talking about finances, but is it any different with your fitness? Are you sick and tired of being overweight, stressed, having a lack of energy, or concerns about future health? Until that statement is true and you find the right motivation, you’ll never get into the gym or out on a run.
So what’s it for you? Is it your family? Is it being a better version of yourself today? Is it an improved day to day life with more energy and a healthier lifestyle? Find your motivation and hold onto it in a way that propels you to success.
The second thing we struggle to do is make an investment that actually costs us something. Part of my problem is I wanted to get in shape until it cost me something. And I would always stop short of that moment.
Think about it...why do you think 9 out of 10 machines in a Planet fitness are empty? It’s because 10 bucks a month isn’t enough cost to get you off your butt and into the gym! It’s just not. If you have the option of binging another show on Netflix or sleeping in or get to the gym, you never made a significant enough investment to force you to go.
Now, please, do not use this as a reason to buy a $2,000 Peloton if you don’t have the money, or hire a personal training. If you have the money for that great!
But I know, for me, I chose a gym that was not the cheapest, but the one that was a big enough investment that I force myself to take advantage of the investment and actually get something out of it. I’m too cheap to pay good money for a CrossFit membership and NOT use it!
So what’s the investment for you? I had a buddy one time who wanted to get in better shape and he couldn’t find the motivation. Finally, I looked at him and said if you really want to get in shape here’s what you do. Put $250 bucks in a checking account. Every time you skip a workout you pay me 20 bucks. He looked at me like I was crazy.
No, seriously, you value your money enough to not just want to give it away. Plus, every time you workout it will feel like you’re saving 20 bucks. So, we did it and the first time he missed, he was ticked! But, I held him to it and he venmo’d me 20 bucks.
Again, two weeks later, he missed. 20 more bucks! And he was hot about it! For the next month he never missed a workout and by that time had built the habit necessary to make it work and he was past the initial misery of starting.
So don’t do it alone and find someone to hold you accountable if that’s what it takes.
The last mistake most people make is focusing on the end instead of the process. Instead of improvement! Most people sit here and say...gah I need to lose 10 lbs. That’s the end goal, right? But what we need to do is build a process to accomplish that goal. The question we need to ask is, how can I make small changes in my life to accomplish the goal. Then, when the goal is accomplished there is a process in place to keep us on track, not some fad diet or workout plan meant to get results fast.
According to a US News Report, “95% of people fail to get the results they wanted when they started the diet.”
They go on further in the article to say that often times people don’t fail at diets, diets fail people. That’s a powerful thought. These fads have very little ability to deliver what you want. They’re too extreme and oftentimes not realistic for the long term. They’re for triage, not for preventative care and health. So build a system targeting the results you want and then trust the process.
Celebrate the wins along the way. Make it fun! Build habits that are life changing!
So what’s the system for you? Do you like reading? Buy a book that will help you get where you want to go or get off on the right foot. Do you like Podcasts? Find a highly recommended one that can help motivate and hold you accountable. Take the first step, don’t get concerned with finishing the race day 1!
For me, I didn’t want to go in and hit the weights 6-7 days a week, knowing I’d burn out and be miserable. No, my goal, and the system I built for myself, was to exercise more days in 2021 than I didn’t exercise. So, that means Monday and Tuesday I work out before my kids get up. I take Wednesday off. Thursdays I workout after work and Fridays during my lunch break. Then I enjoy the weekend, rest and have fun with my family and I’m back to it on Monday. It’s a system that can work for a long period! Not just to accomplish a quick goal.
So my last thing I’ll say is this. Don’t wait to make a resolution. Build a system that works NOW! It’s worth it. Find your motivation, make the investment needed to get you moving, and focus on the PROGRESS along the way
Your health and fitness cannot be ignored, so take ownership of it today!
How To Determine A Return On Marketing Investment
“Ugh.”
That was a direct quote from a client when I asked a simple question, “how is your marketing going?”
This post is as much an encouragement to marketing support service businesses as it is a call to action for business owners who are frustrated with trying to determine their return on marketing investment.
The barrier to entry is about the same for palm readers, business coaches (ahem), and marketing service providers...not very high.
Just about anybody can hang a shingle and call themselves a marketing agency. That loose availability does not mean there is no significant value to be found in a well-run service.
So how much should you spend as a marketing investment, and for goodness sake, how do you realize a return on your marketing investment?
First, let’s discuss how much to invest in the first place. Your planning and delivery of marketing in your business should be as intentional and well thought out as product development, product delivery, accounting, sales, and all other systems of the business.
Resources must be spent on marketing (the definition of marketing is not limited to advertising and promotion) with the same intentionality as resources spent on things like employee compensation, product and service delivery, and insurance coverage.
In conversation with a marketing agency owner, I asked, “how much should a small business invest into their marketing?” His response was, “it depends.”
He went to provide a range that I thought was very helpful.
Three percent of gross revenue (total income minus cost of goods sold) would be a low marketing spend, whereas twelve to thirteen percent of gross revenue would be an aggressive marketing spend.
The question then becomes, “what do we invest are marketing resources into?”
This is an important mind shift in understanding that marketing is not a cross-your-fingers, hope-for-the-best, haphazard shot in the dark.
Marketing is a system.
Just like the conglomeration of all of the bones in your body combine to form the skeletal system, and that system works in calculation and coordination, so all the conglomeration of promotional elements in your business work to form the marketing system.
I like to think of marketing in terms of channels or canals. You have the channel of social media, the channel of your website, the channel of live events, the channel of advertising, or the channel of say a podcast or YouTube.
Each channel provides a connection point for you to connect with your potential or actual client or customer.
The most overlooked, and yet perennially most effective form of marketing for just about every business on earth is quite old fashioned.
Word of mouth. Yes, word of mouth marketing is a channel, and is probably the most trafficked channel your business has.
There are three things you can do with your marketing system and the channels that combine to collectively share your mission with a targeted world.
First, map out the exact channels that should exist in your marketing system and turn a blind eye to the channels that are distractions.
All of your friends may be seeing great success with a certain social media platform. You might even hear a podcaster say, “you’ve got to be on Mashblot (a fictitious social media channel I just made up)!”
No, you don’t. You should invest in channels where your target client or customer is paying attention. If they are not looking at Mashblot, may be best to bypass and go to a channel that fits.
For some, you may not need to be on social media at all. We coach many contractors who are far better served to set up two lunches per week with vendors, general contractors, Architects, and Developers instead of trying to generate leads on Facebook, YouTube, or the platform du juor.
What channels are your clients paying attention to? Map it out.
Second, create a process to nurture and educate that channel. You can ask a simple question, “what is the end game?”
For your social media...what is the end game?
For your in person lunches...what is the end game?
For your website...what is the end game?
Our coaches spend a significant amount of time face to face with business owners. Over lunch or coffee, our end game is to coach! When a non-client reaches out to us to “learn more”, we try to spend less time talking about the features and benefits of our deliverables, and instead we actually coach them during that time.
It allows our client to get a feel for actual coaching and to evaluate their need for transformation.
That is our end game, coach well and allow the business owner to experience freedom directly.
For us, our website, social media channels, the My Business On Purpose podcast, and Live Events all exist to facilitate an in person or virtual meeting where we can coach in real life and understand the reality of a particular business owner.
Once you have your specific and finite channels, each channel must have a process all aimed towards an end game.
Thirdly, do the work and track.
Marketing is often characterized by a flowing group of artistic free-thinkers, and instead is both art and science. Certainly marketing requires ongoing creativity, that then gets packaged into a system for repetition.
Free thinking by design is not repetitious, and yet marketing demands consistency and repetition.
Business owners must know that in order to market well you must harness the ideation of free thinking, and then do the work.
For example, each one of our coaches writes one article per week between 500 and 800 words...every week.
Our coaches are not journalists, they are not career writers, they are business coaches. Yet the repetitious work of marketing requires content, and content requires writing.
Writing for our coaches is a time for each to reflect back on the questions and challenges their clients have faced the week prior and to simply answer those challenges. Just like I am doing in this post.
Once written we then turn that content into blog posts, LinkedIn articles, a podcast episode, a YouTube episode, and sometimes as a keynote at a live event. All that from one article.
When the channels are mapped, the processes are spelled out and the work is being produced, you can then do the important work of tracking your progress.
Each week we record metrics on a simple client spreadsheet where we track downloads, visitors, purchases, members, book sales, views, and other metrics that give us a picture of the progress within our marketing system.
Marketing has been billed of late more as the Vegas-style luck of inserting one dollar into a machine and getting two dollars out of the machine instead of the blending of art and science, free-thinking and repetition.
Marketing is a whole lot more than hoping to hit the jackpot on the simple pull of a lever, and it is worth you doing the work to uncover it.
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.
