Remember the days where windows showed up like clockwork in 3 days? Chemical arrived the next day? Subcontractors called you back? Schedules held true? Material budgeting was straightforward? Clients had empathy, patience, and treated you as the expert?
Remember the days when your biggest headache was, “how do we find new business?”
The British playwright Michael McMillan said, “You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.”
As you come into this final 12-Week Plan LIVE event of 2022…this final opportunity to think deeply through the new challenges you will confront, the new mountains you will climb, the new opportunities you will pursue… you have a choice.
Let me rephrase, you have to make a choice.
Will you gripe, moan and mope about those mean clients, those non-committal subs or vendors, those irritating shipping delays, or those increased prices?
Or will you cut the strings of excuses, limitations, and barriers, and be free from the sludge and the mud of what Zig Ziglar calls “stinkin’ thinkin’”.
We are in a cesspool of negativity right now. I hate my job, I hate my town, I hate the people I work with, I hate the government, this head coach, that team, this policy, that country and on and on. It reminds me of George Strait’s song “I hate everything”.
We are not called to falter and we are not called to fade…we have been called and built to FLOURISH! To flourish, we must intentionally control our mindset.
And in order to flourish in 2023 we are going to have to rid ourselves of stinkin’ thinkin’ and embrace a new attitude of Fortitude: the ability to display courage in pain, to go into new opportunities with a mindset of strength, believing we CAN do something rather than swimming in the cesspool of “can’t”.
Mrs. Jones is being an email bully? We CAN learn to speak to her with truth and thoughtfulness.
Your partner, sub, or vendor is not pulling their weight? We CAN influence and bring value to their operation in a way that serves everyone around.
Tough conversation needs to be had with team members? We CAN plan conversation in an appropriate way that brings value to everyone…a Win/Win mindset.
Hard-pressed to find new team members? We CAN build a thoughtful, powerful, spectacular recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process that WOW’s recruits and supplies them with a substantive opportunity.
We CAN do those things…but not with our current attitudes.
Never in the history of the American workforce have four separate generations worked so closely and communicated so seamlessly than what is happening right now.
You have Boomers who are remaining in the workforce longer, and Gen Z’ers who are entering into higher-level roles earlier. The Boomers, X’ers, Millennials, and Z’ers are interacting everyday.
It’s like a cocktail of Dockers pleats, meets peglegs, meets skinny pants, and now everyone is confused.
You can throw your hands up and protect your generational brand…OR you can make a decision to ignore the stinkin’ thinkin’ and embrace the generational diversity, and the value that comes with.
The values of new generations are in the questions they ask of our institutions, our methods, our systems, our policies, our norms and nuances.
The value of older generations are in the standards they hold for their work product.
There is exponential value in merging those two schools of thought.
Stinkin’ Thinkin’ creeps in and will corrupt all of it so that very little of the cross-generational value is pulled out and instead we spend our days griping, moaning, and moping.
We grumble about the Karen’s, and take pot shots at the bro’s.
There is a better way! A more HUMAN way.
We live in a world where some, seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time
Each of us comes into this room with convictions, norms, and beliefs.
I challenge you to question your convictions. If your convictions are too weak to withstand questioning…then your convictions are not foundations by which you have confidence to stand.
Let’s build and reinforce a new belief, a new conviction…a belief that hard things CAN be done, rocky decisions CAN be navigated, and they will lead to powerful outcomes that will bring the satisfaction we desire.
The generational realities in our modern workplace will challenge us and will be a massive growth opportunity for all of us to retire our stinkin’ thinkin’.
What are some of the ingredients for this needed mindset?
Allow yourself the freedom to have your mind challenged. Some of my greatest learning as a man, living in the south, who identifies as an apprentice and student of Jesus…some of my greatest learning has come from friends outside of that tribe.
As soon as we wrapped up the September Live Event, our team sat down to a delicious taco lunch at the La Poblanita food truck and we knew exactly what our agenda was going to be for this entire morning.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive for the workshops we had, and yet still some wanted more deep dive time for workshops. We are moving from 4 workshops down to three, and you as a business team are going to walk out of here with a map…a plan on how to recruit, hire, and onboard new team members that takes into account the generational realities, and also the process you are inviting them into.
Thomas will lead our first workshop: Creating The Spectacle: Employees Want To SEE Something Special
Patrice will lead our second workshop: Stirring In The Substance: Backing Up The Spectacle With Your Process
I will lead our third workshop: Bellied Up For The Long Haul: Building an “Unleavable” Experience
During each workshop, we will have some opening thoughts, and then we will guide you through a two-part discussion with your own team.
Part One will be devoted to generating as many ideas as possible.
Part Two will be to the mapping and implementation of the best of those ideas.
Some of you already have existing elements of one or all three of the pieces: recruiting, hiring, and/or onboarding.
This is to go back to the garage and take time to refresh your process, and ask yourself, “what if we changed this up to meet new demands?”
Also, allow your minds to go places that are uncomfortable and a bit squirrely. This is a safe place to dream, to wonder, to invent, and to create. Some of you will be uncomfortable there…get over it…come into the dreams world if only for a few minutes.
Let’s get started.
We are 6 weeks from the end of the year. What does your team need to hear from you as you finish it out? Well, let’s talk about that today.
Happy Monday y’all, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
We spent hours last week running what we call Prep Week with every one of our clients. Making sure they were focused on the things that matter heading into 2023!
We got all kinds of feedback, from “Yes, we needed that.” to “It’s so crazy, it’s already time for these discussions,” to even “Man, I’m really excited for next year!” And all of those statements are true. What we’ve realized is if we don’t plan intentional time in the year for some of these conversations, they sneak up on us and they get rushed or worse, never happen.
The same can be said for your Annual letter. Many times, we realize we’re two weeks out from the end of the year, so we rush it and lose much of its impact. We write down a few thoughts that have little meaning, print it out, sign our name at the bottom and send it out.
But that’s such a miss! It falls far, far short of what your Annual letter could be. So, I want to walk you through 3 reasons to write a killer year-end or annual letter to your team and maybe offer a few tips for how to make it have an impact.
It’s simple. Your team AND YOU work too hard to not know whether the year was a success or not. They need to hear what you thought of the year and hear it in your voice! Not some quick, thrown together thing, but a well thought out analysis of how much we accomplished this year.
It’s powerful when you read it aloud to them and can celebrate together. If there’s one thing I think we don’t do enough of, it’s collective celebration. Pausing to focus on the gain we have made and all the hard work that was put in to that. Thanking them for all they did to accomplish it and maybe even acknowledging the major hurdles y’all had to overcome. This helps build a team that craves growth because they know it will be celebrated and not just accepted.
Which brings me to my second reason why:
2. Your team needs to know you see the hard work they put in
Use this as an excuse to brag on each person individually. Have 17 people on your team? Tough! That's why you’re starting this now. Take a sentence or two to acknowledge each of their individual efforts, brag on them a bit, and make sure you are specific. They work hard all year long, now is the time you get to show them that you saw them. That you saw their contribution and are grateful for it. If you have 5 people, spend a paragraph on them!
This is such a crucial part of building a culture of recognition and accountability. Because if people are never going to get recognized, I don’t care how motivated they start out, they will naturally wane in enthusiasm if it’s never recognized. But what better way to encourage your team at the end of the year than to brag on them in front of everyone?
And if you have that one employee that this is REALLY tough to find something to brag on them about. Do it anyway. They still deserve it. Take your time and be genuine and show encouragement. I promise it will build loyalty and a positive culture.
3. It becomes an amazing Chronicle of your business journey
It’s so fun going back and reading annual letters from years past. You can tell where you’ve been and it’s so fun to see the dreams you had, the dreams you accomplished, the battles you were fighting and are no longer fighting, the growth, and the journey. It’s amazing to see it and you get to be the one who shares it with your team! Don’t skip it.
So, if you’re one who wants to write a quick email to the team thanking them for the year I would REALLY push back. Spend an hour, shoot or more, writing this thing and making it really impactful for your business. Then let it sit for a week, come back and read it and see if it’s missing anything.
Then print it out, write a small handwritten piece to each employee and then read it aloud at a team meeting or Christmas party. This is a powerful tool if you will take the time to use it and take the time to put some thought into it.
If you need a few examples, please reach out! I’d be happy to send you some examples.
And the last thing I’ll say is this. If you’re a podcast lurker…just listens and knows you need to take action on some of this or begin working with a coach, now is the time. Nothing changed between last Thanksgiving and this one, and unfortunately, you know it! There’s no shame! But there is a different way to do it.
Maybe start by taking our healthy business owner’s assessment to see where you stack up. Go right now to boproadmap.com/healthy and take 5-6 min to take it. And reach out! We wake up every morning to liberate business owners from chaos and we want to work with you.
Alright, that’s it for today! Have a great Thanksgiving!
You don’t have to be a college football fan to understand this story, and yet it would help to understand that college football in the southeastern United States is akin to cricket in India, premier football in England, Formula 1 in Italy, and the carnival in Brazil.
We barter, bet, scream, yell, curse, fret, cheer, cry, and hug strangers all in the course of a four-hour window on any given Saturday in the fall.
Betting college sports, television rights, and now the newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules have driven revenue in college sports to levels unthinkable just ten years ago.
I was able to play football at the University of South Carolina back in the 1990s when assistant coaches barely scratched a living, and graduate assistants took a joyful vow of poverty. All this sacrifice for the privilege of sleeping on cots at the stadium due to the hours required in hopes for a winning season and a chance to continue playing at one of a very few bowl games around the country.
It is not the same game.
Money has skyrocketed, bowls are ubiquitous. The collective tolerance for losing has an inhumanely short attention span.
Our school has compensated its last coach a reported lump sum payout of $12.9 million to not coach.
“Who?” was the first question for many South Carolina Gamecock fans when the list of top head coaching contenders emerged in late 2020.
Coach Shane Beamer emerged as the victor.
A unique, quirky assistant coach at Oklahoma who had never been a coordinator, won the job and the hearts of the South Carolina Gamecock fans.
How?
Beamer's strategy for leadership can thoughtfully be described in four words that you see and hear around the program and the fan base: love, joy, family, and home.
For years, college football was dominated by gruff, macho, bull-headed tough guys who were famous for intentionally making things tougher than they needed to be in order to mentally fire up their players to perform over their skis and bring home a win.
During my tenure at South Carolina, we played the Bulldogs of Mississippi State University each year. Jackie Sherrell was their head coach who in 1992, in an effort to “educate and motivate” his team before playing the Texas Longhorns, had a bull castrated live in front of his team.
That ship of that leadership style has sailed and a new form, and dare I say a more humane method, of leadership is emerging.
The old guard might think this new leadership is “soft” or “weak”. Instead, this counter-intuitive leadership is thoughtful, intentional, human, and engaging.
Beamer has displayed three themes and manifestations of this leadership style that connects with generation Z and motivates them to play on the biggest stages.
