It is the first day for your new employee.
Yet most new employees for small businesses walk into their first day staring at what feels more like a rusty, duct taped operation instead of a well-oiled machine.
The very first impression that a business makes on a new employee takes place during the hiring process when the business team is simply telling the then-candidate about the wonders of their business.
Day one is usually the day where the new employee walks in and comes face to face with reality, “what I see feels different from what I was told.”
This story has played out too many times in our coaching calls where an owner will tell us they just hired a new employee and when that person walked in on day one, not only did the owner forget they were to start that day, they also began scrambling to find busy-work that would occupy the new employees time.
The owner then justified that haphazard training by saying “it’s just better if we throw you to the wolves”.
No.
It is not better to simply be thrown to the wolves without initial training on how to handle wolves.
Imagine any professional sports coach simply throwing a new star player to the wolves without training and practice…it’s silly.
Yet in business that tends to be the strategy of choice. We hide behind excuses like, “we just hire smart people and they can figure it out”, or “if she can’t handle the heat then we don’t need her”.
There is a better way, a more human way to onboard that massively valuable new team member.
One element of that better way is to have a new employee kit or packet ready to physically hand them on day one.
That packet can consist of five elements to give your new employee a much higher chance of success.
First, each new employee starter pack should include an opening letter from the owner.
This is a letter that is standardized for the new employee starter pack and allows the new employee to hear directly from the visionary of the business.
The letter should start out with a simple welcome followed by the mission of the business letting the new employee know that the primary reason they were hired is to help achieve the already-defined mission.
After the mission, the letter should include a simple outline of the unique core values of the business letting them know, “these are the filters we use to make decisions every day.”
The letter can be rounded out with an overview of the rest of the new employee starter pack.
Second, each new employee starter pack should include the outline of their initial training.
What technical skills will you be teaching them? How? When?
What will the timeline of that training look like?
What professional soft skills will you be having them commit to?
What is the scorecard for a successful startup in this role?
Third, each new employee starter pack should include a printed guide with training notes or slides they will be learning from so they have a note-taking mechanism.
Actively having your new employee physically write down notes, thoughts, and questions will help them to engage and retain the information that must be shared.
In her helpful book The Power Of Writing It Down, Allison Fallon reminds us that “writing gives us space to work through our biggest questions.”
Fallon goes on to remind us that “writing helps us gain confidence in ourselves, our ideas, and how we move through the world” while giving us a chance to know the sound of (our) own voice.”
Giving your new employee space to write gives you the space to answer their biggest questions, thus new content for updating your training as you hire future employees.
Your greatest opportunity for feedback on your business are the fresh, new eyes of a new employee.
Fourth, each new employee starter pack should include startup swag and quick start support tools for the role they are assuming.
If you are hiring a salesperson, what are the selling tools they will need to stack away in preparation for that first sales call?
If you are hiring a field operations person, what are the “cheat sheets” or checklists that would be helpful in the startup phase?
Think of these tools as the “Quick Start” guide you see when you open the box to a new appliance or power tool. Identify the five things (or four, or seven) that will get this person “started” in this new role knowing that a more advanced understanding of the job will come with further time and intentional training that you have mapped out above.
Finally, every new employee start kit should include some sort of engaging handbook that employees can refer to answering the most basic questions like contact lists, and overall employee related questions (payroll cycles, vacation, dress, conduct, etc.)
Regardless of the specific elements in your new employee starter kit, just having something built and delivered that shows forethought and intentionality in line with the mission of the business takes you miles down the road towards a successful startup with your new team member.
This summer, we have had multiple business owner clients physically leave the location of their business for an extended period of time (anywhere from two to four weeks).
Most of these are physical location businesses, and no, this is not a fantasy…it is real life.
For the most part, these owners are not spending the time away from their business simply sipping bubbly and eating bon bons. Most are staying active through the duration of their time away, and in many cases working on their own business, or learning about the inner workings of another business they are visiting.
One owner traveled north for five hours and worked three days a week at another business that is in the same industry. He simply called the owner up and asked to come work as an employee so he could watch and learn.
The perspectives and takeaways were endless. He would spend a few minutes each evening creating audio notes from his time each day. No conference could equip him in the same way he was able to see it for himself.
How did he create the margin to physically leave his business? You can read and listen to the majority of our content to learn that. The bigger question is, why?
Why did he leave his business and not spend every second of the time away just resting and relaxing?
Most business owners are drivers, and most drivers rarely find replenishment from “doing nothing”... their mind never stops.
Instead, owners are now making a decision to leave their physical location for extended periods of time, and making a plan beforehand with how they will allocate their time in a rhythm of rest, intentionality, learning, and work.
While away, many of these business owners would still check in on elements of their business, but only during pre-determined times.
But why?
First, when you are physically taking a break from the all-in, day-to-day grind of your business, then you are forcing yourself to see things from a different perspective.
I have also been physically away from the central location of our business for three weeks. Two of those weeks were committed to working both in (some) and on (some) of the business, and one of those weeks was committed to absolutely zero communication around our business.
While hiking trails in the morning, or biking town streets in the evenings that are unfamiliar to me, it is forcing my mind to bend differently around many of the same issues that I was only able to see from one angle.
The second reason you should make time to take a break from the day-in-day-out grind of your business is what it does for your small team.
You have team members that are silently looking for an opportunity to grow, to lead, and to develop. Contrary to the bitter generational sentiment, there are many young professionals, leaders, and line workers who are waiting to be asked… to be invited into greater responsibility.
They cannot (err will not) step up if they believe they will be stepping on your toes. No matter how non-intimidating you think you are; your team will usually have great internal respect for your role, and you will not see them “step up” until you are willing to step out for a small period of time.
Finally, you should plan to take a break from your business for a defined period of time because it will force you to prepare for that time away. In order for your team to assume responsibility in your distance, they will need to embrace the vision, mission, and values of the business. They will need to be equipped w/ the systems, processes, and methods to bake that cake, stack that crate, pack that bait, or quote that rate.
When others are working IN the business, it allows you to leverage your narrow brilliance, that part of the business you truly enjoy while the team runs the day to day.
You will never fully know if your team is ready to own the day-to-day, if you are unwilling to leave the day-to-day… if only for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months.
Start preparing now, set a date, communicate, prepare… and go see your world from a different trail.
I’ve sat down with a few businesses recently for introductions and after chatting for 30 min or so, they have each said something along the lines of, “man this sounds awesome! I’d love to get through this busy summer and start up with y’all in the fall.” That’s great, so what’s going to be different in the fall? If you can’t make the time right now, what happens in the fall where things magically slow down?
So, this raises the question…”When is the right time to work on your business?”
That conversation has probably happened 25 times. And I’m being more direct than I probably would be with them, but the truth is right there. Nothing changes in the future. Life doesn’t magically slow down and give you this green light to finally work on your business.
At least not with any of the businesses we work with. It’s fought for and scheduled and followed religiously until it becomes ingrained into the fabric of your business. You know, just like I do, that your business doesn’t care if you have a vacation planned or were hoping for a date night with your spouse. Nope…it slings chaos at you just as frequently as the sun rises in the east every morning.
So…how do we find the time to make all this work? Because what we ask Business on Purpose clients to work through is DEFINITELY work! In fact, we ask for 2-3 hours a week of “work on your business time” every single week.
There are ones that limp along for a bit, and then there’s one where it looks like they are in the fast and the furious movies as they just fly through our roadmap and see change in just a few short months. So what’s the difference between the two?
Well, we asked our clients that question. And here were their top 3 answers.
1. Schedule time every week and don’t allow anything to invade that time.
I know it seems overly simple, but putting it on your schedule every week, letting your team know that you’re diving into work that ONLY you, the business owner, can do, is a game changer. Then shutting out email, texts, calls, interruptions of any kind so that you protect that time and can do valuable deep work! That’s what moves the needle.
2. Stop making excuses for why you can’t find the time.
This may come across as harsh and it’s not meant to. I’m guilty of this, too, as we all love excuses! I’m too tired, we were gone all weekend, my kids are too young, my kids are about to leave the nest and we don’t have much time left with them, I have too much work right now, I don’t have enough work right now, we have the wrong employees, we just aren’t ready yet…trust me we’ve heard them all!
What we heard from our clients is that the day we stop making excuses is the first step towards freedom from the chaos. Because you take charge of owning your business and start moving the right direction. There’s no way to get rid of legitimate excuses, but you can stop them from preventing you from moving forward.
3. Follow the plan.
Early on in coaching, most people fight certain things we tell them. Whether it’s team meetings that they’ve tried and failed at before, or opening up multiple bank accounts, or delegating responsibility for things to employees that you don’t know quite how it will turn out. And yet we have taken hundreds of businesses through our Roadmap and everyone that has committed to all of it. Not a la carte pieces of it, but the system as a whole has come out the other side free from the chaos.
But it takes trust and commitment. Each of them, looking back, wished they had stopped fighting it and gone with it, trusting the plan. Now, hindsight is 20/20. We all look back and wish we had done things differently, but once people commit to the plan and gain momentum there’s no looking back.
So…what changes for you this fall, or in 2023? What’s holding you back from working on your business this week, today…shoot right now!?! If you ever expect anything to change you have to schedule the time, stop making excuses, and follow the plan.
And as always, we’re here to help! It’s what we do best…liberating business owner’s from chaos. A plan to walk alongside you the whole way!
If you’d like to see how your business stacks up on the things that we value, take a few minutes to take our healthy business owner assessment at boproadmap.com/healthy.
Hope we can touch base soon!
Today I want to talk about something that holds businesses back more than anything else. Continual learning and implementation.
Thanks so much for listening in today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
One of our core values here at BOP is learn and implement. We want every conversation with business owners, every coaching meeting, and shoot every time we show up to work to be a learning experience. Relentless and never-ending. We never just want to step back and look at our content, our roadmap, and think…man it’s perfect!
Because the business world is always changing. It morphs and moves and the climate it operates in changes. We have to be willing to learn and adapt and change with it. Now, we don’t want to change the core of who we are, but operationally and strategically we can be out in front as we respond to all of that change.
But here’s the thing, we don’t just want to learn. We want to adapt and implement that learning into our every day. It’s next step that so many businesses fail to do today. And that, specifically, is what I want to talk about today.
When we see businesses stall, or plateau…9 times out of 10 it’s because this thought has entered their mind and not been kicked out like a kid acting out in class. They will think… well, that’s just the way it is and I don’t ever see it changing. They have waved the white flag on whatever their problem with and growth cannot happen in that vacuum.
You see it’s that fixed mindset, we seem to have talked about that a million times, that holds business owners and their teams back.
I was working with someone the other day and here’s what they said…that schedule has always been chaos. And we don’t see that changing anytime soon. We’ve done this for 30+ years and it’s always chaos.
So here’s where I pushed back. If you believe it’s going to be chaos, then you’ve already given your consent to your team that it SHOULD be chaotic…and that’s a problem. What part of the process do we have control over?
Well, a lot of it. The business owner said.
Great! Let’s start there and work backwards.
So we built out a 12-week plan to get better at the things they control. We wrote out every step of their process with dates that corresponded. Even invited several of their team members into the process to make sure that the next time they walk through this…it may still have some components of chaos, but at least they will own the parts they can control.
That’s game-changing business ownership. Understanding what you control, and even if 100 times over you fail, taking what you’ve learned, growing from it, and implementing it into a new process that can lead your team to a more efficient and enjoyable experience.
It’s why we get out of bed every morning at BoP…to liberate you from that chaos!