Why I Can't Focus And Get Clarity
My wife and I were at a gala recently...it was a socially distant, sparse crowd celebrating the culture-changing work of Martin Luther King Jr.
A business owner came up to me and said, “I’m reading your book and want you to know that I feel like you are writing directly to me.”
Curious, I asked, “what's in the book made you feel that way?”
Her response, “I’m in constant chaos.”
We regularly poll our clients and those who attend our in-person live events and online workshops and the number one piece of feedback we receive from business owners and key leaders is, “I cannot focus.”
Focus is an interesting word that carries with it the ideas of clarity, center, core, or bull’s eye.
We blame the current culture of screens, screams, and scram. The truth is we don’t have to scroll the devices (screens). We don’t have to turn on the news and noise (screams). We don’t have to do everything we have been invited to do (scram).
Hundreds of years ago the word focus was synonymous w/ a fireplace in a home... a hearth that was the center of the room where people gather.
I love a (controlled) fire. Honestly, one of my favorite places on earth may be wherever there is an outdoor fire that we can stare at. I’ve heard it called “nature’s tv”.
It’s true. I cannot stop staring, constantly stoking this dancing stage of contorted and vivid flames; never the same shape or rhythm and yet in constant motion.
Business owners tell us they feel like they are constantly trying to put out little fires that always exist. But what if those “little fires” are not threats to the business, but instead are lights along the path towards the vision that has been laid out.
What if those are fires not meant to be extinguished, but instead meant to light the path to the real destination.
We cannot focus because we do not want to put in the effort to focus. Please don’t be offended, but for most of us (save our first responders whose job is to intentionally respond to chaos), we react to chaos because it makes us feel needed; harrowed.
Robert Cardinal Sarah in his book The Power Of Silence says, “Without noise (chaos), man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent…noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself.”
We get to tell people when they ask how we’re doing, “I’ve just been so busy.”
Busy is not envied. Busy is not the goal.
Helpful, meaningful, transformational, impactful, useful….those are worthy goals.
Busy is... busy.
How do we stop succumbing to busy, loosen our addiction with the “feeling needed” that chaos brings and instead be content in who we have been made to be?
We need to introduce more silence into our day-to-day.
Sarah goes on to say, “Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving, and understanding the people around him. Clarity is born of silence.”
Clarity is born of silence.
Do you want clarity? You will need to make more time for silence that Sarah contends leads to a heart “that is able to hear, to listen, and to welcome.”
One you go silent, all the sudden you will begin to hear the things that truly matter instead of just the things that are busy.
Silence used to be a societal value, now noise has assumed the podium. You can take it back... and gain the clarity you are looking for.
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.
What does it mean to “Turn the Corner” as a business?
What are we aiming for when you come on as a BOP client? What’s the goal and how do we get there?
Happy Friday friends, I’m excited to talk through that today it’s Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose.
A few months ago I had a couple come in to talk about potentially taking them on as clients. They had great numbers. Great sales and revenue, a solid team, a thriving business, and satisfied clients. But they were exhausted from wearing all of the hats in their business and feeling like they could never take a break because 100 different balls would drop if they did.
So, I looked at the husband and asked, “So what happens if you keep going like this.” He looked at me with full sincerity and said. “I’ll die, no literally I’ll probably have a heart attack.”
And I don’t think that feeling is foreign to you if you’re a business owner. The constant pressure to keep things moving, to not let a single ball drop, and the pressure you feel to help provide for your employees and their families... it’s a HUGE burden.
But it doesn’t have to feel like you’re going to die. In fact, we prefer that it didn’t.
Fast forward almost 5 mos. That same couple is sitting in a coaching meeting with me last week and were absolutely beaming about a new hire. But not just any new hire. A new hire that they had prepared for and were able to offload so much extra work to. We’ve spent the past almost 5 mos developing a system for their new admin to thrive in, so that now that they made a great hire, this person is fully able to do the job she’s hired to do, EXACTLY the way they want it done!
They looked at me in our coaching time and said, “Thomas, we feel like we’ve turned the corner.” Obviously, I’m smiling as it’s just fun to be in the room and watching them so excited about where their business is headed, but it was more than that. Because they are above the chaos right now and could dream about where they want their business to go for the first time in years!
We got to talk about new neighborhoods they wanted to serve and new services they could offer. They can pour back into their team as they finally have the time to offer them. They can even focus on the little details that always slip through the cracks as they had the margin and the capacity to handle the little things again.
And THAT, is what we want for businesses. That’s “Turning the Corner” as a business owner. Being free to work ON your business and not simply in your business.
We went on to talk about a lot of things last week, but as I gave them a heavy load of things to jump on, he looked at me and laughed. He said, “I’m going back to the office to jump on this right now,” because his business was in a place where he was freed up to be the owner and work ON his business.
That’s freedom folks! That’s being liberated from chaos! And the fun thing for me to watch is now he’s a better husband, a better father, a better employer, and has 10x the life satisfaction he had because he’s not running around 24/7 in panic mode. He put in the hard work, and trust me it’s hard work, to build systems that work whether he’s the one doing them or not.
And HE WILL NEVER GO BACK!!!
Stories like this are why we do what we do. We want to be a part of your businesses story...your businesses liberation from chaos! To partner with you and provide perspective from thousands of hours of business coaching across an incredibly broad collection of industries to help you, as a business, turn the corner.
If we can help in any way or you just want to hear a bit more, please feel free to reach out on here, or check us at out mybusinessonpurpose.com. Subscribe to our podcast and youtube channel and begin the journey.
And know that we hope to do it alongside you!
Have a great weekend!
What’s your word for 2021?
How do we stay laser-focused and provide personal accountability moving forward in 2021? Well, we’ve got some great ways to help this morning…
Happy Monday friends! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
So, a few years ago, my brother in law and I were sitting around the pool over the 4th of July just talking about the year. He was asking me a few questions about my year and how I stay focused on the direction I want to head.
I was a little confused about what he meant, so I asked him to elaborate a bit on what he was asking.
“Well, my word for the year is ____ and it’s been a great way for me to stay focused on what I want for our family and for me as a man.”
I was kind of embarrassed because I didn’t have anything like that. Now, I’ll be the first to say that I like being a free spirit. Putting labels on things feels so constricting and feels like it sucks all of the spontaneity out of life. Just ask my wife about the battle it was to just get me to click that little box on Facebook about being “IN A RELATIONSHIP!”
I felt like it would take the fun out of life and lock me into a life of boredom.
BUT...what I’ve realized as I’ve begun this practice is it doesn’t lead to a life of boredom, but a life of freedom. Freedom to choose what really matters in life and to go chase it. Freedom to stay focused on what I really want to focus on and not get distracted by the junk that tends to get in the way!
So...the past few years I’ve started to take the first week of the year to think, pray, marinate on the word or phrase I want to use and chase after for the year. Some years I’ve knocked it out of the park and others I’ve looked up in June or July and realized I haven’t even thought about it since January. Having a baby or two will do that to you.
This year, my phrase for the year is Disciplined Peace. Disciplined Peace.
What does that mean?
Well, I felt like 2020 was marked by a lack of peace. The entire year felt like anxiety was constantly right below the surface. Chaos was forever in our face. For me, my discipline went out the window as I felt like I was putting out whatever fire was right in front of me and just trying to survive.
What I’ve seen at the start of 2021 though, is that the fires are still burning. They aren’t going away. So how can I have discipline in my faith, with my family, with my fitness, with my friendships (man a lot of F’s right there)...with having fun, with learning to rest, with my work. All of that! How can I be disciplined in the areas that matter, so that it frees me up and leads me to Peace.
At the end of the year, I want more peace in who I am, who I was created to be, where my family is headed, in my marriage and in living life.
So...Disciplined Peace. Knowing that if I’m disciplined in the things that matter, it will lead me to a life of peace.
Ok...let me turn it back on you. What’s your word for the year? What’s the phrase you want to hold onto to push you where you want to go this year? Don’t just make something up. Take a couple of hours or a few mornings this week to process it.
I’ve actually set aside time in my weekly calendar to ask the question, “Was I disciplined this week in a way that led me to peace?” I want that question before me all the time. So far, the answer has been yes! I’m excited! I’m motivated. And I’m making time for what truly matters.
How can you do the same? Please feel free to comment your word for the year. I’d love to hear what you’ve got and see how we can encourage each other over the next few months!
If you’d like to hear more and get more content, please make sure to bounce over to mybusinessonpurpose.com and subscribe to our YouTube channel and podcast. It’s gonna be a great year!
Have a great week!
Get Rid of Resolutions... Lean into habits!
Any idea what percentage of Resolutions are still intact after the month of January? Well, let’s get into it.
Happy Friday everyone, Thomas with Business on Purpose here.
Recent studies have shown that just under 30% of resolutions stick beyond the month of January! That’s wild!