Intentionality
After each game coach Shane Beamer is ushered to a press conference where, like every other coach in college football, he is questioned and pushed.
If you listen carefully, you will hear coach Beamer call many of the reporters by their first name, and share some inside bit of information that clearly communicates, “I have a relationship with you beyond your general questioning here.”
It is subtle, it is intentional, and it breaks down tension.
The most powerful word on the planet to each person is the sound of their own name; not a soundbite, not a zinging one-liner…just Steve, or Hannah, or Clare.
Emotional Communication
Attend a South Carolina football game at night and you will be treated to a four-hour spectacle of intentionality, targeted communication, and repetition.
It is a four-hour sandstorm that is part dance party, community-involved recruiting video, campaign messaging, and football.
The communication is emotionally charged, but not unbelievable. It is messaged in a way where “welcome home” means “I see you, I am grateful for you, you matter, and you can be anywhere else, but you came here…so we’re going to make you feel special, win or lose.”
You will not have to look deep in the archives of Gamecock Football media to find a clip of Coach Beamer choking up words in reference to his family, players, fans, or any topic that he is able to find meaning in.
Beamer allows himself to show frustration (especially to poorly called penalties), and to display breakdown emotion. When they play poorly he does not hide it. When they play well, even in the midst of playing poorly, he does not hide it.
He displays joy and pain, in full measure. Hiding emotion is no longer a sign of strength to a younger generation and instead leads to confusion and higher levels of anxiety.
Human vulnerability is a powerful relationship currency.
We have mastered the art of hiding wounds, pains, and cuts leading us to massive storage reserves of unreleased anxiety and mental health challenges. College football players and coaches standing on a brightly lit stage are no different. Stardom and money rank among the worst prescriptions for an anxious mind.
Repetition
For much of the 2022 season, the offensive staff and players have been forced to listen to an off-tuned chorus of frustrated fans regarding their sporadic play.
Beamer is unmoved, at least publicly. It is clear that he is holding to a mission of positivity and joy, love, family, and home. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, there is work to be done…leadership always be refinement.
For many coaches (and leaders) crotchety frustration was the curriculum of their leadership youth.
After a game Beamers’ staff and his players are allowed to go back to work in preparation for the next game, not having to take the initial stings of a short-sighted and emotional blows. Of course they hear and see the venom or the adulation, but they have a cup-bearer willing to take the first sip of any feedback, look them back in the eye and say, “in love, I’ll take the heat, you go back to work and do what we believe you are capable of doing.”
Beamer is not perfect, and that is the point.
He has embraced imperfection and allowed himself the freedom of a different boundary of intentionality, emotional communication, and repetition…all motivated by love.
A far cry from castrated bulls, angry grimaces, and childish vulgarities.
The emerging generation is longing to be recruited, to be invited into an ethos of love, family, and joy, especially when things are hard.
Welcome home to a new kind of leadership.
I spent some time last week with a local business that had just finished redoing their core values. They spent a ton of time getting them right and a question came up. How do Core Values start to trickle down and truly affect your business? Well, let’s talk about that today! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
What does taking the next step with those look like?
I want to talk for a few minutes about why all of this matters. Like why can’t I just come in and work hard and that be good enough. And yet I would argue that following these core values leads 100% of the time to being a great at whatever you do. Can you do it without your values, yes, maybe… but if we lean into a healthy culture, excellence in design, and healthy relationships both internally and externally, it leads to a quality product every time! And…a quality experience, which is just as important.
Not sure if you have ever heard of Pal’s Sudden Service? Pal’s is a local fast food restaurant to Johnson City, TN. 30 locations all across Eastern Tennessee. They keep it as simple as it needs to be. Burgers, hot dogs, fries and milkshakes.
And here are their core values:
-Delight customers in a way that creates loyalty
-Daily excellence in products and service
-Exceptional value
-Training for ALL employees
Here’s where that shows itself. They time each customer as they come into the drive-thru and on average a customer spends 18 seconds at the order window and 12 seconds at the pickup window!!! No wonder customers are loyal.
You would think they make a lot of mistakes going that fast, nope! With their core value of daily excellence in products and service they just finished a study that they make a mistake on an order 1 out of 3600 orders!!! Unreal
So they are fast, they are accurate…nailing the first two core values and it leads to exceptional value for their customers.
Lastly,, training for ALL employees.
New employees get 120 hours of training…120 hours…before being allowed to work on their own. Grilling burgers, mixing shakes, taking orders…everything. Then, every day, every shift…their computer generates the names of 2-4 employees who take a quick quiz…if they pass, they go right back to work, if they fail…it’s back to training and retraining to improve their knowledge.
YOu may look at that and say…gah that’s overkill. I mean it’s fast food, does anyone even notice that? Couldn’t you say the same about the technical side of your job…fill in the blank. Will anyone notice if we do that well? Well, they did a study…again and their average customer comes to Pals 4x more than the average McDonalds customer. That’s a loyal following. That’s the culture and the impact you should hope to create.
The CEO was interviewed about all of this training and the way they do things and they asked him…120 hours of training, aren’t you nervous that you’re going to spend all of that time training and your employee is going to just leave? And his response was as good as gold.
He looked back at them and said, “No, not really. I guess the way we look at it is, what if we don’t train them and they stay?”
That’s where Core Values have sunk in so far that they touch every part of the organization. Because they know they must Delight their customers and create loyalty, they must have excellent products and service, they must create exceptional value and they must accomplish all of that through exhaustive training.
That ensures that the main thing stays the main thing!
So…if you wrote down your Core Values, could you point to practical ways that they are implemented, and do you spend an adequate amount of time on each to make sure they show up with your team every day?
I’d wager no.
Do…it matters…people notice. Alright y’all, that’s all I have today! Take a few moments today to write down each of your values, ask the team if they know them and be honest about whether they are priorities for you or just cute little billboard quotes that have zero impact.
The priority of our work is to liberate business owners from chaos, and most of those business owners have between 2 and 50 employees.
We get the question often, “are we in a recession?”
Our response is usually the same, “does it matter?”
Seriously, in your day to day life does it matter?
Over the last two years, I have watched some moments of real irony. We obsess over downturns in the market, a decline in business, and recessions or depressions.
Just last week, anyone who had money invested in the crypto-currency exchange FTX (some reports put that figure around $1.8 Bn) lost it all.
$1.8 billion…poof.
Was that a product of a recession, or recession like market movements?
No. It was a problem of poor management and leadership.
Throughout 2020 and 2021 the market was red-lining at high RPMs and many businesses had converted their business development and outbound sales departments into order takers trying to handle the inbound demand from a flood of cash pumped into the market now being spent on new homes, background kitchens, boats, and cars.
Business owners were pulling their hair out as they tried to manage customer expectations, a volatile supply chain, and prices that had the discipline and direction of a squirrel.
Now the outcry is, “what if we lose all of this work?” We have switched one cry to another rather than quietly leading through a boom and quietly leading through a bust.
We do not individually influence macroeconomics, but we can certainly lead well within the economic climate we’ve been given, whether cloudy or sunny.
Here are 9 elements you can implement to lead well during the boom or the bust so you will stop asking the question, “is a recession coming?”
First, write your vision down so those who read it may run. A written vision story compels, clarifies, guides, and motivates.
A business without a vision is like a ship without a compass and that is somewhere no one wishes to be.
Second, write an annual letter to your business team. Reflect back on the year that has passed, and project on the year to come. What have you seen and what do you see? Write it down to share, and write it down to keep a history of how you and your business handled like-situations in the past.
Third, build a calendar exclusive to the culture you wish to create. Culture is not accidental, and good culture does not follow those with luck. Solid culture is built through intentionality, repetition, and predetermined meaning.
What do you want your culture to be? The ingredients of that culture will need to be planted intentionally and thoughtfully throughout the year.
Fourth, subdivide your cash. Every dollar that comes into your business is not your dollar. Some of that dollar is for your business, or for you, and some of that dollar is intended for other destinations (i.e. taxes, vendors, fixed expenses, etc.).
Open up multiple bank accounts that will house the major payouts from your business so you can subdivide every dollar as it comes in right away.
The fifth element to help you lead predictably through boom or bust is a simple cash tracking spreadsheet. Every week, go review your actual cash balance and record it sequentially on the same spreadsheet so you can watch your cash.
A winning strategy in any market is to always have a bucket of cash to pull from. You won’t have cash if you don’t watch your cash. This does not give us license to obsess over cash and hoard it. Our financial warehouse should have a receiving department and a shipping department, an in and an out.
Sixth, a well-led business has a simple budget. Thoughtfully review the prior year’s profit and loss statements with its chart of accounts, and think through where future income should be spent to best align with the mission and vision of the business.
Seventh, a well-led business should have basic estate planning to provide clarity to heirs in the event of a surprise. Do you have written operating agreements, employee agreements, wills, powers of attorney, or trusts if needed?
Sitting down with a qualified estate planning attorney is a gift to the business and to your family.
Eighth, insurance should be reviewed and mapped out as well to insure sound coverage.
Finally, a well-run business is being led by an owner who has thoughtfully walked through their own personal finances. What income is needed? What desires and goals do we have? What income is needed for those desires and goals?
An owner who has little discipline over her personal finances, is likely to have little discipline over the finances of the business. Booming economies in many ways can actually exacerbate bad financial discipline allowing a business to grow habitually accustomed to overspending and underpaying.
Let’s stop living within the anxiety of an emerging recession, or not, and instead commit to solid leadership, and build a better boat that can handle both a placid lake, or a raging sea.
Believe it or not, every time a customer does business with you they come in with expectations both spoken and unspoken. So, how do we manage those and shape those to match what we have to offer? Well, let’s talk about that today!
Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose.
Last week, my wife found a deal online. $79 bucks for your first visit. Introductory offer, book here. She ended up calling the office to make an appointment and was so excited to go. She sat down, went through the full experience, and absolutely loved it! About halfway through, the receptionist came over and brought her bill. $240!!!
She immediately texted me and was pretty bummed. I told her to just show them the intro web page and ask about it.
“Oh, that’s an old promotion. Sorry about that.” And that was it. No one told her as she was running up a bill more than 3 times what she expected. Nope, just added to it and didn’t even flinch.
After her having a short conversation with the receptionist, they lowered it to $200 and she left.
But here’s the frustrating part. The service was amazing. Probably worth every bit of the 200 bucks she paid. The place was clean, the service amazing, the staff friendly…and yet because she walked in with an incredibly different expectation for price, she left with a bad taste in her mouth and unable to recommend the place or really want to go back. It felt like a bait and switch.
And to this day, the promotion is still up online… further adding to the belief that it’s a bait and switch.
Let me flip over to the other side of the equation. The Savannah Bananas minor league baseball team. The first time I went I was a little shocked at how much tickets cost. I’m used to paying 10 bucks or so for minor league night with the Charleston River dogs.