So…where have you thrown your hands up in your business and just said, it will never change? Where have you just gotten so frustrated and stopped learning, have made the choice to crack the door and make chaos normal. You cannot tolerate it or it will spread every which way in your business and hold you back from growth.
So today, take the time to think through it. Then, do something about it! Put a plan in place. Figure out who needs to be in the room, discuss what you can control in the process, and become experts at the things you control. Shoot, maybe it’s inviting other businesses who are a part of it too, and ironing out a process together.
Because newsflash, eliminating chaos helps them too!!! I can promise you if you can take a step back to provide yourself with some margin, it is never the wrong thing to do. It will help in all areas of your business!
And here’s the last thing…if we can help, please reach out. It’s our specialty! Walking along business owner’s to figure this stuff out. Because it helps you make time for what matters most in your life. Not just putting out fires, but family and building your team and not having a heart attack! And maybe finally running your business instead of your business running you.
Hope that makes sense today! Have a great one.
It’s mid-July…back to school is beginning to rumble in the not too distant future, employees are restless and it’s time to begin preparing for another season of structure as the fall rapidly approaches. Hey everyone, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. So, what do you need to be doing to get ready for that? How can you truly kick it off with a bang and get your team operating at full capacity again?
Well, I’ve got 3 things you can do TODAY to prepare for the fall.
I don’t want to waste any time, so let’s dive straight in.
1. Take an inventory of where your team is at?
When was the last time you scheduled a meeting with yourself to do a self-audit? Are you struggling with motivation? With lack of training? Do you have the right people in the wrong seats on the bus or the wrong people on the bus entirely? Are there glaring holes or areas where your process is severely lacking?
I wouldn’t blame you no matter what the answer. But you can’t figure out a plan to get where you want to go without having a sobering conversation of the state of your business. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Be brutally honest. Not negative and debby downer, but honest. Those are two very different things. Negativity keeps you from seeing hope and solutions, while honesty shows your flaws and leaves room for solutions! Lean in on honesty
Walk through your Vision, your mission, your job roles and org chart, your core values. Look at your schedule to see if any changes need to be made. Look at vendor relations and any headaches with team members that have been consistent…hopefully, you’ve kept good notes in your employee check-ins! Take a quick pulse check on your culture…what are you known for internally and externally?
Once you have a great idea of the things that need fixing it’s time for step 2.
2. Build out a team day for early fall and get it on the calendar
What problems came back time and time again. Do you need to walk through processes by department and retrain on all of them? Does your team need more structure and accountability? Do they just need to laugh and play together and enjoy some good food together after a long summer of grinding it out? Do you need to redraw job roles and share lines of responsibility? Are there new people on the team that need to hear you read through your vision story and your mission statement to explain where you’re going and why you’re going there? Do you need to remind them of your core values and what truly separates you and the standard the team will be held to?
Maybe it’s just a time to thank them and celebrate and truly build a culture of gratitude…I don’t know. But so often we try to address all of this stuff in an hour meeting when the phone is ringing and to-do lists are out of control. But everyone’s attention is on their job and not on the meeting…so get your team away. It doesn’t have to be at a resort. It can be at a bowling alley, at a putt-putt course, one of your homes, anywhere! But create a time to refresh your team and address anything that came up in your self-audit.
It all starts with building it out and putting it on the calendar!
That brings us to our last thing to do today…
3. Build in structure of accountability
So often this stuff fades quickly because we never revisit it. We have to build new systems to support these areas that need help. If it’s something like Core Values, start talking about it every week at team meetings. Where did we see someone live out our core values? And have a small prize like a gift card or silly award. If it’s new processes, set up a follow-up meeting once a month to talk through any hiccups or areas to improve it. If it’s moving job roles around, have check-ins once a week to offer support and make sure the team is living in the new roles effectively and not drowning!
We want to take the easy way out and just act like by us leaving work for a few hours, playing together, and discussing things that matter is really going to create lasting change, but it’s only the starting point. If we don’t revisit and create repetition and a predictable system to live within, our team just goes back to their same old habits and nothing changes.
Address it, coach it, provide the system to live within, and then watch it come to action.
So, if you’re like almost every business we work with, your team is tired and dragging trying to finish the summer. It’s time for a reset.
Schedule some time for a self-audit today, build a team day around the things that are found out in your self-audit and then build in structure and accountability to keep things moving the right direction.
You can’t solve every problem today, but you can start building the framework to fix a handful of them this fall. Hope that makes sense and hope you truly will schedule the time for this work this week. Have a great day!
A dear friend of mine sent me a book recently simply titled Success: The Glenn Bland Method…How To Set Goals and Make Plans That Actually Work!
The book was written in the 1970s and quite frankly carried and implied genre that I don’t spend much time reading (but should probably spend more time).
On page 42, I was stopped when Glenn Bland wrote this about goal setting, “only 3 percent of all people have goals and plans and write them down. Ten percent more have goals and plans, but keep them in their heads. The rest - 87 percent - drift through life without definite goals or plans.”
Then Bland follows that shock statistic with this, “the 3 percent who have goals and plans that are written down accomplish from fifty to one hundred times more during their lives than the 10 percent who have goals and plans and merely keep them in their heads.”
Fifty to 100 times more during their lives than the 10 percent.
Brian Moran wrote a great book some years ago, The 12 Week Year. It is a must-read, and a must-implement.
Here is the jist…
Renew and update your goals every 12 weeks instead of every 12 months. Only choose 3 goals…only 3. Any more than 3 and you are at risk of not accomplishing anything. Too many goals is similar to having no goals at all.
Within each goal, write out as many tactics you will need to accomplish the specific goal.
That’s it…pretty straightforward.
Moran gives us a simple framework to follow and one that has worked well, albeit adapted to a variety of contexts, in it’s most basic form.
Many of our clients have seen success and have positioned themselves as one of the 3 percenters, and thus accomplishing more value-added things in their lifetimes than they could have imagined to this point both at work, and more importantly, at home.
That’s a big takeaway…don’t just make goals for work, prioritize goals for your personal life as well and follow up on them with the same rigor.
How have they set goals and achieved them?
Three things.
First, set 3 goals.
Each goal can be intentionally broad and should be a direct solution to a challenge you see right now, or the next mountain that you wish to climb.
Do not overthink your goals, and at this stage, they do not need to be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
Just create a title for a goal like, “better culture and employee engagement”.
Second, take 1 of those goals you created and then create as many steps as needed that it will take for you to look up in 12 weeks and say, “because we accomplished each one of these steps, we can confidently know that we have a better culture and employee engagement.”
For instance, you may have some of these items as tactics,
If you do not map out the details of your goals, then you will rarely achieve them.
Finally, the missing element to most goal setting is repetition. Having one place, usually the weekly team meeting, where the entire team can hold themselves accountable to the goals and tactics.
Goal-setting workshops are notorious for writing things down, and then never circling back to implement, review, or hold account to those goals.
Do this exercise with your team four times per year and watch your culture become a collection of 3 percenters!
Remember, if you don’t write it down, you don’t own it.
If you don’t write it don’t you can’t understand it.
If you don’t write it down…it doesn’t exist.
After spending two days speaking to a groups of builders and contractors, there is an unspoken question that most have and is revealed when we begin to talk about the chaos they are feeling.
What most builders and contractors want to ask, but struggle to open up about is simply, “how do I manage my small business successfully”.
They know what features the clients' desire. They know how good structures are built, and yet they quietly live with an inadequacy of building a structure of their business with the same integrity, the same stability by which they build their projects.
In the volatile market environment we are in now, material delays, pricing increases, and employee challenges, how is a business owner to manage the business so that the business doesn’t end up managing them?
A journey back into the annals of history can help us gain perspective on our current reality. Where there is no vision, people become detached, scattered, and alone. It’s proverbial…it’s a natural law.
If you have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have clarity, you have direction, you have aim = clarity and purpose.
If you DO NOT have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have confusion, chaos, and aimlessness = frustration.
You cannot manage what you do not see. You cannot see what is not laid out plainly in front of you or your team.
The first element every business owner must have written and installed in their business to have a business they manage instead of a business that manages them is a written, detailed snapshot of the future of their business. In short, this is a written vision story.
A business without a written, communicated vision, is simply an idea in an entrepreneur's head that people are forced to gamble to be true.
Lacking a vision is like a transit bus with a full load of passengers driving particularly nowhere. Where there is no vision, we run out of gas at the worst possible times and places.
In order to have a compelling vision, you must have the 3 RPMs of great leadership: repetition, predictability, and meaning.
Repetition is the mother of all learning as made evidence by Aristotle’s oft visited quote, “we are what we repeatedly do.”
Predictability seems mundane, uninteresting, and boring…but predictability is the lifeblood of scale and delegation.
Meaning is the communication of significance. Money is not meaning. The best predictor of engaged team members has more to do with highly communicated meaning (vision, mission, and values) than it does with the accumulation of more and more money.
The second awareness to managing a business that does not manage you is committing to hiring humans, and not playing chess with “human resources”.
There is a word that is being suggested in the public discussion of psychology right now that is worth taking a look at…the word LANGUISH.
To languish is to “lose or lack vitality… being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation”
Author and Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant says it’s not burnout, because we still have physical fuel, and it’s not depression because we still have hope.
What is causing us to feel weak and withered, to feel LANGUISHED?
DISTRACTION
Translation of distraction? We are willfully allowing ourselves to be pulled apart… pulled away.
William Danforth, former Chairman of Purina, wrote in 1953 of the power of a good, distraction-free walk…
"(Walking) is the best medicine! This is not only the best but cheap and pleasant to take. It suits all ages and constitutions. It is patented by infinite wisdom, sealed with a signet divine. It cures cold feet, hot heads, pale faces, feeble lungs, and bad tempers. If two or three take it together, it has still more striking effects. It has often been known to reconcile enemies, settle matrimonial quarrels, and bring reluctant parties to a state of double blessedness. This medicine never fails...and you have it in perfection as prepared in the great laboratory of Nature."
When was the last time you went on a walk, with no distractions? Give it a try and see if you don’t begin to gain a clarity that you are finding it hard to discover of late.
Human resources is the discipline of managing distracted people so that the company comes out on top.
Hiring humans in contrast means understanding the thing that most hinders us from living out our skillsets, and providing the best possible environment, the best “stage” by which each person can thrive, leading to the thriving of the organization.
When hiring humans, in a humane way, we invite them into a collective that breeds culture.
Culture is a biology term!
Culture is not lunch on Fridays, soda fountains in the break room, bean bag chairs, and unicorn rides for the kids
The ingredients you put into your culture are the ingredients you grow out for all to enjoy… or not.
The culture you have is a DIRECT result of the ingredients you have planted. If you like it, keep planting. If you don’t like it, plant something different. Either way, YOU MUST GET IN THE FIELD AND PLANT WITH Repetition, Predictability, and Meaning.
To create a business you manage instead of a business that manages you, it is crucial to commit to a written vision, a process for hiring humans, and planting the seeds of desired culture; all with repetition, predictability, and meaning.
You are not your business. I own The On Purpose Group, the entity that holds Business On Purpose, but that is not who I am.
I heard a late-middle-aged woman recently say something that made me sad, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t own this business… this has been my identity for so long.”
It is ironic that amount of time and focus that we spend trying to protect our digital identity (identification, credit cards, passwords, etc.) and yet spend very little time trying to maintain a distance between ourselves and the identity that is created from our work.
You are not your work. Today you can serve ice cream, tomorrow lead a class on pottery, and the next day lead a congressional hearing. Of course acumen in any trade or profession is, in part, gained through right repetition over long periods of time. So if you wish to have impact through your work, then it will likely require longevity and focus.