More than 2 out of every 3 New Years Resolutions are given up on by the end of January. I laughed when I read this, but there’s even a day called “Quitter’s Day” where Scientists expect you to fail on your resolutions...and it’s January 19th!
So, make it past the 19th and you can successfully say you beat quitter’s day!
I’m kidding, but the obvious question stands to be asked...how do you follow through? How do you make it? How do you implement change?
Well, if you subscribe to our podcast, which you should, or if you’ve followed along on Facebook, which you need to be doing, you’ve heard us talk about Habits. Habits are what is left over after your resolutions have failed!
So... STOP MAKING RESOLUTIONS!!! Start making habits.
So how do we do that? How do we make sure to instill habits that will work for a long period of time instead of ones that are quickly over on “Quitter’s Day?”
Well, I’m going to give you a book to read, and 3 practical ways to begin implementing habits that last instead of resolutions that fade.
First, a book to add to your list. It’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s powerful, practical and a quick read. We don’t get any kickbacks from them, just want to help you on your way to accomplishing your Vision for 2021.
Ok, so the first thing I want to do is touch on a pitfall that keeps people from creating habits and combat that with a practical strategy.
The first Pitfall I see is people focusing on the finish line instead of the process. People spend all of this time thinking about the destination, the end result, the losing 20 lbs, the doubling your revenue. But you can’t lose 20 lbs if you can’t lose 2. You can’t double your revenue if you can’t grow sales this week.
It’s why we focus so hard on the 12 Week Year! It’s splitting your BIG goals into bite-sized chunks and doubling down on the process instead of the end result. Do you know what happens? You build daily habits for achieving those goals. You find ways to get it done today...instead of getting overwhelmed with getting it done for the year! Habits start with baby steps and it’s so easy to get overwhelmed and defeated by focusing on the end goal that’s so far away.
Number two...have no skin in the game! This is why 90% of the machines are sitting there empty at Planet Fitness. There’s not enough skin in the game. If you don’t go work out, what’s the big deal...it’s only $10 a month! It doesn’t sting, it doesn’t propel you to go and make good on your investment. Now, don’t go and throw money away! But there is something to taking a step that you FEEL. I spent years saying...I’ll get in shape. But not until I spent my hard-earned money did I start going 4-5 days a week. But the cost forced me to make a habit! And that’s what counts.
So, what are the investments you need to make that will force you to develop a habit? That will sting until you do something about it? Is it investing in a new employee? Is it spending money on an estimating software that you know you need? Again, don’t throw money away, but put enough skin in the game to force yourself to learn a new habit and get moving! Trust me, those motivating factors can get you going immediately.
The last thing I see all too often is people trying to do it alone. It sounds like common sense, but having someone to push you and hold you accountable is paramount to establishing habits that last. Who have you shared your resolutions with? Who have you told your Vision/your dreams with? Is someone checking up on your progress weekly?
That’s why we speak about our 12 week plans every single week in our team meetings! It’s accountability. There’s nowhere to hide! But if I know I’m going to be asked about my goals...I start building habits to get there.
So who do you need to invite in? Who will help you on your journey? Encourage you when you’re frustrated? Pick you up when you need it? Find that person or that group and do the same for them. We can’t do it alone! We weren’t designed to do it alone, but were created to do life in community. Don’t believe the lie that you can do it alone.
So get after it today...revisit those resolutions that you set for 2021 and figure out what habits you need to implement to reach them. Again, your habits are what’s left after your resolutions fall by the wayside. So use those habits to push them all forward and accomplish your Vision for 2021.
I promise you it will be worth it.
Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and YouTube channel for tons more content this year!
How To Make Time For Everything
Amidst the various equalities throughout our world; wealth, culture, educational opportunities, food security, etc., there lies one resource that will always be provided in equal measure.
Time.
Every week our clock resets with 168 units (hours) of time that systematically tick off each second for 604,800 consecutive beats.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Edward called me last week and asked simply, “why does Cynthia stay till 630 every night to get her work done? Every week, she is logging overtime in a role that has never needed over time.”
Business owners around the world are asking, “how do I make time for everything?”
Key leaders and employees ask the same, “how do we make time for everything?”
Before we suggest a helpful strategy, it is first crucial that we dive into why we can’t seem to make time for everything.
The answer lies somewhere within the not-so-forgotten path of silence.
During the year 2020 the American culture played its part in a pandemic that was plagued by rhythmless noise without the solid drumbeat of coordination, vision, and planning. Within that pandemic lodged a feverish height of social, political, and racial topsyterviness.
The beginning of 2021 did not relent as the Government spiraled in response to an insurrection within the Capital building fueled at the highest level of power.
The headline for each evening news program became a ping pong match of interchangeable breaking news revolving between COVID and protests.
Over time, although both were incredibly serious and important, the coverage became noise...not sound, not information...noise.
Interesting to look at the evolution of the word noise.
It is said to have meant “quarreling” in the Middle English voice.
More insightful, though is the Latin room that noise is birthed out of... nausea.
You know that green feeling you get when you are on a boat in the ocean and it just won’t stop pitching and yawing? That is what incessant noise does to us.
It nauseates the mind. It causes a seasickness of sorts for the brain that creates a fog where our only goal is to stop feeling sick.
I heard recently a couple say this of the importance of our physical health, “when you are healthy you have a thousand dreams, but when you are ill you have but one dream.”
Why can’t we make time for everything at work? Why can’t we make time for everything at home? Why can’t we make time for everything regarding our hobbies, interests, and relationships?
We have mind-nausea in response to the breaking news of everything.
We have only one next step...turn the noise off and embrace intentional silence.
In his reflective book The Power Of Silence, Robert Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without noise, man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent. With its festive appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself.”
Sarah goes on to write, “Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a morphine pump...But this noise is dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness. The awakening will necessarily be brutal.”
Wow, “noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself.”
Why can’t I make time for everything? Because we do not want to do the hard work of facing ourselves...facing our real work.
It is so much easier to bang out some emails in the name of work.
It is so much easier to watch a tutorial video in the name of work.
It is so much easier to do the easier thing in the name of work.
It is so much easier to listen to the latest, loudest voice asking us to do something that seemed important in the moment, just to find out it was another distraction along the neon-lit path of noise.
Noise to me is a lot like Vegas; a lot of lights, a lot of motion, a lot of activity, a lot of busy…
And a lot of regret.
All the while noise rages and the important work gets left undone.
Still, Blaise Pascal’s quote remains one of my favorites, “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot sit quietly in their own homes.”
Noise is hitting refresh on the news site. Noise is scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Noise is a life on auto-piloted repeat with no thought of stopping or interjecting. Noise is whatever is taking you from your real work.
In one of the great parenting moments in history, Manoah, a Jewish father at the time that Israel was led by a series of judges, asks God, “what is the mission of this child to be?”
In other words, what is the important work you have created this child to carry out?
That is my question for you today, what is the important work that you have been created to carry out?
It might be bookkeeping, teaching, sweeping, coordinating, calling, documenting, estimating, bidding, flying, diagnosing, or calming.
Noise will most certainly keep you from that important work and lock you into a nauseating diet of ick.
The question remains, how do you make time for everything?
You don’t.
Instead, make time for the things that matter...and not everything matters.
We train our heroic business owners and key leaders to build a simple ideal weekly schedule.
If you were to list out all of the important work that you need to tackle each week, what is it and how long would each task take?
Block it all out throughout a weekly calendar in what Cal Newport would call “deep work” blocks of time.
Share that weekly schedule with the people that matter most and ask their permission to help you live by it. Cut out the noise. Cut out the nausea. Get healthy and all of the sudden you will have a thousand dreams...instead of just one.
Greenlights
Well, happy new year friends! I hope you were able to relax over the holiday season and rest with those you hold dearest. I hope it was a great time of reflection on the past year and a time of eager anticipation for the year to come.
My holiday was spent wrestling with my kids, trying to run the sugar out of them at every turn, and being genuinely thankful for everything my life consists of. It’s far from perfect, but I’ve realized that a heart of gratitude is where I want to be no matter what life throws at me.
I spent a good bit of time over the break reading and reflecting. One of the best books I’ve gotten to absorb is called Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. If you haven’t picked it up yet, do yourself a favor and listen on audible. McConaughey reads it himself and adds so many nuances that you cannot get in the printed text. He’s an artist in every sense of the word. You will be shocked, you will laugh, you might cry. But you will also be left in awe at a man who has kept a journal for the past 40 years...from someone who has WRITTEN his life down and has taken the time to look back on his successes, his failures and the lessons learned along the way. It’s spectacular!
Now, a small/large disclaimer. This book is not for kids, it’s full of foul language and quite a few adult situations...please know that in advance and if that is not your thing, this may not be the read for you. But, if you can push through some of that, I was amazed at some of the things shared and left to process through what I’ve heard in a way that makes me a better man.