I noticed that the price was a good bit higher, starting around 25 bucks, so I was curious if it would be worth it.
From the moment we stepped foot at the stadium, we were entertained. High-fived, laughed, high energy, all the food and drink you could want all included, not wanting to miss a minute of the action.
We left feeling like we would have paid double the price for what we got and the actual product far exceeded what we knew we were going to pay.
See the difference?
So, if you were to look at your marketing and sales…where do you fail to live up to the expectations? Maybe you need to start by simply writing down the expectations your customers arrive with. And then one by one walking through them and addressing them. If it’s timely service, how can you meet or exceed that? If it’s value pricing (if that’s your goal), how can you be upfront about that to exceed the customers expectations?
Maybe it’s being innovative and providing new solutions… how do you stack up? Maybe it’s having a team that is friendly and joyful? Send some surveys out to customers to find out how you stack up or call up someone you do business with, take them to lunch, and just ask. They will tell you!
Because here’s the thing… this goes for relationships, dating, business, everything! Discontentment is a direct result of unmet expectations!
But if you learn to manage and understand and exceed expectations, or set them appropriately ahead of time…you will create raving fans in your business with long-term relationships where customers come back time and time again.
The opposite, of not knowing what expectations are out there or maybe even manipulating them to get people in the door is shortsighted at best and a horrible business model.
There’s a word that one of my mentors walked me through years ago. Congruence…it’s this thought that what’s on the outside matches what’s on the inside. I think we spend too much time trying to hide one or the other instead of matching the two up and being who we say we are and showing who we say we are.
Once we learn to set appropriate expectations and deliver or exceed those expectations, we can finally be a business that will get referred by everyone we do business with.
So sit down today, create a list of expectations our clients have, and see where we stack up! Do it! Put in the time and see where you land.
Thanks!
Bob Roberts is a larger-than-life Baptist Preacher turned global engagement pioneer and independent global diplomat whose best friends are with people far outside of his own East Texas tribe.
Bob began mentoring me two decades ago with his words, his actions, and his time. I’ll never forget the day he drove me to Barnes and Noble in the mid-cities of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and loaded me up with what today are foundational books in my personal library.
Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat were two of the books that he bought for me (still two of my top 5 all-time reads). There were a couple of nuanced books that threw me off; a book from Henri Nouwen and another about the now renowned Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh.
Perplexed, I dove into the books on global engagement as they spoke to my inner desire for circumnavigate-able adventure. Nouwen and van Gogh would wait.
Twenty years later I picked up a book entitled Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent Van Gogh, that then led me to another Nouwen title The Way Of The Heart.
We are asked frequently by business owners, “why do I feel like I work day and night and yet get nothing done?”
Nouwen makes reference to a “wordy world” that we inhabit and then lobs this thought, “we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say, or do are worth thinking, saying, or doing.”
Van Gogh is said to have been largely unrecognized while alive except among those who knew him and his tight circle of outcasts.
Although, van Gogh had long sense passed when Nouwen was alive, Nouwen wanted to understand van Gogh’s relentless pursuit of a compassionate life… a life that compelled him to shed ministerial garb for the poverty-stained garments and conditions of Dutch peasants.
Nouwen built a relationship with Dr. Vincent Van Gogh, the artist’s nephew who was key in the realization of the museum that bears his last name in Amsterdam.
Carol Berry writes in Learning, “Henri asked (Dr. Van Gogh) why so many people flocked daily by the thousands to look at his uncle’s paintings. What was it about Vincent that touched a chord that resonated deeply within us? Henri related Dr. Van Gogh’s answer: ‘Because people feel comforted and consoled. Vincent was able to crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful, something beautiful, something joyful, and something worth seeing. He was able to draw out the inner secret of what he saw.’”
Here is the question for us as business owners.
How was Bob able to make the time to take me to a bookstore two decades ago and plant powerful seeds of books that would circle back to make influence twenty years later?
How was Carol Berry able to share wisdom and insight from two major influencers of human compassion from the academic world and the art world?
How was van Gogh able to “crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful?”
Each one made a singular decision; ignore the other things they could have done and commit to the important things that require their uniqueness and imagination.
Skye Jethani writes in his book The Divine Commodity that van Gogh, “warned other artists, ‘Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.’”
Put another way, do not become a slave to monotonous distraction.
Jethani goes on to say, “we’ve been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos…and where there is no exterior noise we feverishly work to produce it.”
When we submit ourselves to constant distraction, to the latest, loudest voice, or worse, when we manufacture our own distraction, we are selling our soul, our creativity, our narrow brilliance for the empty currency of non-caloric entertainment that will need to be refreshed and even more outrageous in an hour.
How do we limit distractions? Begin practicing solitude.
Isolation is not solitude. Nouwen describes solitude as “the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self…solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”
You will not find solitude, you must make…make time, make place, make opportunity to sit and be confronted with imagination, with thought, with anger, frustration, joy, and excitement. Without seeing those things, we cannot experience those things.
For some of you business has become a tired, repetitive cycle moving from frustration to frustration. You have become the slave to your model and the freshness of your dreams and imagination have died.
Distraction is not just robbing productivity…it is robbing your soul.
Might I suggest you make time to walk into a bookstore and find a book on Van Gogh and just stare at the pictures for a while, and may that help rekindle your imagination and inspiration for the mission of your business.
Or, you go back to scrolling your feed.
If you are comparing your 2022 to 2020 and 2021 you may want to pause.
Standing here at the early sunset hours of 2022 we are feeling a very real metaphor.
It goes like this.
During 2020 and 2021 many of our businesses were barreling down the business highway at 90 mph winding hot at 10,000 RPMs.
Today, it already feels like a massive slowdown, and it has been. Let’s not lose perspective, though… instead of going from 90 mph to 0…we are now riding down the highway at a more sustainable, more comfortable pace of 70 mph, and the good news is that we are only running at 5,000 RPMs.
In other words, it is taking far less effort to go just a little bit slower and start to get some breathing room.
The problem is that our human minds have grown accustomed to the speed, breathlessness, chaos, and cash flow of the past two years and we don’t know how to mentally or emotionally throttle our expectations, let alone our spending habits.
New norms have emerged over the past two years; pricing volatility, material, and logistics inconsistencies, marketing and sales simplicities, and probably the most noticeable internally is that your employees want more money for the same roles and while demanding more flexibility and meaning. Employees want their business life to fuel their personal lives, and not the other way around.
Historically, business owners have tried to solve headaches by shooting one particular shiny bullet…sales, sales, sales.
If we could just get more work then we would have more cash to pay higher fees, higher premiums, higher wages, higher demands, and higher expectations.
That is an infinite and empty treadmill leading to the same destination over and over.
I am going to walk you through the four steps you need to take to navigate your business in 2023 in a powerful way.
The first step in building your business plan for 2023 is making time to fill out your Vision Story.
In 2023, where vision is not written down, people will indeed scatter, and that scattering of people will further scatter your mind and thoughts into a web of frustration.
Instead, follow the ancient Jewish wisdom that says, “write the vision down so that those who read it may run.”
Vision is clarifying and vision is separating. When you cast vision you know who is bought in and who is not. Some will run towards your vision and some away from your vision.
You will be tempted to scoot on past writing your vision down and instead make up some silly excuse in your head that either, “I don’t need this” or “oh yeah, we’ve got something like that”.
We’ve made crafting your vision simple.
Seven categories to begin working through, and you will likely need to make about an hour or so of time for this powerful and important exercise. Notice I said the word exercise… it’s work and it’s healthy.
The second necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the sobering Delegation Roadmap.
Andrew Carnegie said, "No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit."
John Maxwell said, “If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”
Discovering delegation will make time for what matters most in three ways:
The moment that you stop delegating, or choose to not delegate and empower is the moment that you have chosen to have a job instead of owning a business.
The third necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the non-negotiable Weekly Schedule.
You feel busy but not productive because you have little to no boundaries.
I recently heard Lance Golinghorst articulate that we all have access to three major scarce resources: time, energy, and attention.
Attention is indivisible. It is well-researched that multitasking doesn’t work. As I am writing and reading this, I should not be brushing my teeth or checking my bank balance.
Energy is renewable (I can generate more energy), and transferable (I can give you energy and you can give me energy).
The real wake-up call is in regard to our time. Time is non-renewable (we cannot make more of it), and it is not transferable (you cannot give yours to me).
You go into each week with a defined, finite allotment of time. Either you put boundaries throughout your day roping off all of the tasks and responsibilities, or we will do it for you.
If you do it, it allows you to maximize your scarce resources of time, energy, and attention. If we do it for you, then we will devour your time, energy, and attention.
You can make excuses as to why it won’t work in the specific role you are in. We love you, but your role is not a special unicorn or snowflake. Own your role by owning the boundaries for your role and then share those boundaries with us so we can support you.
Finally, for a robust 2023 business plan, you will benefit from building and implementing a Culture Calendar.
The culture of your business is not happenstance...it is not an accident, and no luck is required.
The culture of your business is a DIRECT RESULT of the ingredients that you allow to enter the mash bill.
If you allow the ingredients of unpredictability, inconsistency, minimal communication, lack of process, lack of mission, gossip, and no values in decision-making, then the result will be a business that has notes of unpredictability, lack of process, and the like.
If, however, you allow only the ingredients of consistent communication, accountability, humor, reinforced process, and clarity in vision, mission, and values, then the result will be a business that has notes of the same.
Again, the four tools that will change the game for you and your team in 2023.
Our mission is to help liberate business owners, like you, from chaos to make time for the things that matter most. Working 70 hours a week is NOT what matters most…empowering others to live into their narrow brilliance IS what matters most.
Remember, when you choose to implement, you are choosing to cut the chaos and make time for what matters most.
Joe Calloway said it, “vision without implementation is hallucination.”
Amidst the chaos of a recession, there are many who see opportunity and possibility tucked away in a larger population that submits blindly to doom and gloom.
We have always had a few business owners in the past with a desire to expand into new markets, and yet the drumbeat of expansion is ironically higher now in a tough, recession-bent market.
These are trade contractors who are realizing that the purpose, people, process, and profit they have built has positioned their business in a place of strength while other like-businesses are suffering under the weight of volatile cash flow.
Growing markets need to have the same care and attention as growing new agricultural fields. When left to grow without curation, a business can look like a garden that has grown past its boundaries.
Our town right now is a bazaar example of this. Its population has grown at race car speeds and yet the town services divisions are struggling to keep up. Much of our physical landscape was designed to be beautiful and boundaries. Due to the struggle of keeping up, the vegetation has started spilling out over the borders onto the streets and looking a bit more haggard; it is unkept.
That’s how a business feels when uncontrolled and undisciplined growth occurs. It is growth, but not all growth is healthy.
I once cut back a shrub that had grown far too large and was left with nothing but a brown stem because the growth required larger and larger support until the fruit of that support was gone. What was left was the support structure (management), with no fruit (revenue).