Where we must be careful is when longevity and focus begin turning into obsession and idolatry along with a healthy dose of “what else would I do if I didn’t do this.”
Anything valuable thing taken to an extreme is at risk of becoming a liability.
Hence the woman who has allowed her business to become her identity. Her community might look at her and say, “Wow, what an impact”. While her family and friends might look at the same person and think, “Wow, what a missed opportunity.”
How do you ensure that you and your business remain two separate organisms working in tandem for the health of your surroundings and avoiding becoming one in the same?
Build your business with an opened hand realizing that you not owning the business is always an option on the table.
Although I own The On Purpose Group, I want to operate with a mindset that I manage the business as a General Manager or Steward who is always looking out for the best interest of all stakeholders, and to build the backend of the business in such a way that someone else could come in and manage if and when that time were to come.
Recently, Gerrick Taylor, owner of Taylor’s Landscape Supply and Nursery left his five location business for two weeks to go serve as an employee at similar business about five hours away. He wanted to go see how a similar business is managed day to day.
While Gerrick is gone Taylor’s will continue to operate because it has been built in such a way where multiple team members can operate or steward the business in the owner’s absence.
Derrick is not Taylor’s, Taylor’s is an organism running, operating, and growing even while he is away because the team is empowered to grow the business.
It is always better to have a sellable business, even if you choose not to sell.
How do you build a sellable business that can run without you and free you from the prison of being tied to your business…whether you wish to sell or not?
First, you must decide that you will not be synonymous with your business. It is more of a mindset than a checklist of tasks to be accomplished. Ask yourself right now, do people know me for anything other than my business? If you have a hard time answering that, you must take action.
What are the things that makes your sense light up? What are the things you dream about doing if you didn’t “have to work all of the time”? Brennan Manning once asked, “what makes you cry?”
What is it? What makes you tear up at the mere sight of a thing? A child jumping into a father’s arms? A homeless woman on the street begging for money at the stoplight? A legislative policy? Ensuring that couples are well equipped before getting married?
For some, we must begin radically separating your identity from your business. Imagine this, we are all standing at your funeral, and on your headstone it reads, “He owned a great company”.
Of course, that great company can do great things for people like providing great jobs, great products that serve needs, and the rest. But I would dare say that your life is of more value than the jobs you created or the products you served. Even without the company, you are important.
Wouldn’t you rather have your headstone read, “He loved well”, or “His family was crazy about him”?
Second, you must commit to building purpose and systems that build people that build the business. One of the reasons that you are synonymous with your business is because most of the systems of the business are in your head. What happens to the business if something happens to you?
That was the question TJ Anderson asked driving down a four-lane road in 2015. TJ owns Atlantic Spray Foam and had that sobering thought when thinking about his future.
He began radically committing to building systems, process, and purpose into his business. He went from being the dominant business developer in his business, to rarely selling, servicing, or scheduling any jobs and instead investing in a team that invests in the customer.
Finally, you need to surround yourself with third-party wisdom mentors who are not going to blindly cheerlead. You need truth-tellers and advisors who can help you properly forecast what is coming, and thoughtfully plan how to equip yourself, the business, the people around you.
A Jewish proverb tells us that “without counsel. plans fail, but with many advisors, they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22)
I might go a step further and say, “without (objective) counsel plans fail, but with many (wise) advisors they succeed.”
You are not your business. Your business is a valuable asset, and you are of even greater value.
Our family’s mission is to be a light through wisdom, adventure, and time around the table.
Our family mission ties directly into the mission we have here at Business On Purpose which is to liberate heroic business owners, just like you, from the chaos of working IN your business.
So that you can ENJOY your business, maximize the impact that it can have on your family and your community, and make time for what matters most!
For a ground rule...IGNORE THE NOISE and distraction…
“It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise, and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work.”
We are about to SHOW you our work. It’s up to YOU to implement
Surveying hundreds of heroic business owners just like you over the past few years we have heard loud and clear one of the biggest challenges that you face in your business...the feeling that you will never be able to step away from your business b/c you are SO busy working IN your business.
Imagine the day, a lady named Josephine comes walking in your workspace, opens up a combo-locked suitcase and says simply…
“I am ready to buy your business at a 4 times multiple of your annual earnings IN CASH right here on the spot...with two conditions…
...First, we have to be able to run your business the same EXACT way that you run your business right now, from the sales calls, to the payroll schedule, to the lead generation, to the production and everything in between. I will not require you stay on an earn out...but we need the entire business map so your valued customers will never feel the switch…
Second, you have 30 minutes to make your decision and we will expect the roadmap to be in our hands and training to begin immediately using ONLY that roadmap as our training (you will not be allowed to “wing” any of it from your head!”
Could you do it?
You might say, “No one would ever do that.” Ummm, we’ve seen crazier.
Then you will say, “that is totally unreasonable to expect that a business owner would have her entire business mapped out SO THAT THE TEAM COULD RUN IT.”
Or is it?
We can say with definition that your business is certainly more “sellable” with a comprehensive systems roadmap in place because your team can run it!
Of course, this entire example may be totally lost you on because you would never have the intention of selling your business anyway.
No problem.
But wouldn’t you like your business to depend LESS on you, and more on the RIGHT TEAM? That is a business that compensates you with intentional time, meaningful freedom, and the money to pay for it all?
Don’t you want your business to help facilitate your passions and convictions? To serve others without killing yourself?
Wouldn’t you love to do what Eric Burton did, and leave your business for 31 days and it would continue to hum along?
We have determined through our own experience that about 8 out of 10 Small Business Owners are being OWNED by their business which means that even if they wanted to sell, no one would ever pay to OWN a business THAT OWNS THEM!
How do we break out of the prison of our own business?
How do we finally get off the treadmill?
How do we stop constantly putting out fires and feeling pulled in 17 different directions?
How do we stop the habit of throwing Hail Mary’s in our business everyday?
One way to try is to simply continue doing things the way you have been doing them. Of course, we know where that leads...INSANITY!
The other way is to replicate the delivery of every part of our small business and make it so predictable others can run it the EXACT SAME WAY WE WOULD.
And, it also gives those team members the FREEDOM to use their skill set instead of being slowed by confusion.
We are so obsessed about trying to find the right people…when in reality the more predictable strategy is to build a great SYSTEM where a variety of people can come join in.
Remember the old Jewish phrase?
In Jewish lore, there is a powerful statement that we have found to hold true since the centuries it was first written, “Write the Vision down so that those who read it may run!”
The same is true for the processes that make up the Vision. In fact, we may even make our own statement to say, “Write the processes down so that those who read AND IMPLEMENT THEM, may run...the business!”
Truth is...if you don’t write it down...you don’t OWN it…and neither can your team
Did you know that your business doesn’t have to own you?
Did you know that you DON’T have to feel like you are on a treadmill?
Did you know that owning a small business doesn’t have to feel like a daily cliff dive with no visibility and no parachute?
Owning a business can be the ultimate opportunity to set others free to live in their skill set, to serve customers, employees family’s, vendors, your local community, and your global community...all at the same time!!!
That’s right. Your business can be a MASSIVE force for living out your convictions and serving others. BUT, it will never get there by doing the things that got you to this point.
As I built this presentation, over my screen was an incredible view of the tidal creek behind our house in the lowcountry of South Carolina. It is a constant reminder of a real, living, breathing process that just operates on auto-pilot every day.
Behind our house, the tide comes in anywhere between 7-9’, and then six hours later is completely empty. That’s right, 7-9’ of water floods the marsh and then completely empties out...EVERY 6 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds the tide comes in and the tide comes out...EVERYDAY!
The tides are a process. Just like the earth’s rotation and the seasons are a process. Processes are simply a “a series of repeatable actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”.
When process is NOT in place, what you may get is creative, but it will not be repeatable creativity...and if it is not repeatable then OTHER people will not run it the way you want them to…they will make it up as they go.
When process IS in place, what you get is a replication of the original creativity. I’m so glad the sunset is a process, b/c it is something that we like to enjoy on repeat!
When you are starting your business, every time you bake that cake, repair that brake, or stack that crate, you are doing something that could be processed so you NEVER have to do it again…AND you are equipping someone else to live out their unique skill set.
When you process all of the individual steps, you are equipping and empowering others to bake that cake, fix that brake, or stack that crate so that you can focus on the other elements of serving customers, like payables, receivables, inventory, and office management.
Then once those are processed, then you are again equipping and empowering others to facilitate payables, receivables, inventory, and office management, soooooo that you can focus on generating new leads and onboarding new customers.
Then once those are processed, then you are again equipping and empowering others to facilitate to….
Hint: Rinse and Repeat
Do you see where this is going?
Imagine you had EVERY process in your business documented. It could be written down, it could be recorded on video…regardless, it brings massive clarity to every one you might bring into the business.
Imagine, just like NASA has EVERY single detail of flying a spaceship to the documented...imagine that you had EVERY process in your business documented.
THEN, once documented, you focused the majority of your time on training the processes to capable people who could replicate your brilliance and creativity!
Every basic franchise has done it from hamburgers to window washing. That’s what a franchise IS. When you buy a franchise, you are essentially buying a process map to walk you step by step through how to make a hamburger, or pick up garbage, or unload a truck, or change brake pads, or build websites.
Franchises exist for EACH of those services and thousands more.
I’m not even saying that you want to franchise your business...but wouldn’t it be great if others could run your business with the same clarity, MISSION and focus that you run your business with?
IT CAN HAPPEN!
You can do it!
See you at the top!
INSERT MOTIVATIONAL CLICHE HERE!
Welcome to the process map. On this one magic sheet of paper, you will document the title of EVERY major process that makes your business work.
With this one magic sheet of paper, the process clarity that comes with, AND (never forget) LOTS OF REPETITIOUS IMPLEMENTATION, you will create a repeatable business that pushes you towards your Vision, consistently lives out your mission, and is completely in line with your unique core values.
With this one magic sheet of paper, you will have built a curriculum for training that will make you feel like you are running a full-scale business university for your team. Training will become a hallmark of your small business. The product will become less and less the focus and training your team to deliver a great product will increase with habit and time.
Story: Gerrick Taylor planting 52 palm trees...now GT spends his days working ON Taylors (vision planning, training, pioneering new locations, etc.) and coaching middle school football
In order to create a business that could run without you, you must build a team that is excited to run without you…which means you must build a map that accurately reflects your business so those who read it may run.
Welcome to the construction of a business.
In business, we tend to get distracted by what is on the outside. We see logos, signs, branding, and products and we think “Wow, they are CRUSHING IT!”
While inside, the owner of that business feels like they are the ones being crushed by the weight of chaos and burden. They own the business…but in reality, the business owns them and they feel like somewhere deep inside what they have really built is a house of cards.
Every business has five cornerstones, on concrete slab foundation, and four wall systems.
These are the PRINCIPLES of the business…
Harrington Emerson, the American efficiency engineer known for his pioneering contributions to the field of management, once said, “As to methods (processes), there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The person who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The person who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
Let’s dive into PRINCIPLES
First, the five foundational cornerstones of every business, whether you are building homes, remodeling back porches, selling ice cream
Next, every business must have a sturdy concrete foundation that is made up of the ingredients of culture and planning.
Finally, every business has four primary systems that must operate with repetition and predictability… again, whether they are selling sport coats, architectural services, or decking products.
We must be careful that we are not so lost and distracted by the day to day fires of payables, receivables, sub-contract challenges, material delays…and instead, we build systems and people to work through that while YOU focus on the emotionally taxing and important work of working ON the business.