One of the most powerful vignettes he shared was from one of his first movies. He had spent years grinding and living off his talent. Years just winging it and letting his “true self” shine through. Until one day he showed up to set and 5 minutes before they called action, he looked at the script. Not one, not two, not 3, but 4 pages straight of a monologue...IN SPANISH...was sitting before him. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. He was exposed.
I was listening to this in my truck as I drove up to a family farm and I was moved by something he said. It was so powerful I played it again. As it rang in my ears I pulled the truck over to the side of the back country road and played it a third time so I could write it down. I didn’t want to miss it. Here’s what he said after his embarrassment.
“We have to prepare to have freedom...we have to do the work to then do the job. We have to prepare for the job so we can be free to do the work!”
That’s it! I can’t put it any better myself.
Preparation...for whatever 2021 throws at us. It won’t just happen. There is no shortcut to success, it’s brick by brick.
So what does that look like for you today? Is it taking the time to write down goals? Is it building a weekly schedule so you can focus on what matters? Is it recording a process or two and building systems that work? Maybe it’s all of the above and you need to set a time to just begin working?
All I know is EXACTLY what McConaughey said…”We have to prepare to have freedom!” The freedom we’re looking for is just on the other side of the preparation and the work. Don’t miss that and also don’t be intimidated by that. If I or BOP can help you with that, please reach out.
2021 is going to be a great year. There will be many twists, turns and unexpected surprises along the way. I don’t know about you, but nothing monumental happened at midnight on New Years Eve...much of life is the same.
But, if we can focus on what we can control…”Preparing for the job so you’re free to do the work,” then whatever is thrown at us this year we will take it in stride.
Know this year that we are for you and will do whatever we can do to help you succeed. As always, check out our website at mybusinessonpurpose.com, we’re offering one month free to our member site. There’s zero excuse to not give it a shot. Head over to mybusinessonpurpose.com/thomas28 if you want to. Subscribe to our podcast at the business on purpose podcast and check out our youtube channel for TONS of new content this year.
Let’s get it!
Have a great week.
Your Preparation informs your performance…
How prepared are you for the work ahead? Well... let’s find out. Hey, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose.
I was sitting in a men’s breakfast this morning listening to a good friend of mine share about his experience serving in the Marines. He’s been through things I’ve never dreamed of and we’re blessed to have men like him defending and serving our country. His name is Joe McNamara and he has some amazing stuff on leadership, so make sure you check him out.
He said 4 or 5 things that stuck with me...things like “It’s called Leadership, not Likership.” This thought of our job is to lead our teams, not necessarily be liked by them. He said, “Attitude is a weapon.” Your mindset is a weapon that you can use to combat any situation.
But the one that stuck out most to me was this…” There’s no such thing as rising to the challenge.” There is no such thing as rising to the challenge. Your performance is always an indicator of how well you prepared.
I thought about how true that is. I have seen countless talented people just wing it... expecting to “rise to the challenge,” and time after time their performance is less than it should be.
I was reading an article recently about a basketball player that has been playing some really good ball recently. His coach was bragging on him saying, “You guys have just now seen what we’ve been watching for months.” The reporter asked him to go a bit deeper and the coach elaborated. “He won’t leave the gym until he’s made 300 3 pointers after practice.”
That’s where his success is rooted. He doesn’t just wait until the game to try to show up. No, he knows that he will fall well below his performance ceiling if he does that. So, he spends hour after hour, with no fans watching, so that he knows he’s prepared when his moment arrives.
My friend speaking this morning, was talking about how proud of his men he was. As some really, REALLY intense stuff starts happening, they remained calm and performed, BECAUSE THEY WERE PREPARED! Because day after day, they trained in the morning, trained in the evening, tried it in light, in the dark when they were rested, when they were exhausted. Until they could perform at any point.
And when the moment was upon them and it really mattered, they were ready for it!
How prepared is your team? Is your sales process documented in a way that frees your sales guys up to perfect it and REALLY be prepared to capitalize. Is your Admin team ready to take on the constant barrage of phone calls with customer complaints that they get every day? Or do you just leave them along, hoping/praying that no one calls and complains about...Is your team trained to be able to handle the business without you if something were to happen to you? Trust me... it’s happened to normal people just like you.
My purpose in saying these things...is all of this preparation happens when you do it ON PURPOSE! It’s why the name of our business is My Business on Purpose. Because we know that to be successful it doesn’t just happen in crunch time. No, it’s day after day of doing things the right way, so you’re ready to capitalize on opportunities.
I hope that makes sense. And I hope you go connect with Joe McNamara. I really look up to him and the way he’s served all of us and the thoughts he has to share on leadership.
Have a great rest of your week!
Stop Making Resolutions And Start Making Habits
For some it’s a book, for others it’s a cigarette, and for others, it’s a phone call. Each evening throughout the world a sequence of nighttime habits are taking place in every home, apartment, flat, and dorm in the world.
For me the routine is to enjoy something sweet; a cookie, a small piece of pie, a handful of chocolate chips. Not just a quick bite, but instead a long sit down alongside an ice cold glass of milk. That’s my routine.
At the beginning of each new year, I consider a resolution to do something different each evening moving forward, maybe some fruit or a cup of hot tea. But I never do.
Why do I do that? Why do I do the same thing every night?
In fact, why do I repeat most things most days over and over again? The good things and the bad things?
It’s like they are on repeat.
What is going on?
In his powerful book The Power Of Habits, Charles Duhigg lays out a three-step “loop” that we all experience that creates the habits we repeat.
After I share this three-step loop from Duhigg, I’m then going to challenge you to ditch resolutions which have a history of not lasting, and instead replace a resolution with a habit.
What habit?
Email.
There. I said it.
Email.
A McKinsey analysis found the average worker spends 28% of their workweek “reading and answering e-mail.”
I can hear many of you right now, “but you don’t understand...my job revolves around email.” I hear you loud and clear.
Let’s OWN your email and do something different.
If there is no plan, or habit, email can come to a place where it dominates your day, dominates your mind, and dominates your ultimate agenda, and keeps you from transforming your business on to the purpose that you intended in the first place.
I heard someone say once, “email is someone else’s agenda for your day!”
What a horrible truth.
Let’s not just resolve to change it in our minds, but let’s actually change it in our habits.
Duhigg shares a powerful three-step loop that will help us.
The three steps: cue, routine, reward
The cue is the thing that provokes or sets off the actual habit...it’s what launches you into the very habit you do.
The routine is the actual behavior that you are looking to change. The routine is eating the chocolate before bed, drinking three cups of coffee before 7 am, or checking email obsessively throughout the day.
The reward is the feeling, emotion, or response you receive as you complete the routine. It’s that immediate gratification or satisfaction you feel, see, touch, or experience.
Duhigg makes the case that simply by replacing just one part of the three-step loop, you can transform your habits.
It is difficult, and in some cases impossible for us to control the cue. The cue might be a time of day, or something that happens naturally in our course of life (i.e. bedtime). You cannot change that...you will always have a bedtime.
The reward is tied to your psychology and physiology which of course can shift over time, but again, much harder to master.
Duhigg suggests that replacing the routine, the second of the three-step loop, will provide the key to changing your habits.
Let’s apply this to our email challenge.
With email, the cue may be “arriving to work” or “scrolling my phone” or “don’t know what task to do next”.
In fact, think through your last few days at work and answer this cue question, “why and when do you check your email?”
Is there any rhyme or reason?
Some habits are very methodical like eating sweets before bedtime but not as much throughout a normal day. Some habits are erratic like scrolling phones.
Simply being aware of what drives you to email, or coming to grips with the reality that maybe it is unrestrained, will be an important step in you owning email rather than email owning you.
Now that you know the cue, let’s now change up the routine.
For most, the cue that launches you into email is erratic, not scheduled. You keep it that way under the false truth of “but I have to be on email all day because that is how people communicate with me”.
No problem! Let people continue to communicate with you that way, but YOU change the routine.
Instead of being on email throughout the day on other people’s schedule, YOU SET THE SCHEDULE.
“Can I do this?”
YES!!!
YOU can set your own routine for email (or anything else for that matter).
For many business owners and key leaders we have seen a three-times-per-day routine work really well. They read and respond to email for 30 minutes in the morning, 60 minutes mid-day, and 30 minutes at the end of day. It is still around 20-25% of a typical workday, but it is blocked in focused time so you are not distracted from the real work.
For other business owners and key leaders, we have seen an every-other-hour-for-30-minutes strategy work.
For both of these strategies make sure to literally set a timer on your phone. This is part of making a new routine which will eventually make a new habit.
From now on, align your cues to a new routine, and you will receive an even better reward...the result of a new habit!