Good growth requires thoughtful planning.
Thoughtful planning required clarity and boundaries.
Here are five steps all business owners can take to filter growth to determine expansion into new markets.
First, you must have a sincere desire to grow.
Skill or demand without desire is like a vehicle with no fuel…the vehicle is capable, the road is inviting, but there is no gas in the tank to make it move.
Growth demands time, effort, energy, and forward motion. Ideas are fun but low on action. Action is long-term and sustained.
The good news is that you now have an idea of the effort required to expand due to the time and effort put into the initial growth of the business.
As you grow, you will likely require more people. Do you have that desire?
Second, you will want to have demonstrated and tracked measurables of your existing business so you have objective numbers to run pro formas and forecasts.
Again, since you have already started and grown your existing business, take the numbers that business has already provided and apply those numbers to a new potential market, and then run scenarios from those numbers that are higher and lower.
Do not waste the knowledge that you have worked so hard to gain and settle for, “well, we’ll just figure it out.” That mindset will drain desire quickly.
The third step in expansion is to create a replicable roadmap for expansion. Looking in the mirror on the business that you have already launched, what were the non-negotiable steps that you have learned to take that will apply to expansion?
What is the ideal location? Who is the ideal client or customer? What makes an ideal team member and how have we trained them successfully? What is the culture we are birthing this new expansion out of, and how will that culture fall in line with what currently exists?
Many of the businesses that we have coached through expansion have resulted in a simple spreadsheet checklist of items that each new expansion would need.
Next, to expand you must identify persons-of-peace. Who are those connections within the community you wish to expand to who identify with your mission and are connected to your ideal clients?
Every location has a minority of the population who will turn out to be raving supporters of your mission. In order to buy in and herald your mission though, you must have abundant clarity of that mission and be ready to share the mission in a succinct way along with a simple value proposition answering who you help, what you do to help, how that help is delivered, and what the result of your help will be.
A fifth element to evaluate when expanding into new markets is to find out if there is already someone there that you could acquire that would love to come in line with your mission and your culture.
There are thousands in the business owner community who have the technical skill, the demand, and the desire, but they have always struggled to run a business focused on purpose, people, process, and profit. Your expansion could be the very opportunity they are looking for to do their work in a meaningful and fulfilling way, but not have the burden of business ownership.
Your running a business on purpose is an attractive hope for many who run a business void of purpose.
Expansion is a natural, exciting prospect when methodically and thoughtfully worked through with an open hand and mind, and an eye on the ultimate vision of your business.
It’s October! As crazy as that sounds. And I’m curious…when was the last time you looked at the goals you set at the beginning of the year? Have you looked at them yet? Or are they collecting dust somewhere, or worse…did you even write them down?
Let’s talk a bit about that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. Thanks so much for joining today.
I was sitting in a coaching meeting with some clients the other day and they were a bit dejected. Felt like they were stuck.
“We’re not making any progress!” they said. “We’ve been trying to move forward on just keep fighting the same battles.”
“Well, let’s look at that.”
Here’s the best part. At BoP we do 12 week goals…small bite sized 12 week plans to keep the business moving forward. Instead of spinning your wheels for a year or more, you can stay on course and refocus every 12 weeks.
So, we pulled up their 12 week plan. We had 3 goals written down with a minimum of 10 action steps to accomplish each. As we walked down their list of goals, they realized they had made tons of progress! They were over 50% there for each of their goals!
They just had to refocus, realize that they were not, in fact, stuck, and recommit to the action items they had written down.
They left the office the other day realizing that they were doing the things that mattered. They were held accountable to a plan and were able to continue checking things off as they moved towards 3 goals that would transform their business by the end of the year.
So, back to you. What goals did you write down? Where are they? How do you track them? Have you tracked them this year? If not, why not?
Recent research suggests that most goals are abandoned less than 25 days into being set. 25 days!!! I think we have to ask ourselves why.
The first reason is we give ourselves too much time to accomplish the goals. I don’t know if you remember being in school and being assigned a semester paper. Are you starting that thing week one? Heck no! It’s so far off I have plenty of time to get to that. So you put it on the shelf until it’s pressing. It collects dust until you realize it becomes urgent! Don’t lie and act like you were one of the gold medal students that finished your stuff months ahead, we know the truth!
But how about when you were given a big assignment that was due by the end of the week. You get going on it now! It’s urgent. To get it finished it can’t sit on the shelf, but has to move forward step by step until it’s done on time.
Goals are no different. We give ourselves too much time to get the work done and either forget about it or put it off until it becomes urgent. That’s why we use 12 week plans. It keeps goals constantly in front of us so we never cease to move the ball down the field.
The second reason is that some goals need to be broken down into smaller goals. Doubling sales is difficult! And can feel overwhelming, so why not figure out some intermediate goals and metrics to incrementally push towards that. Instead of making one giant leap. Set goals that help you move towards the one big goal.
Lastly, I think we don’t look at them practically enough. We write these big goals down and don’t write out the action steps. We don’t give ourselves some easy wins to get momentum. As a result we fail or cease to get moving. Give yourself some action items that can contribute to your goals. Just make a list. What helps me accomplish this. A minimum of ten steps or action items. Set up time to critically think about it and strategize. Then just set some work time to make it happen. Then, set up a time to audit the work. For my clients, we do this every two weeks at our coaching meetings. Intentional time set aside to make sure we’re making progress.
And here’s the secret. It works! It’s not a magic wand, but intentional time set aside to work on goals works! Who knew?
So, if you’re in the group that hasn’t checked out your goals since January…no shame! Pull them off the shelf, break them up into bite sized chunks, and make a plan move forward. And if you need help with accountability, reach out! We’d love to help you stay focused and accomplish your mission as a business.
Thanks so much! Have a great day.
Greedy Boomers are feeling frustrated and overrun by entitled Millennials, while skeptical Gen Xers are interviewing unaware Gen Zers who are scrolling TikTok in a job interview; and for the first time we are all working together in the same businesses.
College sports is awash in generational misunderstanding. The newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness rules are in place and for the first time in our lifetime you are seeing college athletes representing the hometown HVAC company, or in some cases, an international brand like Alabama’s Quarterback Bryce Young who is already being featured in Nissan commercials.
En masse the younger generations are all for this loosening of regulations, the older generations are on the spectrum between skeptical and opposed.
In his new book A New Kind Of Diversity, Author Dr. Tim Elmore highlights these generational challenges saying, “the generation gap is more distinct because new technology creates subcultures. Hence, generations often don’t have to connect to survive.”
When you look around your business you are beginning to see a Boomer (55 and older) working side by side with a Gen Xer, a Millennial, and a Gen Zer, all staring cross-eyed at the other trying to figure out why they are so peculiar and strange…and wrong.
Generational diversity in the workplace is an unavoidable reality and a massive opportunity. Our response to this reality makes waves; waves of optimism and hope, or waves of pessimism and doubt.
First, to provide the greatest amount of optimism for working within the healthy diversity of the generations we must be aware that rightness and wrongness is being replaced with angle and perspective.
The commonly agreed upon straight edges of society are becoming less and less agreed upon and in their place are the self-published perceptions of the generations.
We used to believe that only a few key players had their fingers on the submit buttons of our societal publishing houses, and now everyone can and does publish something.
The voices of angle and perspective are rising and it is leaving little space for a declaration of rightness or wrongness.
You have a couple of different responses to this reality; we can either dig in our heels and fight for limited options, or we can open your ears and our minds to listen.
Listening is not agreeing.
Listening is not acquiescing.
Listening is not giving permission.
Listening is simply listening.
To be generationally aware is to make time to listen to the different angles, and then to make further time to digest and process what you have sincerely heard.
We will do well to inform our own current angles and perspectives with the angles and perspectives of others as we make time to listen.
The second action we can take to bring hope to the generations is to believe that each person and each generation brings a value layer that was otherwise missing.
Recently we did some renovation work at our home. The project was 99% complete barring a few pieces of artwork. The rooms looked fantastic! The new floors, paint, trim, and tile were all a pop of design that we had been missing.
There was 1% missing though…the artwork.
Most of us went through school moaning about art class. The addition of that 1% that was missing completely brought wholeness to the room.
In a Wikipedia entry, resolve is what the music world refers to as “the move of a note or chord from dissonance (an unstable sound) to a consonance (a more final or stable sounding one)”.
In our renovation, something was missing.
The 1% of artwork brought resolve; brought a more final visual to the renovations we had completed.
Multiple generations working in concert help to bring resolve to a workplace; a more final or stable sounding environment by which all roles can contribute to the overall mission of the organization.
By collectively and repetitively pressing towards that agreed-upon mission, culture is built, and the flavor of that culture is enhanced by the diversity of its generational ingredients.
Generational awareness is to learn the intentionality of great listening, and to set the stage for each generational player to bring the ingredients and notes that provide a full resolve and satisfaction for the culture that is headed towards its mission.
Our family feels like it's been stuck inside for so much of the last month. Some sick kids, tons and tons of rain, brutally hot weather that we thought was finally behind us, you name it!
And yet with the cooler temps yesterday we took advantage of it and took a long family walk. Something we used to do nightly that just had been pushed aside as life got in the way. The simple, little things! We were reminded of how much life this gives us as we played "I spy" the entire walk and had some sweet moments racing each other to the next mailbox.
I came home and immediately thought, why do we forget to do the little things? Because we know, deep down, the little things make the biggest difference for small businesses.
Good morning everyone! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
I was sitting in with a client a few weeks ago who had not been coaching with me for very long and I was asking them about what separates them from some of the bigger companies doing what they do?
“Well, not that much anymore!” As I leaned in a bit and asked them to elaborate, they proved my point.
“Well, when we first opened it was this thought of superior customer service meets the highest quality. We returned every phone call. We wrote handwritten thank yous to clients after big jobs. We spent extra time on the details. We spent time as a team making sure everything was lined up. And as we’ve grown, it feels like there is less and less time for all of that! We’ve kind of lost our way a bit.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it should. That’s the secret sauce of most small businesses. It’s the knowing the name of a client. Or remembering a team members birthday and that they are gluten-free! It’s the random handwritten note that shows up in your mailbox instead of some whitewashed thank you email with your name inserted.
It’s someone actually answering your call and getting a human on the line instead of a “press 0 to talk to a customer representative.” Or having a weekly check-in with your team to hear their thoughts and get feedback from the boots on the ground.
But what happens? Business picks up. The fires grow bigger. The team grows. The daily and weekly checklists get thrown out for the almighty sales funnel, because sales solves all. And yet you look up 5, 8, 10 years from your start and barely recognize who you’ve become as a business!
So, this is my simple reminder to you to ask you…what little things used to set you a part that have now kind of fallen by the wayside. This is a simple reminder to dive back in on those things that may have been neglected because of "insert excuse here!” I know I'm guilty of it.