Don’t become so focused on the beauty of the interior design, that you forget to take care of the foundation.
To understand each of these is to build a business that makes time for what matters most with the one resource that is non-renewable…your time.
Talk to business owner after business owner and the one thing they will constantly preach is equipping and training their team. Talent grows as training grows, yet too many of us rely on “raw talent” and get burned in the end.
Give me world-class training with average talent who implements EVERYDAY over world-class talent and average training...EVERYDAY.
The little known secret is when you begin to offer world-class to average talent...the talent will eventually rise to the training!
Let me show you how to build a process roadmap that will buy you time for what matters most and get you off of the treadmill!
SHOW PROCESS ROADMAP and highlight…
“Yeah, Scott… we’ve got this… but it’ll just sit on the shelf like everything else”
You’re right…IF YOU LET IT.
So where do you put it so you will use it?
YOUR TEAM MEETINGS
Allow me to give you a real-life example.
Our BOP Coaching team realized we had a breakdown in our New Client Onboarding process. One of our coaches brought this up, we added it to our Weekly Coaches Meeting written agenda…we reviewed it as a team.
Our process was updated, our Master Process Roadmap reflected it, and we moved on
The greatest gift you can give your business and your team is the gift of clarity from chaos.
How? IMPLEMENTATION.
I will take a half-baked plan with full implementation versus a perfect plan with half-baked implementation.
I quote Joe Calloway all of the time because it is so powerful, “Vision without IMPLEMENTATION is hallucination”.
If you take time to build out proper software with a proper processes, you will have greater clarity in the WHO of your business.
Josephine is standing with a briefcase of cash…could you take the deal??
Find out right now…while you are sitting here and we go into Q&A time, I want you to scan this QR code and take this Healthy Owner Assessment that will give you a tangible metric as to the health of your business.
It’s free and wildly helpful.
The U of SC football program had just won the first Bowl Game in the 100-year-plus history of the school.
After joining the rugged and tough SEC in 1992, the Gamecocks were still struggling to be the elite SEC teams like Florida and Tennessee.
Tennessee had a young QB with a head-turning last name…Manning. We had a pony-tailed enthusiast named Taneyhill, along with two offensive lineman, two running backs all headed eventually to the NFL.
We were desperate for a signature win in the SEC.
JAMES DEXTER STORY at Tennessee turning the table over, driving down to the five yard line
Often, in life, sports, and business, we do desperate things in desperate times in order to solve desperate problems.
The last 2 years have created a desperate longing. Let’s articulate the challenge that you are up against today.
PAIN - Skyrocketing material and sub Pricing, Uncertainty, Subcontractor frustrations, Schedule delays, unrealistic clients, and PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE!
Let’s think through some of the desperate things you (or someone you know) may have tried in the midst of a desperate situation in your business…
We are running around, spinning in circles, a slave to an over-heated market, the client, to the employee, to the sub, to the vendor.
And we just want it to STOP. Just for a second so we can catch our breathe.
Talked to a custom builder in Kentucky two weeks ago who said, “I’m actually looking forward to a market slow down.” I was waiting for lightning to strike.
You had a grueling week, and then you have a Saturday where you are fired up about a late breakfast where you are going to eat donuts, cinnamon roles, pancakes, bacon, cheese grits… then after you’re done, you turn on a game on tv watching world-class athletes and think, “I need to work out!”
Chaos can often translate to unhealthy habits because we are vulnerable. In the chaos of the pricing increases or material delays, we tend to rest in the false comfort of cash flow, while KNOWING that we are neglecting the discipline of purpose, process, and systems that will create a long term FIT-ness for us, our team, and the mission we are on in our business.
I’ve seen it reported recently that both Quarterback Russel Wilson and basketball mega-star Lebron James each spend over $1 million on the health and fitness of their mind and body.
Here is a hard reality…trying to control pricing and material logistics is like trying to control the weather…you can’t control the weather, BUT you can forecast and adjust plans based on the latest information…and PRE-PARE.
I love the world prepare…it’s actually two words in Latin
How do we make ourselves and our business ready BEFORE the next step?
A friend of mine, Chad Jeffers is the lead Dobro player for Carrie Underwood. He was passing through Columbia, SC a couple of years ago as we were in town and we had coffee in the lobby of the downtown hotel he and the other band members were staying at.
I asked Chad a simple question that I had never asked, “what is it like to play in front of all of those people?” His response was sobering.
He mentioned that most nights he forgets where he is at, and that the “repetition of the event” can get quite boring. In order to be great and find joy in touring, you’ve got to go back to THE FITNESS of your repetition and training.
In preparation for Carrie Underwood’s Las Vegas residency shows, Chad said…
"Typically for tours (including Vegas) we will rehearse for a month and half to 2 months (7 days a week) prior to the first show. Personally, i prepare for the rehearsals about a month prior to that (especially if we are learning new music). "
Kobe Bryant was 41 when he and his daughter died tragically in a helicopter crash in January of 2020.
He was notorious for his relentless work ethic. Writers Scott Davis and Connor Perrett chronicle some of Bryant’s more remarkable disciplines.
Here is a question for us. It’s easy to scream, yell, turn over tables, run out of the tunnel with a new idea, rally the troops for a momentary push.
What about you? In the face of unpredictable pricing and material concerns, and personnel challenges, and disrupted construction schedules…will you commit to play BEFORE the lights come on??
The best bourbon is PREPARED before it’s aged and evaporated.
The best wine is PREPARED with full ingredients before it sits.
Some of you are coming to the BuildExpo hoping for a hail mary, hoping for a silver bullet, a bright idea that will change the game for you.
I want to offer you something else.
When explorer Ernest Shackleton was preparing for his Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he needed the right team. It is said that he published an advertisement…
"Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."
The advertisement may not be true, but Shackleton’s expedition with his crew aboard the “Endurance” was heroic and transformative for an entire British society.
Reading through Alfred Lansing’s aptly titled book “Endurance”, you realize what kept Shackleton and his 27-man crew alive during months of isolation and loneliness in what has been billed as one of the most remarkable pictures of survival in modern history.
What two things kept these men going, when all other expeditions facing similar challenges, died?
FITness and repetition.
In the new unpredictability, do you want to stop spending your days putting out silly fires? You want to discover REAL purpose in your business? You want to make time for what matters most?
To emerge out of the fog in this unpredictable market, you must commit to great preparation by becoming F.I.T.
The most fundamental step to creating a FIT business, is to painstakingly spend time on the fundamentals. Blocking, tackling, throwing, catching
The second step in becoming FIT, is to…
We must go back to the fundamentals, we must invest in people, and in order to restore business FITness in an unpredictable reality, we must…
FINAL STORY:
FITness is no longer optional.
Les and Sara Claxton…Les PREPARED, he made ready, everything is volatile in his world…and he was ready.
Are you?
ACTION: Which of the 3, needs to be your 1st priority after you get out of your seat?
Fundamentals?
Invest In People?
Trail A Mentor
If you want to test your business fitness, go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy
After months of spending time with and getting to know a construction contractor partnership we got to the point where they thought, “We really need help.”
After a few days, they came back and said, “I think we’ll really be ready in about six months… what do you think?”
This is a multi-million dollar, 40-employee business where each partner is having to stay at the office till 10 pm many evenings just to ensure that all of the moving parts of their business and life is being held up. They are spinning plates, juggling balls, throwing hail mary’s, and hoping that when all is tallied up at the end of each year that they have more money than when they began.
I asked simply, “what will be different in six months?”
They looked at each other at a loss for thought, “probably nothing” they replied.
In that moment I had a decision to make, give in to their excuses, or tell them the truth.
The truth is that they have the bones of a great, legacy business and yet they are at risk of losing their friendship and their family if they continue down the hair-on-fire path they were currently on.
I decided to respond with the mind of a coach instead of the mind of a placater, “you need to make time to begin right now…you have no time to waste, and if you do kick the can down the road, you will never get that time back…and time is ticking fast.”
They did not hesitate and we began a powerful coaching relationship.
Not everyone is ready for coaching. In fact, we have a 26-point checklist that each of our coaches use to determine the fit of an ideal client.
There are three questions we ask in particular that tell us if an entrepreneur and business owner are ready for a coaching relationship.
First, are they willing to make time for coaching and implementation?
We are told by many business owners, I can’t find the time. You will never magically find time… there is no more time to be found. We are all allotted the same quantity distributed at the exact same frequency.
There is no more time to find.
Instead, will you manufacture your schedule in such a way that you prioritize the content of your coaching to learn, install, and implement?
You must take the time you have and make it conform to your vision.
Coaching is not primarily counseling where you layout a problem and then discuss psychological mechanisms to leverage in the future when those situations arise (although there is plenty of psychology in coaching).
Coaching is game-planning, forethought, scouting, play-calling, no-nonsense communication, enforcing repetition, accountability, and motivation. Coaching is not cheerleading and empty flattery.
You are being coached for one reason... to be liberated from business chaos, so you can make time for what matters most.
Second question we ask is, "Is the business owner or entrepreneur willing to do everything we ask them to do based on the roadmap?"
A sports coach is not taking implementation cues from the player…a sports coach is leading the player into the direction they wish to go. Want to win a championship? It is the coach's job to help you get there. Want to build a team legacy? It is the coach’s job to help you get there.
I’ve seen it before when the coach loses her zeal for accountability, repetition, and implementation, rarely does the player take that responsibility on themselves. The coach creates a roadmap for the player.
Is the player willing to follow the roadmap even when it seems incongruent?
A final question we ask is, “does the business owner or entrepreneur have more money coming in the front door than is going out the back door?”
We have become too comfortable with what I’ll call day-to-day debt. Assuming that it is normal and customary for us to credit-card and line-of-credit ourselves into and out of situations.
We can brag on our profit and loss statements all day, but we all know inherently those are usually numbers on a page instead of cash in accounts.
In every business we have ever worked with, there are leaks, holes in the financial hull of the business. It is normal, but we should never be lulled into being ok with the holes long-term. Instead, we want to plug the holes and shutter the back door where appropriate payables get shipped out, but everything else is retained for reinvestment or just fun profit!
If the business is in a tailspin habit of spending tomorrow’s deposits on yesterday's payables, it is hard for anyone to help that situation without major intervention.
We’re not looking for perfectly healthy businesses, we are looking for business owners and entrepreneurs who have real desire to grow, to do things differently, leading them to a place where they are liberated from chaos.
In short, it is time to hire a coach when you are ready to do things different, to make time for the things that really matter, and follow principled leadership and wisdom in the mapped-out repetition of great discipline that leads to freedom.
Delegation… handing off things to your team to allow you to do what ONLY you need to be doing in your business. It’s powerful and necessary, but how do you take a task from delegation to done the right way? Well, let’s talk about that today.
Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
So last week I sat in on an interview and we were discussing how the candidate had implemented change in places he has worked before. And he introduced to us his process for delegating and training tasks. I just started smiling as he basically explained to us what we ask our business owners to do when they let go of certain tasks and hand it off to the rest of the team.
He explained it in simple terms in a 4 step process that I’ll walk you through today.
First, there’s a directive. A verbal communication of what is being asked to do. If you want someone to take over-invoicing all new clients and getting their payment set up, they have to be told it’s their responsibility now.
It never fails, we hear business owners complain all the time that things aren’t getting done. When we drill down a bit, they have taught them how to do the task, they have even let them do it from time to time, but they have never communicated that this is now on their job role and 100% (or however much you desire) of the responsibility and execution of the task is handed over. There has to be a directive that tells them what the expectation now is.