How To Write An Annual Letter Like Jeff Bezos
Sometimes we can get lost in the repetition of the process, a good thing, to the neglect of the humanity that can be found in our words. Your team wants to know what you are thinking. They want to know your ideas, your plans, your real-time thoughts, and your reflections; they want to know what you are seeing.
One of the most powerful, durable, and recordable ways to share your human thoughts as a leader is to write them out, personally addressed to your team.
Of course, you have doubt. Poet Sylvia Path helps us confront our doubt saying, “... By the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it... The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
When you write a letter to your company you have immediately created a recorded history. When your business is two, or ten, or forty years off into the future, those future team members and leaders will be installed with the founders' or previous owners' principles, ideas, innovations, and foundations.
When you do not write a letter to your company, it gets lost to time.
We are encouraging you and challenging you to write a letter to each member of your business every year and personally mail it to their home with their name on the top.
To help you, we are going to walk you through a simple template you can use to write your powerful annual letter.
The first exposure I had to a powerful annual letter is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in his 1997 Amazon Shareholder letter. I used it in my first ever coaching session with a client as we built out their Vision Story.
In his letter, Bezos works through some key elements that we can put into a simple template to help you think through your powerful letter.
First, Bezos begins his letter with key milestones that Amazon has achieved throughout the year. It is short and sweet and very powerful coming right out of the gate. No fluff, dive right in. You may say something like…
Dear Hannah,
We saw ACME, Co. grow beyond our projections by about 5% and YOU were a huge part of that. Our goal is to move beyond where we are at now and for next year become the second largest XYZ company in our county...
Next, Bezos then goes on to discuss multiple opportunities that are in front of them. Even if you are staring down the barrel of a recession, the opportunity is in front of you. What is it? What could your business do even if you don’t know the “how” quite yet? Writing this letter forces you to see an opportunity and then take the risk of sharing that opportunity.
Use wisdom, use discretion, and be bold. You can do all three together.
Third, Bezos begins sharing true stories that are aligned with their unique core values of “long term” and “obsess over customers”. With each of those stories, he is also diligent to layout bullet points of what the impact will be to Amazon from those stories, both the fun parts and the challenging parts.
For instance, an impact of “long term” is “When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.”
He’s honest and discrete. Bezos shares what he can share, but I’m sure doesn’t share everything.
Also, remember that Amazon is a publicly-traded company so they will tend to be more open about their financial numbers due to their public transparency. You may wish to not share those.
With whatever you write, just ask yourself, “how will this impact particular team members when they read it.”
The overall goal is to celebrate, encourage, inspire, motivate, show appropriate vulnerability, and vision cast through your annual letter. Use your discretion with how much information to share.
Next, Bezos shares some key metrics that make sense to the Amazon team. What will make sense to your team? Is it the number of increased contracts signed this year compared to last? Is it the user ratings that have increased this year over last? Your performance rating? Safety metrics?
What are those key metrics that matter to your team? This may be a great place to share them.
Fifth, Bezos devotes an entire section just to the Amazon team...to celebrating them. He is aspirational saying things like, “The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team.” Bezos is also sober mentioning, “It’s not easy to work here...but we’re building something important.”
Near the end of the letter, Bezos then goes into full on vision casting and goal setting mode. It is a sentence by sentence power punch to the soul of each team member as if to say, “I so value you that I’m going to stretch our horizon, so you will always have a place to RUN by doing your highest and best work.”
Where are you headed? What are the broad steps that it will take for you to get there? Remember the words to the Jewish Prophet Habakkuk, “write the vision down so those who read it may run!”
Finally, Bezos signs off with a two-sentence summary. This would be a great place to reinforce your mission statement saying something like, “This was a powerful year to (insert mission statement), and I am beyond grateful for you. Thank you for your work, your commitment, and for your devotion to (insert a core value here).”
To summarize, here are the eight elements that we have pulled from Jeff Bezos’ 1997 shareholder letter that will help you write a simple, powerful, and meaningful letter to your team.
| Personal | Write their name at the top of the letter and mail it to their home |
| Celebrate Milestones | Key milestones that the business team has achieved throughout the year |
| Opportunities Ahead | There are always opportunities...find them and share them |
| Value-Based Stories & Their Realities | True stories and a simple layout of the impact of those stories |
| Key Metrics | What are those key metrics that matter to your team? Highlight them. |
| Celebrate The Team | Highlighting all of the “insider” things that it means to be a team member. “We say all of the time…” |
| Vision-Cast and Goal-Set | Broad vision of the future of the business along with a few broad steps of what it will take to get there. |
| Sincere Summary | A simple, thoughtful summary of the letter and a shot of motivation to press on! |
That’s it. Proof your letter, send it to a team member along with a trusted advisor for review, read over it one or two more times, and then personal address each one and send it to their homes.
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.
How To Help Employees And Yourself With Money Problems
Through our work with business owners, we have seen some who have had access to significant money. Not all, but some.
A few weeks ago I was on the phone with a business owner who has what some would consider to be “life-changing” money...meaning, he wouldn’t have to work anymore if he didn’t want to, and he still has at least half of his life left to live statistically.
He has houses, boats, cars, toys, investments, commercial real estate, and access to a lot of other people who have the same.
We talk frequently, but this one particular conversation he ended with, “it’s ain’t what everybody thinks it is”.
When money becomes THE thing instead of just A thing, then EVERYthing changes.
Lynne Twist wrote a great book entitled The Soul Of Money. In her book, she writes of money, “Money alone does not guarantee a fulfilling life, and excessive amounts of money more often become an obstacle to it.”
“Money is the most universally motivating, mischievous, miraculous, maligned, and misunderstood part of contemporary life.”
“Money has only the power that we assign to it, and we have assigned it immense power.”
How do we know when money has become THE thing?
It was said this way of a rich person. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich person to enter into freedom.”
Why can money be so dangerous? Why is it warned against and yet lauded and cheered? What’s our obsession with money?
SO WHAT’S BEHIND OUR OBSESSION WITH MONEY?
It’s not the joy that money brings, it’s the fear that we might not have it.
Scarcity.
Twist calls scarcity a lie, and even goes on to define the lie as “the mindset that tells us we can never have enough and drives us to strive above all and against all for more and more.”
Scarcity is not only a lie, but it thrives under the umbrella of three myths…
Myth #1: There Is Not Enough To Go Around
Myth #2: More Is Better
Myth #3 That’s Just The Way It Is...
How can you help employees with money problems? Train them about the myths of money. Embrace the mindset of sufficiency and abundance, and live your own life in a way that shows that money is not an obsession, but a tool for generosity!
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.
How To Prepare Your Business Financially For 2021
Order cannot come out of disorder and yet we cross our fingers at the end of each year in hopes that next year will be better.
2020 punched us all in the mouth forcing us to play our cards and either set processes aligned with the vision, or plunge deeper into chaos and disorder.
For many of our clients, this has been a year quietly spying on their financial resources and being more aware of where it is all being allocated. This goes beyond simply pulling an Aging Report from Quickbooks or running a Profit and Loss Statement and staring at the Net Income number to determine success.
We had a client who started the year with a dangerously low amount of cash and a dangerously high amount of payables. We began tracking their cash accounts, receivables, and payables every single week on a single, simple spreadsheet.
No fancy apps or software, just a simple spreadsheet.
In August of 2020, after nearly running aground just 10 months prior, this owner exclaimed in a meeting, “I feel like we are printing money.”
What he was really saying was, “before we tracked it through a simple process we spent whenever we wanted to”. It’s as if untracked bank accounts have holes in them and money leaks out. Pay attention to the leaks and you’ll begin to plug them and it will soon feel like your business is growing at a pace you have not experienced before.
As the year is winding down, we have walked each of our heroic business owner clients through a two part “2021 Readiness Plan”.
Part One is the readiness of the owners’ vision, mission, values, systems, and structure. We go through and re-read the existing vision, mission, values and make updates and tweaks, or in some cases wholesale changes so there is massive clarity for the next steps.
We then take that vision and open up the organizational chart and master process roadmap to ensure that the “vehicle” or structure of the business is aligned with the ultimate destination for where the owner desires to go.
Part Two of the “2021 Readiness Plan” is to focus your attention on the simple financials of the business.
We ask each of our clients to subdivide their bank accounts so they can partition resources into various buckets; profit, taxes, owner’s compensation, operating expenses, and others where it makes sense.
Then we make sure that each business owner is simply documenting those cash accounts each week in a spreadsheet; we call it a dashboard. Add to that their receivables and payables each week and you have an ongoing snapshot throughout the year.
We then work through simple revenue projections and a matching budget that align with the vision worked out during Part One.
From there it is asking them to think through where they are at with estate planning (wills, trusts, power of attorney, etc.) and insurance.