Dive back in on BIG Wins and team check-ins. Dive back in on an effective team meeting and reestablishing your core values. Pull up a Job role and refresh it. Look back at your weekly schedule and time block your week out. Delegate one thing today. Build out a new process to make something more efficient. Shoot maybe it’s just calling a customer to thank them for their business out of the blue! Whatever you've set aside in favor of more important things, bring it up and set aside the time for a bit. I'd imagine that you, like me, would find it refreshing and completely worthwhile!
So, here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. Write down 10 things that you did when you started out your business that truly set you apart. Now, take one step further. How many of those things do you still do? Have you lost your secret sauce? And be honest, if you’ve only done it once this year and you used to do it weekly, that does NOT count.
Now pick 2 that are seriously important. How can you reimplement these into your routine? How can you recapture a bit of that magic that you had? Maybe remember a bit of why you got into this in the first place. Maybe it’s getting your team together and showing them the list and delegating one to each of them.
We can’t lose the soul of our business as sales increase. It’s what got us the sales in the first place!
So gather your team up this week. Put an appointment on the calendar to think this stuff through. Recapture the things that truly separate you from everyone else and watch the joy come back into what you do!
It takes intentionality and leadership, but you’ve got that! Now you just have to do it.
Thanks so much y’all get after it!
Thomas and I were doing our weekly check-in when we got to the last statement after I had asked him the Check In questions (Thomas walks you through the Check In questions here), “what I see and what I need from you.”
At this stage of our business, my role is requiring more and more visioneering and more accountability to macro-level task items. If my head gets caught up in too much day to day strategy, then we are not maximizing where I am most valuable to the business as an owner.
Note: for context, at the time of this writing/recording we are a team of eight with five full-time coaches and three focused roles to share clients connections, marketing, and administration/accounting.
Thomas heard what I am seeing in him and the growth that he is heading towards in leading our coach team, I then shared a thought I had not spoken, but it made sense.
“Thomas, I need you to run defense on questions, thoughts, and ideas that I could easily run with and get lost in.”
Ownership is lonely, and ownership can be misunderstood.
Leading the business from 60,000 feet requires a challenging juggling act of realizing the impact of each decision on the business as a whole, and the impact of each decision on each individual and their professional and personal life.
At times those disparities can seem to be in conflict and the urge is for the owner to abandon the skies and crash back to the ground to make sure everything is ok and in the midst unintentionally show distrust to the wildly capable team that is managing the ground game.
At that moment I was asking Thomas to recognize when I feel the urge to rush back down to earth in moments where it is clear that I need to remain in the sky to test and evaluate the atmosphere for the future vision of the business.
Each of us has blind spots, areas that no matter how hard we look, we are simply unable to see and we need other team members to “have our back” and to say something when they see something.
I’ve asked many of our team members to have my back at different times and in different ways, this is simply one example.
Who do you have that can ensure you are able to stay in the clouds for a bit and do the important work ON the business?
If there is no one right now, do not be discouraged, instead, be on the lookout.
There is a high likelihood that the person already exists in your business but simply has not been trained, groomed, and invested in, to the point of being able to have those open conversations.
By developing these conversations, the have-your-back mindset begins to work both ways.
I’m reminded of a scene in The Gladiator where the new Gladiators were being attacked from all sides and Maximus (Russell Crowe) led his men into a 360 circle which each man facing outward (backs to each other)...THAT’s the image!
Here are three ways to develop a have-your-back culture:
First, begin hosting weekly or every-other-weekly Check In’s in your business.
Watch Thomas’ instructional and informational video to record and deliver each of the questions and that important final statement.
Second, you can build a simple culture calendar on a spreadsheet.
Write out dates along the top row of a spreadsheet (week by week). Then on the left hand column (usually Column “A”) write out all of the cultural elements you wish were installed in your business; team meetings, birthdays, check ins, team training days, etc.
During each weekly team meeting review your culture calendar and watch the connection, communication, and relationships begin to develop in a powerful way.
Finally, share BIG Wins at every team meeting and make some of those BIG Wins the actions of your team members who really pulled their weight on certain items. Don’t be “too cool” for this step. Your team will buy in and appreciate it over time.
Who can help you run defense on your time so you can MAKE time for the things that really matter…at work and at home.
We have been misled about the idea of culture.
After poorly thought out ideas of free-Friday-lunches, bean bag chairs in the break rooms, ping pong tables, open office concepts, and incentive compensation plans, team members are still disengaged and frustrated.
We are trying to solve a pervasive, soul level challenge, with the oscillating fan of surface level ideas, rather than dousing the underlying flames of cultural disconnection with the quenching water of cultural satisfaction and engagement.
Often we hear business owners complaining about the pending generational work ethic, or lack of, followed by a throwing up of hands and a resignation that “my generation is the only generation that knows how to work.”
When speaking to groups of small business owners, this is a typical refrain, “nobody wants to show up and work.”
My response, in a kind and forceful way, “no, they just don’t want to show and work for you… because you have already given up on them.”
The great challenge of a sporting coach is to recruit, develop, and game plan in a way that maximizes talent and outcomes.
The same is true of a business owner. Too many business owners are resigning to the cancerous idea that “if I want it to get done right, then I must do it myself.”
NO!
We must allow that mindset to die in the graveyard of pride and hubris, and instead, embrace a growth mindset… a mindset that believes that each generation and each person has a unique brilliance to bring to a well-defined and clear mission.
All businesses, generally, want great culture and yet great culture is not the default.
Culture is not a business term, but has been borrowed for business from science.
Culture is a biology term.
Go back to middle school science when you saw your first petri dish. That little glass dish would hold some biological element, and then over time when subjected to heat, moisture, and any other environmental elements would grow the fruit of whatever elements were inside.
Business culture is no different, install the elements of bad culture and bad culture will grow.
Install the elements of good culture and good culture will grow.
If your business plants the seeds of unpredictability, lack of communication, no team meetings, little documented process, and scattered vision…then don’t be surprised at the fruit.
If your business (ahem, you) plant seeds of predictability, repetitions, agendas, written and tracked goals, shared vision, mission, and values… then don’t be surprised at the fruit.
Here are three elements to a great culture that engages people and makes time for the things that matter.
First, write down your vision, mission, and values and commit them to repetition and memory.
Vision unites, a vacuum of vision scatters.
It’s a natural law.
If you write down a vision of what you see and share that vision, your team will either run towards it, or run away from it, but either way, it will be clear.
If you write down and memorize a less-than-ten-word mission statement and five or less unique core values, then your team will have great clarity on why they are heading in that direction, and the boundaries to remain in.
You must commit to writing it down and sharing it regularly if you want the seeds of great culture.
Second, you will need to maintain a written calendar to repeat those agreed upon elements of great culture.
How often do you read back through your vision, host team meetings, host personal check ins, celebrate birthdays, family anniversaries, and team member work anniversaries? When do you write annual letters, host annual team discussions, and get feedback from your team on progress?
Create one simple spreadsheet with a line of weekly dates across the top, and then line out all of the elements you want to see in great culture along the side; team days, team lunches, individual gatherings…all of it.
Finally, if you want a great culture… don’t be a jerk.
Be kind, be visionary, be appropriately confrontational, be helpful, be humble, be inquisitive, be aggressive… but don’t be a jerk.
The livelihood of each of your full time team members is tied to your leadership, and much of that person’s discussion when they go home is around their work.
Don’t be a jerk.
The bad news is that you as a business owner directly impact culture.
The good news is that you as a business owner directly impact culture.
Plant the seeds for good culture… rinse and repeat.
If I were to walk into your office this week, pick an employee at random and ask them where you’re headed as a business over the next year or so, would they be able to answer correctly? I’d wager they may be able to nail a few small things, but would probably fall short of where you’d like them to be. So how do we communicate those things and effectively put the bullseye on the wall for the whole team to chase after? Well, it starts with a team vision day. Let’s talk about it!
Thanks so much for listening in today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
About a year ago we sent out an employee survey to all of our clients. Just told them to forward it on to their employees, because we were curious how many of them could answer this question. “What’s the goal of our business?” And many similar questions like that. Just give them a chance to answer and see what came up.
Now, it was fascinating to read the responses. Things like, to make the most profit we can, or to build perfect houses or even to make sure our customers are happy.
And yet, there was something missing in most of the responses. Well, a lot of things missing, actually. Things like how big do we want to be and who our ideal client is. Things like what we want the culture to feel like and how much business we want to take on. The size of the team. The gross revenue. The ways we want our clients to feel when they do business with us. All of that.
And so how do we take those things, write them down and communicate it to the team effectively so that they hear it and take notice?
Hear me say this… don’t overcomplicate it! Have a Vision day, or in our opinion, multiple Vision days throughout the year. We have 6, yep that’s right, 6 Vision days over the course of the year. Hour-long meetings where we do nothing but read through the vision of where we’re headed and who we want to be while headed there.
The other day I sat down with a client and he brought up prepping for their quarterly team meeting where they read through their vision story. I was so proud and he went on and on about how much it’s changed their business. They commit to reading through it once a quarter so that their team is never confused about what’s important. They see the core values and how it connects with end goals. They can recite the mission and know their why.
It’s such a powerful way to engage their team and connect the dots so that no one every has to guess at where the endzone is. They know it because it’s constantly in front of them multiple times a year.
So, how do you start? Well, the vision needs to be written down. One of our favorite quotes comes from the book of Habbakuk in the bible. “Write the vision down so that those who read it may run!” That’s what you want your team to do, see the vision, and have it read over them so that they can run full speed after it!
What a powerful picture!
Then schedule a date to start it. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just read through it and let your team ask questions along the way. Then, after the first time reading through it ask this simple question…”So, after hearing our vision, are there any questions about where we’re headed?” If yes, answer them! They are super important.
If the answer is no, ask this. “After the first time reading through our vision, what would you say is important to us?” This is crucial in them retelling you where you are headed and how you want to do business moving forward. You have to know what they heard you say and make sure it sunk in! And if they missed the mark, rework your vision until it communicates what you want it to towards your team.
That’s vision that moves people forward! Schedule a few more times throughout the year. You want your team knowing what you are going to say before you say it. That’s when you know the vision has truly sunk in.
Alright, what are you waiting for…put pen to paper and write it down so your team can run after it. Then put it on the calendar and get the entire team there and engaged!
Then let us know how it went. Thanks for joining today I can’t wait to hear about your Vision day!
A few months back I was driving the most beautiful stretch of interstate on God’s green earth, I-26 between Orangeburg and Columbia…and I’m on one of those long stretches where it’s 40-ft tall pine trees as far as the eye can see and I start to notice some clouds stacking up in the distance. Cars just disappearing into it a mile or so out and here I am driving 70+ mph right at it.
Kind of an eerie gray about it and I can’t even remotely see through it, what’s on the other side, what’s inside… none of it! And the closer I got the more questions popped into my head. And it was fine, it was a bad storm that we had to slow down for, but we made it through to the sunshine on the other side.