From there, comes coaching. A fully built-out process that explains step by step how to you would like it done. Leaving absolutely nothing out. Don’t say, oh well they should know how to do that part… I promise you, it is worth your time to write every step out with pictures or a video teaching them how to do it.
Doing it alongside them and coaching them to do it EXACTLY the way you want it done. Equipping them and encouraging them as you reinforce your directive.
Third, comes support and accountability. What happens if they have questions? Here are resources for them. Here’s when you will check back on them. Asking them at team meetings if it’s done and how it’s going. Asking if there is anything missing from the process and supporting them as they take it over. Even understanding how long they will need before it is time for them to take it all over.
That’s the support they need and that will ensure they are ready for the last step.
Simply Do it. Take it over. It’s their responsibility that has been communicated, coached on, supported, and then ultimately owned by them.
Now, let’s pause for a second. Typically, we jump from step one to four. Directive/Delegation and then you take it and own it. But what does that lead to? Frustration decreased performance and you thinking your employee is less capable than they actually are.
If you skip the coaching step, there is accountability and support, but no clear tangible process for them to use. If you skip the accountability and support, there is not feedback loop to understand if they actually understand the task at hand.
All four steps seamlessly go together. They must all be completed. And I can hear it now, Thomas this is going to take forever. And my answer? It’s worth it, if it helps you get something off your plate and done effectively day after day after day. Because you’re not delegating something so that you can own it again in 30 days. No, you want this off your plate to free you up for something else. Business development or a new role that only you can filL!
So make sure it’s done the right way. Don’t skip steps.
Direct and communicate, coach them up, offer support and accountability, then free them up to do it and own it.
That’s it. That’s how you delegate. That’s how you liberate yourself and your business from chaos.
That’s what it’s all about!
Ok, we’re finally sitting down to meet 1 on 1 with our employees. So what do we ask? Well, let’s talk about that today.
Good afternoon, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
The thing we have been pushing our clients to do more than anything is to sit down and meet with your employees. Spend time listening and learning. Good employees have become a currency in and of themselves, and the businesses that are thriving right now are, typically, ones with solid employees.
So, we have been pushing our clients to meet with all key leaders once a week or every other week at a minimum, and then meet with everyone else once a quarter. It’s incredibly valuable and communicates that you desire to hear what they have to say and invest in them individually.
In a world where people are looking around for new jobs in record numbers, every meeting counts and every meeting communicates you want them to stick around for a long time.
But the thing we hear more than anything is this…” what do I ask them about?” Or…” what do we check-in on?”
Well, we built a check-in process to guide you through that.
The first thing we want to ask is a general question to open up communication. We typically ask, “Ok, what are you seeing right now?” Super general and allows you to capture their eyes for a period of time. It’s incredibly valuable as they are operating at a ground level in a way you are not. Listen, write down what they say, and decide if it’s something you need to dive in on or something that needs to be tabled. Then, repeat it back to them. Let them know you heard.
Next, we ask, “How are you seeing us live out our mission and values?” This is reinforcement of what truly matters. You will find out quickly if they even know what they are! But will also help you see some truly awesome things that are going on around your business.
Third, we ask, “Do you have any questions about your job role?” Clarifying questions to make sure they know what they’re being asked to do. Then, if there’s ever tough conversations down the road, you can point to these check-ins where you intentionally asked them if they were confused on their job role. It’s valuable and will keep them feeling supported.
Next, “Anything you need from me?” Again, support and shows you want them to succeed and are willing to help. More often than not, you will hear, “I’m good.” Especially if you’re doing these meetings regularly, but when something comes up here, it’s dynamite and helps y’all feel like you’re pulling in the same direction and on the same team. Keep listening.
Here’s where I typically stop and ask any clarifying questions you want to hear more about. Don’t go too long and try to answer everything at this one meeting. Some things are fine to hold off on, but feel the freedom to dig if need be.
The last question is actually your chance to share. And it starts with… here’s what I see. It’s your chance to offer feedback both positive and negative. That way you’re not waiting until your yearly review with an employee for them to hear something that frustrated you back in March. Dive in and tell them what you’re seeing. It keeps short accounts. Its holding your team accountable and allowing you to course-correct along the way instead of trying to right the ship way on down the road.
So that’s it. Take notes, start a file for each employee and consistently ask the same questions…again, and again, and again.
Use the answers to build content to go through at your team meetings. To build training…as if one employee has a question, there’s a good chance that multiple are wondering the same thing and just haven’t had the guts to ask yet.
This is a game-changer. Your employees need to be listened to and need to hear from you! It is team building…It’s accountability, it’s getting a little bit better every week.
Try it, write it down and let us know how it goes. I think you will be shocked at the progress you can make over a course of time by just committing to checking in with your team.
Thanks!
Hey, y’all Brent Perry with Business on Purpose.
Legally and hypothetically speaking, of course, but the question to ask yourself today is this, would I bet on my business to be profitable this year? Hopefully, your answer is yes, but the more business owners I have the privilege to talk with the more I realize there is uncertainty in that answer.
Now I am not asking if you want your business to be profitable. Or if you are hoping to be profitable this year. I am not even asking if you have been profitable in the past. Again, this is a legal/hypothetical question, if you actually had to bet real, hard-earned cash out of your pocket, would you bet on your business to be profitable this year?
This past weekend was the KY Derby, and wow, what a race it was. I will be the first to admit that I am not a huge horse race kind of guy. I do love riding, and I love sports, I just don’t follow the world of horse racing that closely. Luckily I have some friends who do. And as we gathered on Saturday to celebrate the Derby, they were telling me about the field of racers this year. Apparently, it was a fairly stacked field, with 5-6 horses with similar odds to outright win the race.
These horses would be considered the favorites, if you will, to bet on. The horses thought to have the best shot to win the race…aka the ones most people were betting on. These horses were the thoroughbreds, the ones with incredible pedigrees, the horses who have actually won some races in the past, and were being picked to take home 1st place.
Now, let me tell you about the horse, Rich Strike.
Rich Strike had an 80–1 odds to win the race, making it the second-longest shot to win in Derby history, per the NBC broadcast. Rich Strike started in the worst possible position out of the gate. And Rick Strike won the Kentucky Derby.
This horse pulled off the win against some of the other favorites like Epicenter (one of the horses I mentioned earlier), who entered the race with the best odds and finished second on Saturday.
Not only were his odds incredibly low, and his starting position the worst, Rich Strike wasn’t even slated to be running the race until the Friday before the derby and he was signed up 30 seconds before the deadline.
This is not the horse most people take a bet on. But this is the horse that won.
One of my favorite quotes from the Horse's owner, Eric Reed stated, “This horse is just getting good … getting better every race.”
That’s enough about horses, let's get back to your business.
I don’t know how you are feeling this year about your business. Again, the question I am asking today is about profitability.
Are you one of the favorites that before this year began you would have bet on? Only to be slowing down and watch others around you pass you by.
Are you one of the 80-1 odds that nobody gave a chance, but now you are seeing business grow and profit come easy?
Or are you simply somewhere in the middle of the pack?
The good news is, that it is not too late to change your race!
And 2 quick tips, it starts with
If you want your business to be profitable you have to know where you are heading, and why you want to get there. Your vision has to be detailed and has to be shared with others.
You also need to have diversified bank accounts and a system to track your money (both incoming and outgoing). We recommend 5 and one of those accounts, you guessed it a profit account!
If you want some more information and thoughts about your vision or your banking strategy, please feel free to reach out to us at Business on Purpose. We absolutely love these kinds of conversations. And we love seeing your businesses profitable.
Thanks for listening.
If you haven’t done so already, subscribe to our Podcast, and/or our YouTube channel.
Also, check out our website here, and if you haven’t done so already, take the Healthy Owners Assessment located on the home page.
I had a client turn down a 1.2 million dollar job this week. 25% of his yearly revenue. Let’s talk about why?
Good afternoon, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
If there’s a phrase that I’ve heard over and over this year, it’s “we gotta make money while there’s money to be made.” There’s a scarcity mindset that is going around in the contractor space. Prices are still on the way up, and yet people continue to build, and work continues to be there for the taking.
So, is all work the same? Is all work worth taking, no matter who the client is and no matter what it costs you? Well, most people today would find a way to make it work. Well, we can hire and train quickly and we’ll find a way to get it done. Straight into emergency mode. Straight into the chaos. And yet, that decision is made out of emotion and not with a plan in place. It’s almost destined to fail or be awful throughout.
I was so proud recently when I sat down with one of my clients and they said, you’d be proud of me… I turned down 1.2 Million dollars of business yesterday. What? I was losing my mind. Walk me through it.
I had someone approach me about a 1.2 million dollar job and I told them we couldn’t do it.
Well, why? I started smiling as I knew where this was going.
A lot of reasons. We don’t have the team in place to be able to get the work done. It would have meant hiring guys we don’t yet trust to keep the rest of the business going. Force training them and sending them out unprepared for that magnitude of a job.
Not to mention the collateral damage of relationships with people who work with us weekly and monthly. What am I supposed to tell them when all of a sudden ⅓ of my workforce is out of commission for the next 2 months and I can’t service the jobs they have sent me all along?
Not to mention we probably won’t be able to maintain the quality we aim for or the work-life balance that we hold our team to. All of which are core values. It distracts us from who we want to be as a team and where we’re headed.
Even though it’s 1.2 million dollars?
Absolutely.
I was blown away. Think about what he just said. 25% growth wasn’t worth it because it was a distraction. Because it wasn’t fair to his team, the business partners he works with on a regular basis, or to his family, as he knew it would be long hours, and sacrificing time with them was not an option.
Proud? Man, that’s an understatement. But here’s what I was most impressed by. This wasn’t a tough decision. He had a filter that he put the decision through that removed emotion from the equation. It was an easy decision that weighed on him about as much as if he turned down a chick fila biscuit because he was on a diet. He had his priorities and stayed the course towards his vision.
That is powerful.
So here’s the question for you. Do you have a filter that you run everything through? Do you know what jobs you want and which ones to steer clear of? Do you allow emotion to push you around and do you see the massive top line revenue number and think…we have to find a way to make this work? That’s short-term thinking. But the work has to be done before that decision is ever made.
I’ll never forget this same client about lost his mind on a half a million-dollar commercial job last year. After that job was finished we came back to the drawing board and built out parameters for when and how to take a job. What was important about billing and draws and retainage? Who does he trust in the industry and how does he work well with them?
That hard work on the front end helped this decision a year later all the easier. He knew what that job cost him from a reputation, a team, mental health, and a family health perspective and he knew how to prevent that from ever happening.
Now here’s the flip side. This won’t be the last massive contract he’s offered. I asked him, do you ever want to be able to take on a job like this? Absolutely he said. Great, now let’s put the work in to build a business that can support that type of job without sacrificing the other pieces. That’s the magic right there. Not letting the tail wag the dog, but building the business that is ready for a 1.2 million dollar contract without being distracted from the vision along the way.
So take the time to think through this. Is every contract or sale the same? Is it costing you things you aren’t realizing…and how do you put the work in to say no out of principal instead of just figuring it out.
That’s good stuff today y’all! Thanks for listening.
A business owner called me and said simply, “my people are getting their rear ends kicked right now, do you know of a good motivational speaker?”
Within a few weeks, I show up ready to deliver a powerful talk on the RPMs of leadership (repetition, predictability, and meaning) and then follow it up with our super fun and engaging DISC workshop so that this team of project managers, purchasers, warranty care members, and general managers could work through the importance of speaking to people the way they wished to be spoken to.