Finally, we ask each owner to write an annual letter to celebrate and reflect back on the prior year, while also offering a vision for the upcoming year. These annual letters are encouraging and allow the team to mobilize around the words of the visionary. For the owners that have written annual letters each year, it has become a hallmark of their leadership and is an incredibly powerful history lesson for each business.
You may think, “but I don’t have time to do all of this!”
Order cannot come out of disorder, but you can choose to stop disorder and create a new environment of order for you, your team, your customers, and your family.
I challenge you to do it. Make the time, create order, and you will begin to be liberated from chaos!
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.
A work worth doing…
What do we mean when we say... A work worth doing? Well, we’re about to get into it. Happy Monday everyone, Thomas here with Business on Purpose.
I was talking with Scott, the founder of Business on Purpose the other day, and we were talking about how my transition has been over the past year. To be honest, there have been days that have been great, days that have been easy and other days that have been a struggle.
In Young Life, it was such a great organization to work for. There were tough days and boring days, but at the end of it all was a mission I was so excited about. I knew the why behind it all and that made the tough days 100% worth it.
Back to my conversation with Scott. I was explaining that to him and the words that came out of my mouth kind of surprised me. I don’t know if that ever happens to you, but I can be an external processor, so sometimes I’ll say things and think... yeah that’s it!
Scott had just talked about how he wants this to be MORE than a job and one of the things he hopes never comes out of my mouth is this thought of…” Oh, it’s just a job.”
As we were talking I assured him, “No, that’s one of the things I as excited about with this... is working with business owners and key leaders feel like a Work worth doing.”
And that’s the phrase that stuck with me. “A work worth doing!”
I wonder how you would describe your day to day. Is it just a job? Is it a clock in clock out job with no real direction behind it other than bringing home a paycheck? Now, hear me say this... supporting your family and working hard to do so IS a work worth doing.
But you come in contact with too many people, are training and encouraging and overseeing too many people to just clock in and clock out without any real idea that it could be so much more than just a job.
What if your mission was to positively impact every single person that works with you. If every single team member were to come into work knowing they were valued and invested in. It would change your day to day.
You spend ⅔ of your waking hours at work...why not make it more than just a job... why not make it a “Work worth doing?”
So what is a work worth doing?
Well, it’s like one of our clients putting their employees through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Helping them get out of debt and get freed to make wise choices with their finances.
It’s like another one of our clients letting their kids come in during pandemic schooling and creating a learning space for any of the kids who need to do school from home.
It’s like another one of our clients using his success to pay for a nice lunch for local teachers so they can feel appreciated in the midst of one of the hardest years on record to try to educate our kids!
Maybe it’s as simple as recognizing great work when it’s seen, and like another of our clients, using their team meeting to formally recognize an employee of the week (recognized by customers) and rewarding that team member with a gift card.
These are business owners who invest IN their team members and don’t just show up expecting them to impact their bottom line. A work worth doing means taking hold of all that you have been entrusted with and making sure the mission is to maximize it in whatever way that looks like.
I know, if you’re anything like me, that makes the hard days of work worth it. Having a mission that’s bigger than yourself and a “work worth doing” gets me excited to engage with business owners and their team leaders every single day.
If you need some more ideas of how to do this with your team. Don’t hesitate to check out our website and podcast for more free tips.
Mybusinessonpurpose.com and the business on purpose podcast
Have a great week everyone!
What's Your Standard?
Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! Thomas Joyner here with BOP. I want to talk about culture a bit today. How do you protect it, nurture it, and build it on purpose?
I was sitting in on a coaching meeting the other day and a business owner was talking about experiencing an employee fly off the handle in a business meeting. There was someone they worked with in the room and the employee dropped an f-bomb towards the other guy in a heated discussion.
Nothing was said to address the behavior at the moment, but the question was posed to our team... what do we do about that?
We asked a few more clarifying questions, but at the end of the day, we knew this couldn’t be tolerated. You can’t live that emotionally and expect others to continue to do business with you. That’s what is so important about culture.
A great quote came to mind that a friend had shared with me months back and it’s this…” What you allow in your presence, IS your standard.”
I’ll say that again, what you allow in your presence is your standard.
It’s that important! In essence, by saying nothing when the employee dropped an f-bomb, you’re not explicitly cheering them on, but you are subtly giving your approval of their behavior. You’re saying “I watched this happen and that is fine by me” when you stay silent.
Now we went back to the businesses Vision story and looked at their culture section. We asked the question if this is the culture you wrote down...the one you want others to see and experience, can this behavior be tolerated?
The answer was a quick and decisive, NO!
Ok, so let’s put a plan in to talk about this with your employee. Now, this was the first time they had ever blown up like this. So, it was a great time for the owner to check in and see if there was something else going on at home or something going on that day. It’s a PERFECT time to nurture the culture of your business with a personal touch.
Your employees aren’t just soulless, emotionless chess pieces for you to move around, but are real people with real lives!
They’ve got to be cared for and known.
So, what the business owner did was set up a meeting and lean in. Not take their hands off. Not condemn the person, but condemn the action as a way to care about them AND the culture of the business. Casting vision for how he will see him in the future and pushing him to realize that potential!
Said another way, how you allow your employees to act, treat one another, treat other businesses IS your culture. It’s the little memories that other businesses point towards to decide who they want to work with. It’s what’s said about your business at a casual lunch that either propels someone to call you or sends them to the next person on their contact list.
It has to be fought for!
So, you have to ask yourself. What am I allowing to be said, acted on, or accomplished in my presence or business that is slowly becoming the standard. Culture isn’t created or destroyed all at once. It’s a series of tiny corrections along the way to arrive at a destination. Use your Vision...use your mission statement...use your core values to put up barriers to keep yourself on track towards your culture goal.
It NEVER just happens…
Hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving...as always if you want to see more of what we do, head on over to mybusinessonpurpose.com and check us out! Follow our podcast, too, for some free coaching.
Take care!
A Season of Expectation
Why do we limit our vision and excitement to just the holidays? Well, let’s talk about that...it’s Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose I hope you’re having a great Thursday!
It is November 19th! Yep...you heard that right. November 19th! If your household is anything like mine, you’re fighting over 1 thing and 1 thing only currently...is it time to put up the Christmas Tree???
I’m dead serious. Every year, it never fails, we go back and forth about when we can start decorating for Christmas. Now, I’m a firm believer that no decorations can go up until after Thanksgiving. I know, I know...I’m a Scrooge at heart...jump in the comments and tell me how horrible I am.
But seriously, I put my foot down on decorating before thanksgiving. My wife has already told me her plans for decorating and where we’re going to put the tree, how excited she is about the stockings and what she gets to put in the stockings. When we’re going to hang the lights and are there any new decorations that we can grab on the cheap to make this Christmas the BEST EVER...well that is until Christmas 2021, at least.
I have to admit, though, her excitement is contagious. All the things she wants to do and the picture she paints is so vivid that it gets me excited, too!
It should be no different for the year 2021. Why do we limit our vision and our excitement and planning to holidays? It’s ridiculous! If excitement and energy are contagious around the Christmas season, don’t you think it would work the same way around the rest of the year?
Absolutely! And THAT is why we put together the financial barn.
So, what is the financial barn? Well, it’s a conversation between you and your spouse, or just you if you’re not married. It’s setting your sights on what you want to do with your finances in 2021. Now, we at BOP firmly believe we are stewards of the resources we’ve been blessed with, so this is not meant to be a shopping spree or a 2021 wish list. No, it’s a system built to look at all of the things you want to spend money on in the next year and then formulating the plan for how to reach that goal.
It starts with simply drawing a barn on a piece of paper and listing the things you spend money on in different rooms in the barn. Things like Living expenses, travel, hobbies, savings, retirement, kids college, charitable giving...subdivide it however you want! Here’s the beautiful thing. When you list out how much you will need to comfortably chase after those things, you set your sights on a goal and can put a plan in place for how to reach it.
So what are the things you get excited about? Is it taking a trip as a family? Is it maybe finally doing a home renovation or getting a car upgrade? Is it giving to a ministry above and beyond what you normally do and really making an impact with your finances? Is it setting aside a chunk for your kids college or maybe investing in something along the way? Whatever it is, write it down so you can know what your all in number needs to be.
Once you add up all the things you would need in 2021, you know what you need to earn to reach those goals…
Now I’ll break from here for a second to remind you that these goals need to be realistic. If your household income is currently $75k and you look at your all in number and it says you need 125k to reach it, you may need to trim some things...or trim a lot! But if your number is close, then it’s finding ways for your business to support you in the ways it needs to.
Here’s the best part about this. It puts a bullseye on the board, so if you do wildy better than you had hoped for financially, you can put a plan in place for what to do with it. It frees you to be wildly generous with your funds as you already hit the bullseye. It keeps you from hoarding your cash in a way that only benefits you as you see how incredibly blessed you have been.