And as I think about the state of business right now, that’s the collective feeling we get. We can see a long way out. A lot of us are booked months, maybe a year or more into the future. And yet there’s this big cloud out there and this buzz word we keep hearing, “RECESSION”. That for some reason no one can really identify what it’s going to look like once we arrive at this thing. How bad is it going to be? Will we be able to drive our business through it normally? Are we going to have to slow down? Should we be nervous or just push through as quickly as possible to the other side?
Here’s what we do know…none of us know how bad it will be. We do know there are some changes and we’re going to have to deal with those changes in our exhausted state of just getting through the past 2+ years of a post covid reality.
We also know that we can prepare for whatever that storm looks like. We can get our business ready so we can do more than just white knuckle it all the way through.
4 questions you need to answer today to prepare for whatever is around the corner…
1. “What are the rhythms to equip our team with so that they are free to run full speed towards the vision?”
I coached high school lacrosse at Hilton Head High for 6 years. Every year we would have a parent meeting and outline the full year of what we needed to do to ultimately win a state championship.
-Fall weightlifting and conditioning…here’s the times and places. Commit to it.
-Tutoring Tuesdays/Thursdays after school so your grades are in line
If we can plan a year of high school lacrosse with that kind of intentionality, why can’t we do the same with our business? What rhythms do we need to equip our team with so they are free to run full speed towards the vision?
2. “Knowing our Mission…What would we do in response to our primary lead source drying up?”
We’ve been talking about this cloud that’s out there, right? This storm that may be short, long, intense, not so bad…who knows? How do we pivot in the midst of that.
And what would happen if your primary lead source, your primary faucet of business shut off or rapidly slowed down?
I’m not saying it will, but how do we diversify your business and allow for change in the future?
3. “What would need to happen if something happened to me?”
This is something we spend a ton of time on. Hopefully, nothing ever does…but the business needs to be ready! What processes do you need to record? What systems need to be built? What happens if someone gets promoted within and you need to train their replacement? This stuff happens all the time and businesses are set back because they aren’t ready. Things aren’t written down.
So ask everyone in your business that question and let the answer push you to get things written down.
4. “How does my role directly affect the financial health of the business?”
This one is huge. Have a simple conversation with your team around what makes you profitable. Helping them understand that they play a key role in profitability. Show them what happens when a dollar enters the business and what is left over at the end. (Insider information…you don’t make 100% profit, but that’s what they think!) Show them your COGS and your insurance expenses and payroll taxes. It’s helpful for them to see it all written out.
Listen, we don't know what is around the bend, but we do know we can prepare in these 4 key areas. With our people, with our Purpose, with our Process and with our Profit.
Once you touch on all 4 of those, you will be well on your way to being prepared for whatever this recession looks like!
Have a great day.
There’s a new generation of kids hitting the workforce. So, with thousands of options, how do we attract them to our business? And how do we make sure we have enough runway in front of them so they don’t just jump at the next available job that pays a little bit more?
Well, let’s talk about that today! Good morning friends, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
We met last week with about 125 business owners and key leaders to plan out the 4th quarter. One of the resounding issues that kept coming up was attracting talent in the trade industries. Now, about 70% of the businesses we work with are in the trade industries, so we asked them to go a bit deeper into the problem.
Well, there’s this huge push for high school kids to go to college. Which is great! But, when they get a random business degree or marketing or some other generic degree in communications that they have spent good money and 4 years of their life on, they fully expect to be compensated at a higher rate and to find a job in their field. There’s tons and tons of trade work to be had that does not require a 4-year degree, but those kids aren’t attracted to some of what we have to offer, and seem to not be celebrated as much for working with their hands.
And they’re not wrong. Generation Z is coming out of high school or college with an inflated idea of the return on investment from education. They often think, oh I’ll get a degree in X and should make a good living right out of school! Even though that’s not close to how it works. Meanwhile, there are jobs paying 18/20/22 bucks an hour that you could start tomorrow…WITH A SOLID CAREER TRAJECTORY.
Now, don’t hear me say college is not important. It absolutely is and higher education should be applauded. But, it should not be some hoop that kids are forced to jump through with no direction. That’s a waste of money.
But back to the issue at hand. Plumbers, electricians, contractors, roofers…you name it. All of them are struggling to attract talent. People that want to work in those trades. Gen Z looks around and sees people making Tik Toks, podcasts, food blogging, gaming, anything BUT working with your hands and making a stupid amount of money to do so.
But I think the question we should ask is not how do we compete with that pay. Good luck with that one. The question we should ask is what is attractive to Gen Z about all of those jobs?
Well, it’s notoriety. It’s having a voice. It’s influencing people and being heard. It’s also the freedom to be creative and self expressive.
Well, you say, that’s tough to give kids all of that as a beginning plumber.
Yep, I agree…but can we get closer to that? So many of us are stuck in the ways that the trades have worked for the past 50 years and not willing to innovate or change at all. So no wonder kids don’t want to work with a bunch of grouchy 50-year old men who are “stuck in the old days!” It sounds miserable.
So how can we get them excited about being heard, using their creativity, innovating, serving people…etc.
I think the question we need to start asking is…”What are the employees I’m looking for, looking for?”
It’s a simple question, but until we learn how to answer it, we will be stuck waving our fist at the waves upon waves of Gen Z employees who chose to work elsewhere. We can stick our heads in the sand and say, “man they just don’t make 'em like they used to!” Or we can be proactive, recognize the change in the market and get excited about the strengths this new generation brings.
Here’s the last thing I’ll point to. This Gen z group of kids does not have the tangible skills that previous generations had. So we have to double down on 3 things…
Alright! I hope this is encouraging and is a conversation started with your team. What are the employees we’re looking for looking for. And how can we become that. Not until we answer that in a real way and communicate it to the oncoming work force can we hope to have our hiring holes filled by the incoming work force.
Get to work!
Marketing and I have a love-hate relationship.
The results are powerful when the results exist, yet too often, the results are more aligned with vanity than they are with actual growth.
Marketers are like business coaches (of which I am one) and gypsies, each profession has a low bar of entry and the results are often quantified and masked by generalities.
I can’t speak for gypsies, but marketers and business coaches have real opportunity to move the needles for businesses IF the needle is well defined and well tracked.
Our business coaching firm has been growing over the years as we work with business owners (75% of those are contractors or contractor-related industries) between 2 and 50 employees to help build systems, process, and purpose using our Business On Purpose Roadmap in an effort to liberate business owners from chaos so they can make time for what matters most.
The majority of our business has grown through intentional word of mouth and direct referrals. Growth has not been haphazard, but also not opened to the masses.
We realized that our mission could serve a wider audience if only we had a scalable way to share our value proposition with that audience.
Enter the need for a marketer.
We define marketing as that activity within a business that tells the world, “we’re here and this is the impact we could have on your life…here, try a sample.”
Before I lay out the solution, let’s define the challenge…the elephant in the room.
Marketers have a reputation for obsessing over minor vanity metrics, and foregoing the more important numbers.
We have spent hundreds (at least) of hours and tens of thousands of dollars working with marketers in the past and the primary return has been a volume of likes, views, and impressions.
That is all fine and good, but the primary return on your marketing investment should be the right leads that convert to a sales opportunity.
Be wary of the “branding strategy”, especially when you are a small business. Early on branding comes through the excellence of your work to clients and customers, not the proficiency of your message to non-stakeholders.
Of course, you need a succinct and targeted message. You need clarity and consistency. Early on you can be the one to ensure your message is constant with a clear mission statement, a simple branding guide (standardized colors, fonts, and logos), and as many testimonials as you can get.
As those tools are built you begin building marketing assets that a marketer is able to leverage when the time is right.
The time to invest in a marketing manager is the time that you need to scale your growth in a way that requires more than word-of-mouth marketing.
There are three things that you should have in place prior to recruiting a marketing manager.
First, you should understand the marketing gap that exists in your business. What is it that the marketing manager will do that you, or someone already on your team cannot do?
That leads to the second thing…a written job role with clear and written key results. Resist the urge to search for a marketing role online to copy and paste. Pause, ask yourself, “if this marketer was successful for our business, what would she need to produce regularly?”
When thinking through compensation, every dollar that you invest in a marketer, and the budget for their role, should return three to four dollars in revenue.
You will need to do some calculation, and then have an honest conversation with the marketer about why the compensation is structured as it is. You will want this role to cash flow quickly.
Finally, to prepare yourself for recruitment ensure that you have thought through your existing assets, metrics, and marketing efforts. These are invaluable experiences that will give momentum and runway to your new marketing manager.
As you go on the search for a marketing manager, sharpen your eye towards a few key elements.
First, obsess over the key results areas.
Make sure your marketing candidates understand that vanity metrics are just that; vanity. Your business is making this investment for one reason, to generate leads that convert to sales opportunities.
Everything else, for now, is a distraction.
Second, ask your marketing candidates for past results in other marketing roles.
What channels have they used? What strategies have worked in different environments?
Third, let your marketing candidates know that they will be required and 100% responsible to create and implement the marketing plan. Your marketing role is not a social-media-manager role, although managing social media will play a part.
All appropriate channels of marketing will be expected to be either leveraged or dissolved based on the marketing plan they draft and hold to account.
Finally, ask for a written marketing plan prior to hiring them. Be very clear, you are hiring them to create the plan and implement it, you will be an advisor and asset to leverage, but you will not be the marketer and ultimately the buck stops with them to turn targeted leads into sales opportunities.
Marketing has left a bad taste in the mouths of many business owners, but it doesn’t have to. Marketing is a value-add to a small business if a marketer is willing to do the hard work of generating targeted leads into valuable selling opportunities.
I don’t know about gypsies, but marketers and business coaches can have a major impact on the world of small business if we can only resist the sugary-urge of vanity metrics and target the more substantive and transformational work of actual sales opportunities.
Every day you are waking up and chaos seems to reign.
Material delays.
Pricing volatility.
Subcontractors and vendors not pulling their weight.
The labor pool seems to be vanishing, and recession is on our doorstep.
Those aren’t the greatest challenges, though. We know what the greatest challenge is. All of these elements are leading you to question whether or not you are even in the right business because as much as you try to be present at your daughter's softball game, or your son's soccer match, or simply focusing around the dinner table… you aren’t present because the chaos is consuming you.
You wonder, “how can I keep going if all I am doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul?”
“How can I have plenty of work, but not plenty of cash?”
“Why do those other contractors seem like they’re crushing it while I’m wasting away, just trying to keep up.”
Some of you, like TJ, have asked, “what happens to my business if something happens to me?”
The professional chaos is taking a toll on your personal life.
That stops today.
Most business owners are convinced they are not generating enough revenue. In reality, that is usually not true… the cause of their cause stems not from the volume of revenue generated, but instead from the amount of that revenue that is retained and kept… the proverbial back door of profit is WIDE OPEN!