We worked through the realities of competing personalities and, in some cases, warring agendas.
It was a powerful two-hour window of time and left each of the team members trying to understand their colleagues, customers, and trade partners better.
But then what?
The motivation was there. The new insights, the curiosities, and the nuances were all uncovered, evaluated, and role-played to some extent.
But now what?
A two-hour workshop is part insight, part motivation. Insights can spark a lifetime of curiosity, motivation will typically only ignite a short-term explosion that can leave a mark… but then go away.
How do we take the short term value of motivation and merge it with the long term necessities of repetition, predictability, and meaning so that what we set in motion one day, like a rocket lifting to space, can be strategically placed into a cyclical orbit that brings long term value?
First, we must remember that motivation is momentary.
Some things in our home and business lives simply don’t last very long, and yet have the power to wake us up to something that could change our lives.
We see this played out medically when a friend has a sudden, non-fatal heart attack. That momentary situation acts as a wake-up call by which the patient now has a decision, use the heart attack as a catalyst to repetitively change their lifestyle, or simply reflect on this near-death moment as a cool story, but little else.
Cardiology circles are filled with stories of patients who did not respond to the wake-up call with long-term, sustained changes. Sure, they had the gym membership, and purchased the diet foods… but on Tuesday, when it mattered, they opted for donuts and video games on the couch.
When you bring in a shot of motivation, it must be followed with a drip of repetition.
The second way to bring long-term value from a singular motivational event is, there must be a repetitive home for the long-tail of motivation.
The smoothest and most natural repetitive check in to a solitary motivational event is the agenda-driven, leader-led, weekly team meeting.
This predictable, repetitive event can become home to the ongoing follow-up to the singular motivation… if you make it so.
Business offices are filled with team members who wished that their leadership would hold to a powerful, repetitive, agenda-driven team meeting.
The reason we mock meetings is because most meetings are wasting our precious time. It is not the meeting (by definition) that is bad, it is the poor leadership of that meeting that wastes what is precious to us.
Most clients we work with have spent time, effort, and energy to make their meetings meaningful and important. There are still a few trying to play dress-up with their meetings and talking a bigger game than they are living.
It’s up to you, if you want a culture you can be proud of, and your co-workers will want to invite their friends to be a part of… then the team meeting will become a priority.
It is the one place where your entire team can wrestle through agenda issues, and get on the same page with the motivation that you have been sharing.
As always, in making motivation last, remember that hail-mary play calling is not a winning strategy.
Watch any sport and you will only see the equivalent of a hail-mary executed in moments of real desperation, and typically at the very end of the game.
When successful, we are lured into believing that we can operate this way all of the time. Some even believe that certain players or teams can rely on hail mary’s because “they are skilled at it”.
Real skill comes through the daily, repetitive, predictable, play calling of forethought game-planning and scenario scouting. Hail mary’s are a losing strategy long term.
Go ahead, hire your motivational speaker…but not until you have a long-term plan for implementing the short-term shot.
Look at your calendar. Do it. Obviously, this week is slammed, how bout next? And the next? So when does the faucet cut off so that you actually have some time back on your hands and things slow down? Well, let’s talk about that today. Good morning Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
I saw a meme the other day and I just laughed. Because it represents the way pretty much all of us live our lives week after week after week!
Here it is:
Adulthood is saying, “But after this week things will slow down a bit,” Over and over until you die!!!
I was dying laughing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said the same thing. Next week is a slower week, let’s connect then. And if I’m not careful, I look up and it’s Thursday afternoon and I’m wondering where that slower week I told everyone about actually was!
So, is that you? Are you the person who, at church or your weekly golf match, when asked how you’re doing…always tends to answer, busy man how are you? You deserve a busy badge!
But seriously, who isn’t busy! We fill our weeks with a lot of things that matter and a lot of things that truly don’t! So how do we take our weeks back? How do we begin to own our time and get above the chaos of pretending like life is going to magically slow down in the near future?
I’ve got a secret for you..it’s not going to unless you force it to! Or unless you organize that business and chaos into something that makes a lot more sense.
Here’s another secret for you. It starts with a weekly schedule. Now… I’m not talking about a calendar that tells you what to do. I’m guessing all of you have that.
What I’m talking about is a schedule… intentionally built out in advance of your week that tells it what it will look like. A plan. Same thing with any event. You build out a schedule of everything that needs to happen to make sure that you have enough time for it all.
Your week should be no different. It should be a dictated, time-blocked event that takes place with margin for surprises.
We always say around here, “Chaos is not optional, submitting to chaos is!”
What that means is that chaos inevitably happens. Something takes longer than it should have. There’s a mistake on the job site. Supply chain gets wonky and takes longer to get to you than it should have. However, having a plan in place helps you be able to respond to that chaos so you don’t collapse underneath it.
So let’s take your week and build out your weekly schedule. Take 10 min and write down the big blocks of things you do every week. Or if it’s easier for you to look at the next 2 weeks to get an idea, that’s great too.
Do you need multiple blocks for job site visits? Or team training? Estimating, invoicing, bookkeeping, email…you name it. And write down how much time you think you will need to accomplish that task this week. If it’s 2 hours, twice a week, write it down. Is it an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon every day? Great! What time best fits in your schedule and when works best for you to be most alert for those tasks?
Now go down your list and begin adding to your weekly schedule. The reason we do this is so that you can be fully engaged in your task at hand. How many times have you been answering an email that took some thought? The phone rings, Oh I’ll just pick it up and answer this one quick question. While you’re on the phone, your admin walks in and needs you to sign a few things and look over the schedule for next week.
Ok, I’ll just do this for her real quick. By the time you get back to the email, you have no idea where you were, so it takes you an extra 5 min to finish the email as you lost your entire train of thought!
It happens all day every day right?!?!
But a weekly schedule is different. It’s sitting down to answer email and setting a timer if that helps, saying I have an hour to do a deep dive, and everything else can wait. There’s very few emergencies that can’t wait an hour. It’s walking onto a job site and telling the crew, hey guys I’m leaving at 11, so think through what you need from me today and get all your questions out! It’s amazing how efficient your team can be when they are forced to operate on your schedule.
I think you’ll be shocked at how quickly you get tasks finished when you’re not trying to multi-task on 4-5 different things! Things get done more efficiently and you have blocks with margin in between to put out those fires that may pop up.
Lastly, if you’re anything like my client, you will get really good at accomplishing this schedule so that you have more time throughout the week.
And here’s the last thing I get asked all the time. Thomas, what if I fail at keeping this thing. And here’s how I always respond. The purpose of this is to make a plan. A plan that is tweaked is still a plan. Let the weekly schedule serve you, don’t serve your weekly schedule. Let it illuminate the areas that you need more training or the areas that may need a bit more or less time each week. Review it every Friday for the next week, so that you’re ready to roll on Monday.
It’s powerful and freeing so that you never have to say that quote I started today with. Hopefully, you begin to lean into rhythms where weeks are manageable and there is a slower week from time to time. Because you’ve planned and bought that time for yourself.
It’s a big deal y’all and it’s doable!
I hope you enjoyed thanks for listening…
I was volunteering as the public address announcer for the team my son plays on at his local High School.
Armed with a cobbled-together sound system, a prescribed playlist, a microphone, and a few corny dad-jokes, we try to provide a little light humor throughout the competition of a High School game. Most games are a lot of fun. But the off-field activity of this last game was not.
Parents from the visiting team began heckling when we did not announce their children’s names each time they scored: we never have for any visiting team for a variety of reasons.
On a spring evening in the beautiful low country of South Carolina, in a sport where very few players will go on to play in college, parents began rebuking the volunteer Dad running the music and making some announcements.
Why?
We struggle with empathy as a culture. We are in a civic landscape where if someone is not 100% right or good, then they are immediately painted as 100% wrong or bad.
There seems to be little in between, little grace extended, little camaraderie, or lightheartedness.
The core of our disdain for our neighbors, even the ones who are volunteering their time and effort has to do with shame.
Shame is a two-way activity; as I deliver shame, I am able to build myself up while concurringly tearing you down.
In her important book The Gift Of Imperfection, author Brene Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
Brown says that shame needs three ingredients to “grow out of control in our lives”; secrecy, silence, and judgment.
In a description that hits too close to home, Brown describes shame as “that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.”
Shame typically enters our practical vocabulary when accountability has been breached. Either we fall short, or someone we know or work with falls short of expectations and immediately we armor up, batten the hatch, and began launching shame grenades in an effort to cover up the discrepancy.
Someone missed this mark (even if it is us) and we go to war to protect our reputation and standing among our network. Shame is an effective short-term tool with blistering short-term results.
Unfortunately, for shame’s sake, we live in a long-term world where relationships and connections are vital to human flourishing.
Shame tears down with no plans or strategy to rebuild. Shame embeds itself like a tapeworm looking to grow and shut down the entire system. The seeds of shame produce a lifetime of shameful fruit.
Accountability is vital to life. Without accountability to drinking water or eating food, the human body shrivels and wastes away. The human body has been designed with an accountability feedback loop alerting the mind to present starvations.
Accountability is vital to organizational life. Without accountability to finance, product development, team leadership, marketing or sales, the organizational body shrivels and wastes away. The organizational body must be designed with similar accountability feedback loops that alert the leadership to present starvations.
The mind doesn’t blame the body when the body doesn’t have enough to feed on. The mind simply responds with what the body needs as efficiently as possible.
Accountability is a healthy process that has been badly battered through the delivery system of shame.
A different delivery system is needed that will allow healthy accountability to be dispensed over a healthy and sustained duration.
That long form delivery system is encouragement and empathy.
To lead with encouragement is to literally inspire with courage.
When we respond to a team member with encouragement, we lend them courage so their courage grows feasting off the courage we share.
In order to lend courage, we must first be able to understand where the discouragement is coming from.
Empathy is a powerful tool in understanding the challenge or discouragement of another person. Empathy is to feel what another person feels, or even more intensely to feel the suffering of another person.
We all have joys and we all have sufferings, empathy is when we actively make a hard choice to keep our shame grenades locked away, and instead begin to proactively share courage with another person precisely at the point they feel or show weakness.
How do you balance the truth of accountability with the courage of empathy? There is no balance, we may feel free to use both in endless quantities with a blank check. Accountability can only be effective for the long term when empathy is the delivery mechanism.
Even though my response to the heckling parents was primarily internal, it was equally as shameful as I created a dirty list in my own mind of what I would have said had an opportunity developed.
It did not. They went home probably embarrassed by their actions. I went home embarrassed by my more private response.
We have a choice on what to share and how to share it.
Our family’s mission is to be a light through wisdom, adventure, and time around the table.
Our family mission ties directly into the mission we have here at Business On Purpose which is to liberate heroic business owners, just like you, from the chaos of working IN your business.
So that you can ENJOY your business, maximize the impact that it can have on your family and your community, and make time for what matters most!
For a ground rule...IGNORE THE NOISE and distraction…
“It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise, and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work.”
We are about to SHOW you our work. It’s up to YOU to implement
Surveying hundreds of heroic business owners just like you over the past few years we have heard loud and clear one of the biggest challenges that you face in your business...the feeling that you will never be able to step away from your business b/c you are SO busy working IN your business.