That’s the reason behind all of this. Set up reasonable goals for each category and then allow that to push you to be generous in every area of your life.
At the end of all this, the message is clear. Life is not about stockpiling assets. It’s just not. There will always be another room to fill in our barn or another toy to buy. Life is found in stewarding the things you have and earn to make the lives of those around you that much better.
The FInancial Barn! Do it...do it with your spouse. Feel free to reach back out and tell us how that conversation goes! We’d love to hear about it.
As always, you can check out more about this at mybusinessonpurpose.com
Have a great week!
Chief Executive Officer or Chief Everything Officer? What kind of CEO are you?
I can’t get enough of sports. My wife rolls her eyes at me consistently as she wants to watch a new show together, but it’s playoffs for baseball, basketball, football...whatever! The scheduling of major sporting events is masterful as it’s nearly year round. I can’t help it...I LOVE IT!
As I’ve watched sports over the years, there’s one phrase that’s consistently spoken about young players. He’s just trying to do too much. I was watching a game with Young Quarterback, Daniel Jones of the New York Giants playing. Over and over he would make amazing plays, but then he would set his team back when he, “Tried to do too much.”
Announcers use this term so much, because for young athletes this paralyzes their teams. They realize that you can have all the talent in the world, and STILL not be able to do it all.
I don’t think it’s any different in the business world. In fact, it’s no different at all!
I was reading a great article the other day about how small business has changed over the past 25 years. It spoke of this evolution of the business owner and how they have moved from the CEO meaning the Chief Executive Officer...to CEO as Chief Everything Officer. It’s a subtle change, but one that dictates the entire existence of your business.
Just like in sports, young business owners are so particular that they have to have their hand in every piece of the business instead of training and trusting their employees to get the job done. Where does it lead? To underperformance every single time!
Why? Because you can’t do it all and scale your business. You have to trust people to do the job you hired them to do. And if you can’t, why pay them to do a job in the first place? It’s robbing you of profitability if you’re both trying to do the job.
So, where does this lead us?
If you look up the definition of executive in the dictionary it has two definitions I love…
You have to do both of these as the executive. You have to become the manager of the organization and put plans and actions into effect. You don’t have to do it all yourself, but you have to find a way to effectively train your team to do it the way you would do it, so you can free yourself up to do the things ONLY YOU can do.
It’s doable...in fact, we’re coaching businesses every day that are doing just this. Building the systems and processes in their business to free their employees up to do the job they were hired to do.
Then, and only then, can you go from the Chief Everything Officer who “tries to do too much,” to the CEO that your business needs.
Have a great week everyone!
What Are Soft Skills And Why Are They Important
Democratic cultures endure a multi-year barrage of political campaign noise that has left many citizens dazed and depleted and yet appreciative that options are available.
It would be a shame if the only product of the election cycle was a defined winner and loser (although we never want to take that for granted).
There are also valuable principles to learn from the political process that we should be investing into our business.
We can watch how citizens are impacted by political candidates and draw insight and empathy into what members of your business team might be seeing as they look at you and your own leadership.
That is the core of what political elections are about; leadership.
Political positions are less about task-completion and are far more about people-motivation.
What can we take away from the election cycle that will give us special insight into our business?
There are three lenses by which we view a politician; policy, politic, and personal.
Policy is the lense of the specific things they will hope to do. Understanding policy leads to agreement or disagreement with the method.
Politic is how they will communicate the things they will do. Watching politic helps us determine who we like or do not like.
Personal refers to the character base from which each person operates. Knowing the personal helps us determine who we trust and don’t trust.
Three lenses, the lens of agreement, the lens of likeability, and the lens of trust. I can assure that candidates are trained in great repetition on the first two lenses of policy and politic. It is not always as evident if they put as much training into the personal.
Those same three lenses are present and necessary in your business.
In business, instead of policy, politic, and personal, we will suggest three renamed lenses with similar function.
First, every business owner must view their business, their team, and themselves through the lens of business awareness.
Being business aware is knowing and investing into the systems, process, and purpose every business relies on as fuel to push towards the ultimate destination.
If you are a trustworthy person, a great presenter, but are clueless about your vision or your process, then the business will break down.
Second, every business owner must invest in social and emotional awareness (politic). Many would call these “soft skills”. It is the ability to present things in a way that will be most effectively digested for implementation.
If you are hyper aware of your vision and systems, and have great character but struggle to communicate, then your message will never be heard and your team will lack motivation.
Finally, every business owner must invest in their own (and their team’s) personal awareness. Spending time working towards personal discipline and health in your family, faith, finances, fitness, friends, and fun!
You may have a clear head on your vision, systems, and a world-class communicator...but if you lack character, everything else will eventually fall apart.
The hard work of a business owner is two-fold…
Balance is not the goal because balance is impossible. On the other hand, a consistent rhythm of investing in the three lenses of business is a worthy pursuit.
I remember my first Big Boy job... I was interning at my uncle’s Marketing Agency in Connecticut. I spent all this time studying marketing in college and I figured, “Ok, if this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I might as well go test it out to make sure for a summer!”
So off I went on my 14-hour drive to see if I could cut it in the business world. Let me tell you right now... I was woefully unprepared!!!
I remember sitting in staff meetings with no note pad or way of remembering all the things I had to do for the week. Id scribble something on a post-it note here or there and then go back to try to figure out what I was doing. I’d forego recording future meetings and due dates on any type of calendar because it was “too restrictive” and thought I honestly had it.
And here’s the thing...I did have it... for a couple of weeks. But as the work started to pile up and the graveyard of dropped spinning plates started to pile up around me I realized my “system” or lack thereof wasn’t working. I needed something to keep me on track and as time started to slip away I realized I needed structure around me to help me thrive.
What I’ve realized in coaching 10-12 businesses is that I’m not the only one living this way. Most business owners simply respond to the threat in front of them all day every day. Their schedule is nothing more than going from one fire to the next until it’s time to go home for dinner at night.
But that’s NOT how you build a successful business. You might be able to make it work for a few weeks, months, maybe even a year! But what I’m seeing lived out in front of me is that business owners and key leaders who tell their week what it’s going to look like, are the ones who actually build something they’re proud of . The ones who sit down and plan it all out instead of getting distracted by the problems at hand.
Let me tell you about the BOP solution to this...we call it...drumroll please, the “Master weekly schedule!” Boom...now if that name doesn’t get you excited I don’t know what will! I’m kidding, but seriously it is what you need. All of you. Why? Because it keeps you on track to accomplish the things you want to accomplish instead of just being blown about by the winds of chaos every single day.
So what does it look like? Well, here’s a picture of my Weekly Schedule. Blocks of 30 min for the entire week. Split up into specific tasks each week for admin, sales, marketing and coaching. I’ve got time for sales lunches and recording these videos, I have time built in for professional development and team meetings. It’s all here. I don’t let chaos pull me from this for a second! But it keeps me locked in on the things I need to be focused on to grow my business.
So what are the things that pull you off track? Is it sitting on a job site for too long? You look up and it’s 2 o clock and you haven’t finished your estimates or answered emails or called back your voicemails? Well, then you need to use the weekly schedule to tell yourself how long you want to be on the job! As soon as that time is up, you need to be moving again!
E-mail! Gah you’ll notice on my weekly schedule I have 2, 30 minute blocks for email. I took it off my phone, so I don’t even know if I have an email until I look back at it during my email block in the afternoon. Now here, some of you are thinking I’m crazy...but here’s what I’ve found with email. The more you answer it, the more people want you to answer it. But half the time when it’s been 2 hours without me answering, I see that people are smart and they answer their own questions half the time!
Same thing with talking to your team. What if you set up a 30 min check-in time with your admin or your Superintendent or your Project manager. If you looked at them and told them, we will touch base every afternoon at 1 pm. That’s your slot to ask me all the questions you need to ask. Because what happens all day? You’re locked in working and the phone rings, It takes you 5-10 min to answer the phone call, then another 5-10 min to lock back in on your task...but then bang another call comes in and you never finish what you were doing!
STOP it!!! Set a time for your crew to check in with you...where you can be fully present with them and then let them do their job. If you’re thinking that CAN’T happen, then you need to train them better to do their job so you can do yours of actually running the business.
This stuff is not rocket science, but it can give your business the jet fuel it needs to take off and get where you want it to go! I know, because I’ve built this out with business owners who are sick and tired of living in chaos! Now, it’s work to implement it. It doesn’t just happen! Chaos doesn’t like to leave you alone for long. But when you build the system to deal with it and put it in it’s proper place...you can have the freedom to work ON you business!