Most career contractors do not have a revenue problem, although growth in revenue can be valuable. Most career contractors have a numbers problem… in other words, you don’t know your numbers day to day so your expenses creep up and up while revenue fluctuates up and down… and profit drips out.
We live from big receivable to big receivable, living life like a real-life roller coaster complete all the while feeling sick and green.
There are at least 3 techniques you can deploy to improve profits and margins.
The first technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to subdivide your bank accounts.
When we first met Steve, he was running an $7mm custom homebuilding company in a prestigious market in California.
In the first week of 2020, he had $64,889.85…$65k to run $7mm worth of projects during a year where his local municipality would eventually shut down construction for 6 weeks due to COVID protocol.
That same year, his volume contracted from $8mm to $7mm. In other words, he would LOSE revenue in 2020, would LOSE six weeks worth of billing in 2020, and to make matters worse, of the $65k he had in his accounts… he only really had access to $32,720.14… the rest of it was already scheduled to be spent on subs, materials, and other payables.
Steve was going into an already uphill year of 2020 armed with a water pistol and a kit kat bar for nourishment. Needless to say, Steve was freaked.
But one thing Steve now knew, that many of you don’t, and it’s leading to the chaos you feel.
Steve KNEW how much he had available to pay his taxes, to pay his subs, to pay his team, and to pay himself.
Most of you are looking at the money…and you are missing the true story…STEVE KNEW because Steve had a system.
Steve made one decision, and this decision is spelled out beautifully in Mike Michalowicz’s important book Profit First For Contractors.
In short, when a dollar comes into your business, immediately subdivide it so you know exactly where that dollar has to go…starting with yourself.
There are four barriers you must overcome before you make this shift, and yet the shift will be SO worth it.
The barriers are…
Ok… let’s for a moment suspend our disbelief, and instead embrace the idea of subdividing bank accounts.
Remember, not knowing your numbers is causing frustration and distance with those you love…so let’s do something different.
The second technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to create a simple dashboard that tracks your cash each week.
Steve said, “but my online bank statement tells me how much money I have in each account, and Quickbooks tells me how much I’m owed.”
Yes, technically you are correct Steve…BUT…
In order to understand your profit and your margins we need a means of tracking those numbers looooooong term. It’s nice to know your cash, or receivables, or payables, or Cost Of Goods on any given week…but it’s even BETTER to know those each week over months and years where you can watch trends.
We feel the same about the weather, that is why forecasters constantly tell us where today’s weather compares with weather from the previous week, month, year, decade, and century…it gives context and helps us make decisions.
The Level Two Dashboard is a tool we have built and installed in hundreds of businesses around the world from Architects to Remodelers, to Plumbers, to Lawyers.
The truth is, a dollar is not a dollar…that dollar must be artificially subdivided so we know which part of that dollar is ours and which is not.
Steve trains Mindy on how to take 5 minutes each week and update the Level Two Dashboard, and each week the entire team knows…
So far we’ve asked Steve to do two things; a) subdivide his bank accounts so that each dollar goes where it needs to and doesn’t leak out, and b) track all of his cash, and any cash you owe or are owed.
After following this for about 6 months Steve comes back and says this, “this is voodoo…How is that I generated less money than last year, but have more money?
Simple…he made each dollar accountable to its destination.
The third technique is to KNOW your pricing and margin.
Most of you are guessing when you are pricing because there is no repetitive process to your pricing…it is as if you are re-creating your pricing wheel everytime and it is usually dependent on the amount of desperation you feel in the moment.
We must stop guessing, and start KNOWING.
Remember this…pricing should always be based on VALUE.
Here is the same question asked two different ways…
There are two primary filters to run EVERY price through.
First is your own pricing calculator. Where is that tool in your estimating and bidding arsenal where you can plug consistent numbers in and get consistent numbers out based on PREDETERMINED percentages that are healthy and profitable?
The second filter to run your pricing through is the filter of VALUE!
Once you have a final number from your objective calculator, then take that number and run it through a subjective VALUE thought, “is it worth X to the client for this project to be completed in this amount of time?”
One other thing Steve did when he put those money processes in place…he began predictably pricing jobs EVEN in the midst of price increases, and material delays.
Three ways.
He communicated the volatility to clients UP FRONT and throughout.
Steve then RELENTLESSLY followed every dollar that funneled in and out of the job through a simple job costing spreadsheet.
Finally, he understood the difference between markup and margin.
Margin is what is leftover AFTER cost of goods and materials are removed from revenue. That is NOT markup.
When you markup is how much you increase a price to determine its final selling price so you can make a healthy margin.
When it comes to pricing, understand your markup, and you will earn a healthy margin.
When you have a healthy margin, NOW you have options.
Three techniques that all require time and attention.
First, subdivide your bank accounts.
Second, create a simple, tracking dashboard.
Third, price for value and not for time through predictable communication, giving a home to every dollar, and predetermining a healthy markup to provide a freedom-giving margin.
Every day you are waking up and chaos seems to reign.
Material delays.
Pricing volatility.
Subcontractors and vendors not pulling their weight.
The labor pool seems to be vanishing, and recession is on our doorstep.
Those aren’t the greatest challenges though. We know what the greatest challenge is. All of these elements are leading you to question whether or not you are even in the right business because as much as you try to be present at your daughters softball game, or your son's soccer match, or simply focusing around the dinner table…you aren’t present because the chaos is consuming you.
You wonder, “how can I keep going if all I am doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul?”
“How can I have plenty of work, but not plenty of cash?”
“Why do those other contractors seem like they’re crushing it while I’m wasting away, just trying to keep up.”
Some of you, like TJ, have asked, “what happens to my business if something happens to me?”
The professional chaos is taking a toll on your personal life.
That stops today.
Most business owners are convinced they are not generating enough revenue. In reality, that is usually not true…the cause of their cause stems not from the volume of revenue generated, but instead from the amount of that revenue that is retained and kept…the proverbial back door of profit is WIDE OPEN!
Most career contractors do not have a revenue problem, although growth in revenue can be valuable. Most career contractors have a numbers problem…in other words, you don’t know your numbers day to day so your expenses creep up and up while revenue fluctuates up and down…and profit drips out.
We live from big receivable to big receivable, living life like a real life roller coaster complete all the while feeling sick and green.
There are at least 3 techniques you can deploy to improve profits and margins.
The first technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to subdivide your bank accounts.
When we first met Steve, he was running an $7mm custom homebuilding company in a prestigious market in California.
The first week of 2020, he had $64,889.85…$65k to run $7mm worth of projects during a year where his local municipality would eventually shut down construction for 6 weeks due to COVID protocol.
That same year, his volume contracted from $8mm to $7mm. In other words, he would LOSE revenue in 2020, would LOSE six weeks worth of billing in 2020, and to make matters worse, of the $65k he had in his accounts…he only really had access to $32,720.14…the rest of it was already scheduled to be spent on subs, materials, and other payables.
Steve was going into an already uphill year of 2020 armed with a water pistol and a kit kat bar for nourishment. Needless to say, Steve was freaked.
But one thing Steve now knew, that many of you don’t, and it’s leading to the chaos you feel.
Steve KNEW how much he had available to pay his taxes, to pay his subs, to pay his team, and to pay himself.
Most of you are looking at the money…and you are missing the true story…STEVE KNEW because Steve had a system.
Steve made one decision, and this decision is spelled out beautifully in Mike Michalowicz’s important book Profit First For Contractors.
In short, when a dollar comes into your business, immediately subdivide it so you know exactly where that dollar has to go…starting with yourself.
There are four barriers you must overcome before you make this shift, and yet the shift will be SO worth it.
The barriers are…
Ok…let’s for a moment suspend our disbelief, and instead embrace the idea of subdividing bank accounts.
Remember, not knowing your numbers is causing frustration and distance with those you love…so let’s do something different.
The second technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to create a simple dashboard that tracks your cash each week.
Steve said, “but my online bank statement tells me how much money I have in each account, and Quickbooks tells me how much I’m owed.”
Yes, technically you are correct Steve…BUT…
In order to understand your profit and your margins we need a means of tracking those numbers looooooong term. It’s nice to know your cash, or receivables, or payables, or Cost Of Goods on any given week…but it’s even BETTER to know those each week over months and years where you can watch trends.
We feel the same about the weather, that is why forecasters constantly tell us where today’s weather compares with weather from the previous week, month, year, decade, and century…it gives context and helps us make decisions.
The Level Two Dashboard is a tool we have built and installed in hundreds of businesses around the world from Architects to Remodelers, to Plumbers, to Lawyers.
The truth is, a dollar is not a dollar…that dollar must be artificially subdivided so we know which part of that dollar is ours and which is not.
Steve trains Mindy on how to take 5 minutes each week and update the Level Two Dashboard, and each week the entire team knows…
So far we’ve asked Steve to do two things; a) subdivide his bank accounts so that each dollar goes where it needs to and doesn’t leak out, and b) track all of his cash, and any cash you owe or are owed.
After following this for about 6 months Steve comes back and says this, “this is voodoo…How is that I generated less money than last year, but have more money?
Simple…he made each dollar accountable to its destination.
The third technique is to KNOW your pricing and margin.
Most of you are guessing when you are pricing because there is no repetitive process to your pricing…it is as if you are re-creating your pricing wheel everytime and it is usually dependent on the amount of desperation you feel in the moment.
We must stop guessing, and start KNOWING.
Remember this…pricing should always be based on VALUE.
Here is the same question asked two different ways…
There are two primary filters to run EVERY price through.
First is your own pricing calculator. Where is that tool in your estimating and bidding arsenal where you can plug consistent numbers in and get consistent numbers out based on PREDETERMINED percentages that are healthy and profitable?
The second filter to run your pricing through is the filter of VALUE!
Once you have a final number from your objective calculator, then take that number and run it through a subjective VALUE thought, “is it worth X to the client for this project to be completed in this amount of time?”
One other thing Steve did when he put those money processes in place…he began predictably pricing jobs EVEN in the midst of price increases, and material delays.
Three ways.
He communicated the volatility to clients UP FRONT and throughout.
Steve then RELENTLESSLY followed every dollar that funneled in and out of the job through a simple job costing spreadsheet.
Finally, he understood the difference between markup and margin.
Margin is what is leftover AFTER cost of goods and materials are removed from revenue. That is NOT markup.
When you markup is how much you increase a price to determine its final selling price so you can make a healthy margin.
When it comes to pricing, understand your markup, and you will earn a healthy margin.
When you have a healthy margin, NOW you have options.
Three techniques that all require time and attention.
First, subdivide your bank accounts.
Second, create a simple, tracking dashboard.
Third, price for value and not for time through predictable communication, giving a home to every dollar, and predetermining a healthy markup to provide a freedom-giving margin.
Contractors are notorious for leveraging tomorrow’s money to pay yesterday’s bills…” robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
We can look around and justify the practice, and yet we know deep down that it is a dangerous line to walk; a bit like an expensive game of musical chairs. Eventually, the music does stop… or at least pauses.