Imagine the day, a lady named Josephine comes walking in your workspace, opens up a combo-locked suitcase and says simply…
“I am ready to buy your business at a 4 times multiple of your annual earnings IN CASH right here on the spot...with two conditions…
...First, we have to be able to run your business the same EXACT way that you run your business right now, from the sales calls, to the payroll schedule, to the lead generation, to the production and everything in between. I will not require you stay on an earn out...but we need the entire business map so your valued customers will never feel the switch…
Second, you have 30 minutes to make your decision and we will expect the roadmap to be in our hands and training to begin immediately using ONLY that roadmap as our training (you will not be allowed to “wing” any of it from your head!”
Could you do it?
You might say, “No one would ever do that.” Ummm, we’ve seen crazier.
Then you will say, “that is totally unreasonable to expect that a business owner would have her entire business mapped out SO THAT THE TEAM COULD RUN IT.”
Or is it?
We can say with definition that your business is certainly more “sellable” with a comprehensive systems roadmap in place because your team can run it!
Of course, this entire example may be totally lost you on because you would never have the intention of selling your business anyway.
No problem.
But wouldn’t you like your business to depend LESS on you, and more on the RIGHT TEAM? That is a business that compensates you with intentional time, meaningful freedom, and the money to pay for it all?
Don’t you want your business to help facilitate your passions and convictions? To serve others without killing yourself?
Wouldn’t you love to do what Eric Burton did, and leave your business for 31 days and it would continue to hum along?
We have determined through our own experience that about 8 out of 10 Small Business Owners are being OWNED by their business which means that even if they wanted to sell, no one would ever pay to OWN a business THAT OWNS THEM!
How do we break out of the prison of our own business?
How do we finally get off the treadmill?
How do we stop constantly putting out fires and feeling pulled in 17 different directions?
How do we stop the habit of throwing Hail Mary’s in our business everyday?
One way to try is to simply continue doing things the way you have been doing them. Of course we know where that leads...INSANITY!
The other way is to replicate the delivery of every part of our small business and make it so predictable others can run it the EXACT SAME WAY WE WOULD.
And, it also gives those team members the FREEDOM to use their skill set instead of being slowed by confusion.
We are so obsessed about trying to find the right people…when in reality the more predictable strategy is to build a great SYSTEM where a variety of people can come join in.
Remember the old Jewish phrase?
In Jewish lore, there is a powerful statement that we have found to hold true since the centuries it was first written, “Write the Vision down so that those who read it may run!”
The same is true for the processes that make up the Vision. In fact, we may even make our own statement to say, “Write the processes down so that those who read AND IMPLEMENT THEM, may run...the business!”
Truth is...if you don’t write it down...you don’t OWN it…and neither can your team
Did you know that your business doesn’t have to own you?
Did you know that you DON’T have to feel like you are on a treadmill?
Did you know that owning a small business doesn’t have to feel like a daily cliff dive with no visibility and no parachute?
Owning a business can be the ultimate opportunity to set others free to live in their skill set, to serve customers, employees family’s, vendors, your local community, and your global community...all at the same time!!!
That’s right. Your business can be a MASSIVE force for living out your convictions and serving others. BUT, it will never get there by doing the things that got you to this point.
As I built this presentation, over my screen was an incredible view of the tidal creek behind our house in the lowcountry of South Carolina. It is a constant reminder of a real, living, breathing process that just operates on auto-pilot every day.
Behind our house, the tide comes in anywhere between 7-9’, and then six hours later is completely empty. That’s right, 7-9’ of water floods the marsh and then completely empties out...EVERY 6 hours, 12 minutes and 30 seconds the tide comes in and the tide comes out...EVERYDAY!
The tides are a process. Just like the earth’s rotation and the seasons are a process. Processes are simply a “a series of repeatable actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”.
When process is NOT in place, what you may get is creative, but it will not be repeatable creativity...and if it is not repeatable then OTHER people will not run it the way you want them to…they will make it up as they go.
When process IS in place, what you get is a replication of the original creativity. I’m so glad the sunset is a process, b/c it is something that we like to enjoy on repeat!
When you are starting your business, every time you bake that cake, repair that brake, or stack that crate, you are doing something that could be processed so you NEVER have to do it again…AND you are equipping someone else to live out their unique skill set.
When you process all of the individual steps, you are equipping and empowering others to bake that cake, fix that brake, or stack that crate so that you can focus on the other elements of serving customers, like payables, receivables, inventory, and office management.
Then once those are processed, then you are again equipping and empowering others to facilitate payables, receivables, inventory, and office management, soooooo that you can focus on generating new leads and onboarding new customers.
Then once those are processed, then you are again equipping and empowering others to facilitate to….
Hint: Rinse and Repeat
Do you see where this is going?
Imagine you had EVERY process in your business documented. It could be written down, it could be recorded on video…regardless, it brings massive clarity to every one you might bring into the business.
Imagine, just like NASA has EVERY single detail of flying a spaceship to the documented...imagine that you had EVERY process in your business documented.
THEN, once documented, you focused the majority of your time on training the processes to capable people who could replicate your brilliance and creativity!
Every basic franchise has done it from hamburgers to window washing. That’s what a franchise IS. When you buy a franchise, you are essentially buying a process map to walk you step by step through how to make a hamburger, or pick up garbage, or unload a truck, or change brake pads, or build websites.
Franchises exist for EACH of those services and thousands more.
I’m not even saying that you want to franchise your business...but wouldn’t it be great if others could run your business with the same clarity, MISSION and focus that you run your business with?
IT CAN HAPPEN!
You can do it!
See you at the top!
INSERT MOTIVATIONAL CLICHE HERE!
Welcome to the process map. On this one magic sheet of paper, you will document the title of EVERY major process that makes your business work.
With this one magic sheet of paper, the process clarity that comes with, AND (never forget) LOTS OF REPETITIOUS IMPLEMENTATION, you will create a repeatable business that pushes you towards your Vision, consistently lives out your mission, and is completely in line with your unique core values.
With this one magic sheet of paper, you will have built a curriculum for training that will make you feel like you are running a full scale business university for your team. Training will become a hallmark of your small business. The product will become less and less the focus and training your team to deliver a great product will increase with habit and time.
Story: Gerrick Taylor planting 52 palm trees...now GT spends his days working ON Taylors (vision planning, training, pioneering new locations, etc.) and coaching middle school football
In order to create a business that could run without you, you must build a team that is excited to run without you…which means you must build a map that accurately reflects your business so those who read it may run.
Welcome to the construction of a business.
In business, we tend to get distracted by what is on the outside. We see logos, signs, branding, and products and we think “Wow, they are CRUSHING IT!”
While inside, the owner of that business feels like they are the ones being crushed by the weight of chaos and burden. They own the business…but in reality the business owns them and they feel like somewhere deep inside what they have really built is a house of cards.
Every business has five cornerstones, on concrete slab foundation, and four wall systems.
These are the PRINCIPLES of the business…
Harrington Emerson, the American efficiency engineer known for his pioneering contributions to the field of management, once said, “As to methods (processes), there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The person who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The person who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
Let’s dive into PRINCIPLES
First, the five foundational cornerstones of every business whether you are building homes, remodeling back porches, selling ice cream
Next, every business must have a sturdy concrete foundation that is made up of the ingredients of culture and planning.
Finally, every business has four primary systems that must operate with repetition and predictability…again whether they are selling sport coats, architectural services, or decking products.
We must be careful that we are not so lost and distracted by the day to day fires of payables, receivables, sub-contract challenges, material delays…and instead we build systems and people to work through that while YOU focus on the emotionally taxing and important work of working ON the business.
Don’t become so focused on the beauty of the interior design, that you forget to take care of the foundation.
To understand each of these is to build a business that makes time for what matters most with the one resource that is non-renewable…your time.
Talk to business owner after business owner and the one thing they will constantly preach is equipping and training their team. Talent grows as training grows, yet too many of us rely on “raw talent” and get burned in the end.
Give me world-class training with average talent who implements EVERYDAY over world-class talent and average training...EVERYDAY.
The little known secret is when you begin to offer world-class to average talent...the talent will eventually rise to the training!
Let me show you how to build a process roadmap that will buy you time for what matters most and get you off of the treadmill!
SHOW PROCESS ROADMAP and highlight…
“Yeah Scott…we’ve got this…but it’ll just sit on the shelf like everything else”
You’re right…IF YOU LET IT.
So where do you put it so you will use it?
YOUR TEAM MEETINGS
Allow me to give you a real life example.
Our BOP Coaching team realized we had a breakdown in our New Client Onboarding process. One of our coaches brought this up, we added it to our Weekly Coaches Meeting written agenda…we reviewed it as a team.
Our process was updated, our Master Process Roadmap reflected it, and we moved on
The greatest gift you can give your business and your team is the gift of clarity from chaos.
How? IMPLEMENTATION.
I will take a half-baked plan with full implementation versus a perfect plan with half-baked implementation.
I quote Joe Calloway all of the time because it is so powerful, “Vision without IMPLEMENTATION is hallucination”.
If you take time to build out proper software with a proper processes, you will have greater clarity in the WHO of your business.
Josephine is standing with a briefcase of cash…could you take the deal??
FInd out right now…while you are sitting here and we go into Q&A time, I want you to scan this QR code and take this Healthy Owner Assessment that will give you a tangible metric as to the health of your business.
It’s free and wildly helpful.
STORY
The U of SC football program had just won the first Bowl Game in the 100-year plus history of the school.
After joining the rugged and tough SEC in 1992, the Gamecocks were still struggling to be the elite SEC teams like Florida and Tennessee.
Tennessee had a young QB with a head-turning last name…Manning. We had a pony-tailed enthusiast named Taneyhill, along with two offensive lineman, two running backs all headed eventually to the NFL.
We were desperate for a signature win in the SEC.
JAMES DEXTER STORY at Tennessee turning the table over, driving down to the five-yard line
Often, in life, sports, and business, we do desperate things in desperate times in order to solve desperate problems.
The last 2 years have created a desperate longing. Let’s articulate the challenge that you are up against today.
PAIN - Skyrocketing material and sub Pricing, Uncertainty, Subcontractor frustrations, Schedule delays, unrealistic clients, and PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE!
Let’s think through some of the desperate things you (or someone you know) may have tried in the midst of a desperate situation in your business…
We are running around, spinning in circles, a slave to an over-heated market, the client, to the employee, to the sub, to the vendor.
And we just want it to STOP. Just for a second so we can catch our breath.
Talked to a custom builder in Kentucky two weeks ago who said, “I’m actually looking forward to a market slow down.” I was waiting for lightning to strike.
You had a grueling week, and then you have a Saturday where you are fired up about a late breakfast where you are going to eat donuts, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, bacon, cheese grits… then after you’re done, you turn on a game on tv watching world-class athletes and think, “I need to work out!”
Chaos can often translate to unhealthy habits because we are vulnerable. In the chaos of the pricing increases or material delays, we tend to rest in the false comfort of cash flow, while KNOWING that we are neglecting the discipline of purpose, process, and systems that will create a long term FIT-ness for us, our team, and the mission we are on in our business.
I’ve seen it reported recently that both Quarterback Russel Wilson and basketball megastar Lebron James each spend over $1 million on the health and fitness of their mind and body.
Here is a hard reality…trying to control pricing and material logistics is like trying to control the weather…you can’t control the weather, BUT you can forecast and adjust plans based on the latest information…and PRE-PARE.
I love the world prepare…it’s actually two words in Latin
How do we make ourselves and our business ready BEFORE the next step?
A friend of mine, Chad Jeffers is the lead Dobro player for Carrie Underwood. He was passing through Columbia, SC a couple of years ago as we were in town and we had coffee in the lobby of the downtown hotel he and the other band members were staying at.
I asked Chad a simple question that I had never asked, “what is it like to play in front of all of those people?” His response was sobering.