That’s what it takes. The Master Weekly Schedule...jump on it and let me know if I can help.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Do you own MORE than “Just a business?”
We were working on mission statements with several clients recently and the question came up, “why not just come up with a catchy slogan that we use as our mission statement?” That’s what most places do, right? Find some group of words or a phrase that is catchy, repeatable, and gets stuck in the head of whoever hears it? That’s as far as most mission statements go.
Mission statements need to be so much more than that... why? Because it’s what fuels you every single day. It’s what keeps you moving on the days you have to pull yourself out of bed. It’s the “Why” behind everything you do. It’s so much more than a catchy slogan that gives your sales some juice.
At the end of the day, so many people think the same thing about their business. Just like they say, it’s just a mission statement, they say…” It’s just a business!” It’s just a way to bring home a paycheck and finance my lifestyle.
But what if your business could be more than that? What if there was an amazing “Why” behind it that led to something much much greater? Well, then that would touch all areas of your life and your community. It would lead to a sense of purpose that not only impacts you, but every single one of your employees and their families. Which is Exactly WHAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO DO!
How do I know? Because I get a front-row seat to it with our heroic business owners every day. Once they realize their why, it turns a simple landscaping company into one that teaches their employees about finances enough to tell them they are getting ripped off by cashing their checks at a local grocery store. They worked with them to actually open bank accounts and are saving them hundreds of dollars a year (per employee), by taking the time to teach.
I’ve gotten to sit front row as I see local nurseries pay to put their employees through financial peace university and help them get driver’s licenses to help get them out of debt and gain some ground financially in life! I’ve watched a client of ours at Pay Proudly take a portion of every sale and give it away to non-profits that desperately need the money.
I’ve seen mortgage companies take a portion of their profits and invest in local schools and teachers to let them know they are valued and important in the eyes of the local community. I’ve watched as employees grab hold of the vision and see a destination that they can achieve and then set out to go and do it! To grow and not just settle into a job.
You see it’s amazing when business owners see their work not just as a business, but as a way to invest in people and a community. That’s the why you have to capture. Something that when someone looks at you and hears your mission would want to ask, “Ok, but how do you do that.” And you get to tell them what you do.
That’s a “Work worth doing.” That’s something that will keep you excited for years to come. That’s what our world needs more of. Is people with a work worth doing, willing to view their work as more than just a business, but an investment into everyone they come into contact with.
I hope you can grab ahold of that and figure out your why in your day to day...
How To Find A Professional Mentor
On my first trip to Nigeria back in 2006 I met a man who was unpretentious, slow, deliberate, and available.
Abraham Dada, known simply as Pa Dada, would eventually become for me a standard-bearer of life and leadership.
He was a sage. He was a man who lived out the challenging invitation to have “eyes to see, and ears to hear”.
Imagine if Yoda were a Nigerian man. That’s Pa Dada.
His words were few, each one cutting consciously like a razor-sharp blade, causing little pain while exposing the inside.
Mr. Dada was never the loudest person in the room, but his presence alive, known, and decisions always traveled through his unspoken filter. His life was spent serving... at times with words and actions, at other times with simple presence.
Each time I visited Mr. Dada at his unpretentious home in Egbe, Kogi State, he would be sitting thoughtfully in a blue plastic yard chair on the aft side of a small plastic table. Rarely was he wearing something other than a simple linen set of shirt and trousers. He would usually have his crooked reading glasses on while reading or writing.
Within five minutes of arrival, we would always be welcomed with a warm bitter lemon and a soft “e’kaabo” and “e’dupe”.
If I was visiting without Ashley and the kids, Mr. Dada would kindly ask, “How is Mommy?”, and of the kids, “How are my little friends?”
One of my favorite images that Ashley captured was Mr. Dada thumbing through my book. The teacher humbly offering a generous moment for the student.
In 2014 and 2015 Mr. Dada and I spoke often by phone when I was not in town due to some strain that was taking place within an initiative for which both he and I were committed to. I remained in a state of foggy confusion and did not hesitate to verbalize bewilderment, and I believe Mr. Dada did as well, although he never spoke a crossword or thought to any person or scenario.
It was a real-life, in the moment lesson in “considering others better than yourself.” It was a moment of transparent grace.
On Wednesday night October 28th my phone rang with Mr. Dada’s number. Answering, his daughter called and said simply, “Pa Dada passed in the midnight and he wanted me to let you know.”
“He wanted to let me know.”
Of all the conversations I remember, these may very well be the words that stick.
“He wanted to let me know.”
Two significant mentors have passed on from this life in the past decade. The first is the man who invited me to look through the telescope of the nations and see God’s creation beyond my own borders. Dr. Mike Barnett summoned me to embrace the nations.
Mr. Dada invited me to enjoy the wisdom and grace God has placed among the nations and to do it slowly and methodically.
With Mr. Dada, I did not sign up for a global mentor program, and I did not ask that he formally “mentor” me. I just went with a blurry, poorly planned vision to “work in Nigeria” and over time a friendship developed that provided me with a 5 foot 2-inch man in his nineties who just “wanted to let me know” with limited words and maximum presence.
What is that place, or those people, or that thing that you have an unreasonable, blurry desire for? What if you just set up lunch or booked a ticket and just went regularly so you too can look up fourteen years later and realize that you too found a true gift whose ambition was to “let me know”?
How do you find a professional mentor?
Many times is by not signing up for the professional mentoring program and instead of being bold, proactive, courageous, and a bit unreasonable to make friends with some unlikely people who are older and more experienced than you.
Who do you need to go see today? I wish I could go see my friend and just sit for a while.
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 Five Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer For Their Employees...And Themselves
My son and I were on an 18-foot center console boat on the edge of the Port Royal Sound in the lowcountry of South Carolina when all of a sudden a thunderous squall line formed just to our west and bared down on us.
We had a decision, sit in the middle of the torrential rain and lightning, or make a run for it.
We were about 20 minutes from the boat landing. Within 2 minutes of going full throttle on our Mercury 150, we were surrounded on all sides by the summer squall.
Hindsight being more sober than the present reality, we continued throttle down at 30 knots with what seemed like a 10-foot visibility. Equipped with a simple Navionics boating app, I kept my head down, focused on the GPS map while my teenage co-captain had his head up and eyes peeled so he could call for a last-second “swerve” maneuver if needed.
The storm was relentless.
It felt like we were riding blind for 30 minutes, but was probably more like 8 or 10...it was confusing, chaotic, exhilarating, and probably not wise looking back.
Amidst the uncertainty of that moment though, here are some truths that we could count on…
We were headed towards a defined destination; the Lemon Island boat launch.
We knew what route we were taking; the Chechessee River.
We knew what vehicle we were committed to; an 18 foot Henry O center console.
We knew what kind of engine we had to work with; a Mercury 150 horsepower two-stroke.
We knew exactly WHY we were headed in that direction; to stay alive and make it back home to tell the story!
Owning a business is peppered with days just like that. The surprise squalls of unexpected tax bills, frustrated customers, misaligned employee expectations, and a lack of perfect efficiency.
To help you navigate through the chaos of business ownership and the life of an entrepreneur, here are five questions every entrepreneur must answer for their employees...and themselves.
First, where are we going?
Fortunately, there has been a surge of good teaching, training, and resources around building a powerful vision story.
Your Vision is a detailed snapshot of the future of your vision. Not a pithy statement, and not a paragraph of haiku. Your vision story should be detailed, multiple pages, and meaty with details.
Second, how are we getting to the vision?
It’s silly to imagine that you will hit the road without aiming for a destination. Every road trip is a series of following turn by turn directions on specific streets while passing by many others.
Your unique core values are nothing more than intentional street signs along the route to your destination.
For most, you will avoid turning right on Apathy Lane, or left on Muddy Expectations Blvd. Instead, you will use Intentional Relationships Street or Relentless Learning Circle. Know your unique core values and you’ll know the streets to take towards your destination.
The third question every entrepreneur must answer is, what does the automobile look like that we will be driving towards the vision?
When a new team member comes into the business, they need to know where their role fits within the larger whole. The good ol’ fashioned Org Chart is a visual representation of what the vehicle of your business looks like so they know what they are riding in.
Fourth, what are the specifications of the engine used to motor you to your destination?
One of the most powerful tools in your business is the Master Process Roadmap. Imagine this, your entire business on one sheet of digital paper.
Broken down into four systems - Admin, Ops, Sales, and Marketing - the Master Process Roadmap spells out all of the processes needed to send your business vehicle motoring down the road to your destination.
The final question every entrepreneur must answer for their employees and themselves is “why?”
Why are we going to that destination?
What is the emotion...the magnet...the draw that is pulling us to that particular destination?
WHY ARE YOU GOING THAT WAY?
Whatever your answer is, that is your mission.
Five questions that every entrepreneur must spend time on…
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.