The most dynamic way to prepare for any event moving forward, whether it be growth, recession, boom, or bust, is to know your numbers.
As you know your numbers, you also know there are two primary ways to affect cash availability in your contracting business; increase revenue and/or decrease expenses.
Actually, I like to think it a better practice to increase revenue and manage expenses.
If you want to grow, you will likely have to spend more for that growth in the form of hiring, or increased investment in tools or resources to generate and deliver on that growth.
Here are a few methods for controlling costs in your Construction business.
First, stop spending on things that don’t align with your mission.
Construction businesses will usually have access to large sums of receivables at any given time and if not carefully and subdivided at the time that receivable comes in the door, you will start paying Peter what should be Paul’s.
Many times what Peter wants are just that…wants. Using the cash as downpayment to leverage debt onto a new big shiny truck, the fancy office, or perks that make us seem just a little bigger than we actually are.
That leads to what is a better decision; to watch your dollars closely.
Every single construction client we have, subdivides their bank accounts into at least six accounts following closely the model set forth by Mike Michalowicz in his important book Profit First.
When that dollar is subdivided by pre-defined percentage (not by hunch), it naturally resists being used for anything other than what it was intended.
If that dollar is not subdivided, it is easier for that dollar to hide and slip out as payment for something that does not align with the mission or values of the business.
A third way to control costs in a construction business is to be mindful of tax opportunities.
There are elements in any tax code that promote the movement and utility of money towards certain activities that stimulate economic growth.
Many times, elements of the tax code are value-adds to business owners if they are intentional and thoughtful in their planning.
Request more from your CPA. They are smart people who are worth far more to your business than just an annual tax return. A thoughtful CPA will lay out some basic opportunities for you to conduct legitimate transactions and deductions with your resources in order to gain tax benefits.
For advanced planning, it may not be a bad investment to hire a Tax Strategist as well for higher-level tax planning.
Finally, pay attention to your compensation models and structures.
The common method we have found for construction owners to compensate employees is to make it up as they go.
For an additional 30 minutes of thoughtful work and modeling on a simple spreadsheet, you can create a compensation model that is mindful of your cash flow, your growth, and the opportunities that lie ahead.
Too often we bow to the market around us, or to hostage demands in compensation instead of first asking our business what it can afford and what it needs.
The easy choice is to read this article, close it out and keep doing what you are doing. The hard choice is to read this article and begin taking action working ON your construction company by being mindful of your costs…and your revenue.
You can do this…if you make the time!
Recession chatter is at a continuous buzz due to the identification of predictive recession markers in the same way that hurricane preparation chatter would be abuzz if weather forecasters identified the predictive markers of a hurricane.
Where I live in the lowcountry of South Carolina, we went through a four year stretch where we were either brushed or directly hit by severe hurricanes.
The storms were no fun, and in some cases deadly. In advance of those storms weather forecasters and government officials worked overtime to ensure readiness.
They were not able to influence or avoid the storm, but they were able to provide a helpful forecast based on predictive and principles markers that allowed for thoughtful preparation; the ability to make ready prior to the storm.
Oxford Dictionary defines a recession this way, “a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.”
The markers of a recession seem to be swirling out off the coast and the winds of economic dis-ease have picked up substantially.
The barometric changes of interest rates, pricing volatility, fuel increases, supply chain disruption, and a historic personnel shift have all been mixed into an economic cocktail that certainly has our attention.
We can be naive and try to stop the storm, or we can diligently prepare for a potential storm strike and greatly increase the likelihood that we navigate tough conditions that will set us up for what I recently heard Dr. Tim Elmore describes Post-Traumatic-Growth; the hopeful idea that for the majority of people, trauma leads to growth.
How do you make your business and your team ready for the storm strike of a recession?
Here are four categories that you can invest in giving you a better opportunity to endure.
First, to weather any storm, your team must be aligned around written and re-visited purpose.
The three primary elements of purpose are a vision story, a succinct and memorizable mission statement, and 3 to 5 unique core values.
Your vision story is a detailed snapshot of the future of your business…a long description of what is “out there”.
Your mission statement is a less-than-ten-word, power packed punch explaining to someone why you are doing what you are doing.
Your unique core values are curbs along the side of the highway towards your vision story. Stay away from cliche values like excellence, integrity, respect, etc. Those should be values that are standard. What are the decision-filtering-values that are unique to you?
Next, your people must have access to culture they believe in and will compel them to remain locked into the mission.
Culture is not a native business term, it is on loan from biology. It is literally “to maintain the conditions for growth”.
Most business owners want to grow whether it be the top line, bottom line, product development, etc. Just in biology, the conditions must align with the growth you are hoping for.
To ready your business for the threat of a recession is to take the written purpose you have committed to publishing and sharing above, and ensure there is a recurring mechanism tilling that purpose into the soil, the people of your business.
For us, we read through our 5 page vision story together as an entire team once every two months. We review our mission and values at minimum during our weekly team meeting, and during our weekly 1 on 1 check-ins with team members. We are obsessive about them and constantly revision so we are ensuring the soil of our business is properly hydrated, fertilized, and tilled.
Third, a pending storm demands that each process can continue in the case of a disruption setting in.
If prices continue to remain volatile, schedules continue to be thrown off, people continue down the great resignation road…do you have your processes documented, communicated, trained and deployed so that the business can continue to deliver on your mission?
Or is it “all in your head?”
Finally, cash profit and retained cash earnings (actual EXTRA cash available in your bank account…we’re not talk about money you can borrow) are crucial during a storm in the same way provisions, fuel, and a means of generating energy are must-haves.
In short, being cash-heavy gives you options and opportunities.
If you do not have cash, you will struggle.
If you do not know how much cash you have, you will struggle.
Know your numbers by knowing your cash runway.
The true measure of profit is not the number that sits on the bottom of your profit and loss statement…that is just ink on a page.
The true measure of your profit is the actual cash you have sitting in a separate, designated account that is being continually filled up where you can see it on your online bank portal…and where you could withdraw it if you had to.
Purpose, people, process, and profit.
You intentionally build a store of those four elements and you will be able to look back from the other side of the storm and say, “we prepared well”...regardless of what the storm does to you.
You have a choice, weather a storm with courage, or wither away in fear.
Every time we dive into our delegation roadmap with a heroic business owner, we get a bit of pushback when we tell them they only get 3-4 items that are off limits as far as delegation goes. So how do you delegate the impossible? Well, let’s dive on in… Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner with BoP here.
It never fails, the excuses go on and on and on! That’s impossible to delegate. You don’t understand! I can’t let go of that, I can’t train someone to do all of that! We’ve heard it all.
And yet think for a moment, about some of the biggest businesses you know of. The big boys. Did they start out as multi-billion dollar businesses? Heck no! Most of them were mom and pop 1 location businesses that figured out the magic to scaling their business, delegation, and training. That’s it! They created and implemented new job roles and equipped their team to do the jobs they were asking them to do.
So, if you were to write down all the things you do on a weekly basis. What’s that one thing that came up in your mind that you would love to delegate, but you’re thinking…”There’s just no way!”
Just last week, examples from our clients… one business owner letting go of estimating, for the first time in 6 years of running the business. Another, letting go of the entire back end and hiring a virtual bookkeeper and CPA for the first time. Life changing! Still, another, offloaded a huge piece of their operations and scheduling to another team member for the first time in almost 5 years.
Time after time, day after day, business owners are doing the unthinkable and offloading serious weight in their business and making time for what only they can do in the business.
So how are they doing it? Well, we call it the systems mindset. The next time you do an undelegatable task, record the process. Newsflash, this will take time. Record it with a screen capture technology or grab an admin, your spouse, a kid, whoever, and dictate to them as you do every single step. And I mean every single step. As if you were going to grab John Smith off the side of the road and hand this over to him.
From there, communicate to an employee that they are going to begin to own this task. All of it, by whatever date you decide. Now, this may mean they have to delegate something from their task list. No problem, the same steps apply.
After you’ve communicated this, schedule a time to train them on the process. Walk them through every detail and figure out where they may lack clarity or may struggle. Then push them to have a first attempt. Do it alongside them and help them through it.
After you do a couple attempts, it’s time for them to try it on their own. Resist the urge to jump in and save it. Let them struggle through it. Just like in exercising or lifting weights, if someone helps you lift the bar, you never get stronger. It’s the exact same with job roles. The struggle helps in the long run.
Set up a series of follow-up meetings to check-in and answer any more questions and support them after the initial training meeting. This may be the most important step. They should own 80% of it at this point and just lean on you for the nuanced points.
Lastly, let them own it and then hold them accountable to the standard. Periodically check on progress and continue to support them, but don’t micromanage. Expect them to own it and expect them to be proactive in accomplishing whatever it is.
This is another level of business owner. One who realizes what only their role needs to be and spends hours preparing and delegating the seemingly undelegatable, to free you up for what only they can do.
So, go back to that one thing you hesitated on. Start putting a process together…make it bulletproof. Train, hold accountable and offload it so you business can keep moving forward.
Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be or drink the excuse Kool-aid! Imagine if Wal-Mart or Amazon or apple just one day, years ago just decided things couldn’t be delegated… they wouldn’t be who they are today.
Take the time and believe it can be done.
Thanks for listening today… go ahead and send us what you are in process of delegating and send us the success stories! It’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.
Take care!
We spend a lot of time here at BoP figuring out who our ideal client is. We think through what their frustrations are and how they spend their day. We look at what motivates them and how that meshes with what we offer. Is it a fit? No? How can we make it a fit? Because here’s what we know…for every person we spend an hour with who is NOT our ideal client, equals an hour that we’re not spending with someone we need to be working with. It’s that simple.
So…who is your ideal client? How do we figure that out? Well, let’s talk about that today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
We really are serious about our ideal client. For a series of reasons, but 3 quick ones.
So, if I asked you who your ideal client is, would you even know where to start? What do they look like? Dress like? How do they spend their time? Where do they congregate for business meetings and how do you get in front of them?
What phrases come out of their mouth and what do you hope to hear come out of their mouth so you know…YES, we can solve that problem!
Many of us go, “Oh we can work with anyone!” While that may be true if you’re selling bottled water, I would push back and say, yes, you CAN work with anyone, but why not put your energy towards an ideal demographic? Your ideal client! Your marketing and sales has to be focused. Because those will become your raving fans and the ones to help grow your business organically. Not the ones you just, “Made it work” for.
So…spend some time today diving in on this. Get incredibly detailed. We have a 2-page document simply outlining our ideal client. That way when we go to a former client or current client and ask for referrals we can tell them exactly who we’re looking for and know that we will be able to deliver on our promises.
It’s worth spending the time to do this now…right before everyone jumps back in this fall. Figure it out, look for them and watch your business do what it is designed to do!
Thanks so much for joining, have a great day!