He mentioned that most nights he forgets where he is at, and that the “repetition of the event” can get quite boring. In order to be great and find joy in touring, you’ve got to go back to THE FITNESS of your repetition and training.
In preparation for Carrie Underwood’s Las Vegas residency shows, Chad said…
"Typically for tours (including Vegas), we will rehearse for a month and half to 2 months (7 days a week) prior to the first show. Personally, I prepare for the rehearsals about a month prior to that (especially if we are learning new music)."
Kobe Bryant was 41 when he and his daughter died tragically in a helicopter crash in January of 2020.
He was notorious for his relentless work ethic. Writers Scott Davis and Connor Perrett chronicle some of Bryant’s more remarkable disciplines.
Here is a question for us. It’s easy to scream, yell, turn over tables, run out of the tunnel with a new idea, rally the troops for a momentary push.
What about you? In the face of unpredictable pricing and material concerns, and personnel challenges, and disrupted construction schedules…will you commit to play BEFORE the lights come on??
The best bourbon is PREPARED before it’s aged and evaporated.
The best wine is PREPARED with full ingredients before it sits.
Some of you are coming to the BuildExpo hoping for a hail mary, hoping for a silver bullet, a bright idea that will change the game for you.
I want to offer you something else.
When explorer Ernest Shackleton was preparing for his Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he needed the right team. It is said that he published an advertisement…
"Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."
The advertisement may not be true, but Shackleton’s expedition with his crew aboard the “Endurance” was heroic and transformative for an entire British society.
Reading through Alfred Lansing’s aptly titled book “Endurance”, you realize what kept Shackleton and his 27 man crew alive during months of isolation and loneliness in what has been billed as one of the most remarkable pictures of survival in modern history.
What two things kept these men going, when all other expeditions facing similar challenges, died?
FITness and repetition.
In the new unpredictability, do you want to stop spending your days putting out silly fires? You want to discover REAL purpose in your business? You want to make time for what matters most?
To emerge out of the fog in this unpredictable market, you must commit to great preparation by becoming F.I.T.
1. Fundamentals
a. We convened an emergency meeting of our clients in March of 2020 and talked openly about our concerns and realities...and then all committed...
i. “We WILL NOT contribute to chaos, but instead will simply respond to this call-to-action so we can implement the leadership that we have all been invited into.”
b. What are some of the fundamentals of that leadership??…
i. It’s realizing that your business is not a slot machine that you put money in and hope for the best!
ii. Your business is constructed in the same way that your projects are constructed:
1. Five Foundational Cornerstones
2. Firm Foundation made up of 13 Ingredients
3. Four Structural Walls of Admin, Ops, Marketing, and Sales
iii. Your business has a lifecycle just like you do as a human that goes through stages
1. Five Stages Of A Business
2. Each stage requires different engagement from people, and different leadership styles from you
iv. Great News! You can actually build predictability and stability into your business…sure, the tide and tradewinds of the market will impact you, but YOU determine your course
c. STORY:
i. Custom Homebuilder from the West Coast comes into 2020 with a cash account of $32,000 available dollars. $32k on $12mm worth of contracts. That’s it. Within 12 months, by going back to the foundations, they began 2021 with over $300k of available cash, and it continues to grow. What was the silver bullet????
d. FITness and repetition…no silver bullets. Knowing your cash gives you OPTIONS!!!
The most fundamental step to creating a FIT business, is to painstakingly spend time on the fundamentals. Blocking, tackling, throwing, catching
The second step in becoming FIT, is to…
2. Invest In People
a. NY TImes Headline: people are discontent and leaving for “greener pastures” (UPDATE: 4mm quit in January 2022)
i. We can either gripe about the Millennials/Gen Z…or you can stop whining and start investing!!!!! It’s not as expensive as you think…HOW?
b. Invest with Clarity
i. If your team does not know where you are going…THEY WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU and they cannot make great pricing and material decisions!
ii. How? WRITTEN Vision, Mission, Values
iii. How? WRITTEN Cockpit and Master Process Roadmap
iv. How? A clear, old fashioned WRITTEN Org Structure & Job Roles
v. How? BASIC Financial Accountability and Tracking…SIMPLE SPREADSHEETS
c. Invest with Communication
i. Priority…SCHEDULE, SCHEDULE, SCHEDULE
1. Common refrain, “I don’t know why she is so freaked out about missing the Electrical/Framing schedule…we’ll get the billing eventually!”
2. Not realizing that the payroll bell rings EVERY month whether you bill or not
3. In Ted Lasso, Danny says “Football Is Life”...in construction, “Schedule Is Life!”
4. The pricing and material challenges leave ZERO room for unpredictable communication…so HOW?
ii. Non-Negotiable Weekly Meetings (cue eye roll)
1. Weekly meetings don’t have to be pointless, boring, worthless, and a waste of time…
a. If they are consistent, agenda-driven, and leader-led…weekly meetings offer a consistency that your team craves!
b. These are NOT project meetings…those are separate…these are business meetings that build clarity, focus, and camaraderie centered on the MISSION!
d. Invest with Compassion and Empathy
i. The real crisis of our day is not all of the things we think exist from the cable news tapes…the real crisis is a crisis of compassion and empathy
ii. STORY: talking with the psychologist who said that young people now have the capability to show empathy without FEELING empathy
iii. STORY: 3 weeks ago a biz owner walks into our coaching time: Wife whose husband stole her money. They showed AND felt empathy
iv. Your team will be more prone to stay on top of the unpredictability if you lead with empathy and laser focus on the vision
v. Professor Sherry Turkle of MIT has written extensively for decades on the necessity of empathy. What is her solution for the crisis of empathy we find ourselves in?
1. Reclaim the Face to face conversation
2. Brene Brown wrote “People are hard to hate up close”
3. HOW? 5 Question Check Ins at set times on set days
We must go back to the fundamentals, we must invest in people, and in order to restore business FITness in an unpredictable reality, we must…
3. Trail A Mentor
a. Bill Gates famously said, “Everyone needs a coach!”
b. Pricing variations and material disruptions are not new…find others who have navigated past storm patterns…everything has a pattern if we’ll stop long enough to see it
c. Right now…
i. I have a business coaching group I am a participant of weekly, a psychologist monthly, and a speaker coach, two wisdom mentors I meet with 4 times per year, and two guys locally that we meet together for breakfast about 25 times per year
d. …And I’m a professional coach!
e. Everyone needs a coach, because everyone is broken…just admit it!
i. Mentor: (find someone who has a different perspective and who is farther along that you)
f. At the height of their game: Ronaldo still has coaches, Simoan Biles has coaches, Serena Williams has coaches, Tom Brady has coaches, Lebron James has coaches.
g. (PAUSE) - Who is someone further along than you, who is actively mentoring, pushing you right now?
FINAL STORY:
FITness is no longer optional.
Les and Sara Claxton…Les PREPARED, he made ready, everything is volatile in his world…and he was ready.
Are you?
ACTION: Which of the 3, needs to be your 1st priority after you get out of your seat?
Fundamentals?
Invest In People?
Trail A Mentor
CALLS TO ACTION…
https://mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy
2. What questions do you have?
If you want to test your business fitness, go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy
It’s beautiful outside and if you’re anything like me, you’re getting excited for summer right around the corner. It’s so easy to get distracted and to hit that wall at work, so here are 3 questions to ask yourself today, to push through that stall wherever you may work.
Good morning everyone, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose.
It’s natural that around April 15, you’ve mowed your grass a couple of times, spring break just passed, you hopefully paid your taxes and you got your first taste of the summer lifestyle. And then just like that… it’s Monday… yet again!
You lose motivation, your problems start to feel magnified as if they will never change and you feel less and less inclined to put in the work to actually change them!
Am I alone in feeling this way? I don’t think so.
So I want you to write down the 3 questions I’m going to give you today and find some time to think about them. Hopefully, it’s right after we finish, because you and I both know there’s a fire burning in your business the second you stop this video and if you don’t stop to process now, you may never get around to it.
So how do we push through? How do we collect ourselves and commit ourselves to doing work that matters and rising above the chaos? Well, here are 3 questions to help get you on the right track.
What’s your why? Capturing why you wake up and go to work is essential to recapturing that fire in your belly again! And hear me say this. It probably has very little to do with what you do in your day to day. There’s a why behind it all that fuels that work and keeps you going.
2 weeks ago I spent a long time working with some clients of mine who do heavy install work with commercial kitchens. We wrote and wrote and wrote and finally arrived at this… we exist to provide solutions, serve our customers, and set the standard. BOOM! When it was written, we all kind of took a deep breath and said, yep that’s it. You’ll notice that the things that get them excited have very little to do with commercial kitchen installs. But their why resides in being a resource for solutions, service, and being an industry leader by setting the bar.
It pushed them to dive back into team meetings and trainings and hiring because they finally realized what they want it their work. That’s powerful and you need to spend some time thinking through your why!
2. What do I need to delegate today to make time for things only I can do?
So often we’re weighed down by things we need to get rid of. Sometimes it’s us not trusting and training our team around us, other times we’ve just don’t even realize it’s something we can finally let go of. But what things bring you energy that you need to spend more time doing!?! What things will make you feel like you’re gaining ground instead of just trudging along. There’s a great tagalong question for this… ask who not how. Don’t ask, how do i do that… ask who do I need to do this.
Believe it or not, there are people who love bookkeeping, who love invoicing, who love estimating, who want to run errands and help with logistics! There are people uniquely wired to love the parts of your business, you find miserable… so ask who, not how. That’s the key.
3. What gains have I made?
There’s a fantastic book called the Gap and the Gain, where they discuss a lot about what high performers do differently to realize happiness. Instead of focusing on the Gap between where they are and where they want to be, they focus on the gain from where they were to where they are. It’s one of the main reasons we have “Write it down” as a core value. It provides so much energy to teams when they realize how far they’ve come!
Instead of constantly focusing on the negative, how far you have to go, you look back for a period of time and celebrate the journey you’ve been on. There’s always a higher mountain peak to climb, but the process must be celebrated or else you turn into a numb, bitter, end goal-oriented business with no life. What gains have you made? It’s powerful
So, stop what you’re doing for 5 minutes and ask yourselves these 3 questions…
Those questions will frame your week in the proper perspective and get you fired up to keep moving forward…and get unstuck!
I hope you enjoy! Have a great day
What are you holding onto too tightly as a business owner? And how is that holding your team back?
Well, let’s get into that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
At our weekly Check-ins, Scott always asks me the same 5-6 questions, and he tends to sprinkle in one or two that come and go throughout the year. His question last week? What am I holding onto too tightly that I need to let go of?
It’s a question that’s rooted in humility but also rooted in knowing that this business is his baby. And for years he wore every hat in the business. From coaching to bookkeeping, even ordering the toilet paper for our office bathroom. He’s done it all for years. So, sometimes he doesn’t even realize someone is ready to take something off his plate, because you get locked into these rhythms.
But it’s a powerful question because there are areas I’m ready to grow, responsibilities I’m ready to take on that will ensure I continue to grow in my job role and not grow bored with my day to day.
I had a client a few weeks back lose an employee to this exact situation. He called them in for an exit interview and one of the things they said, was that they didn’t feel like their role had any room for growth. They did the same thing day after day and that things were held a little too tightly by the owner even though they had been working together for years.
From an employee's standpoint, they didn’t feel trusted, didn’t feel like there was any room for upward movement or any vision for their purpose in the business.
So, if I asked you the question, how would you answer? What are you holding onto too tightly as a business owner…and taking it a step further, what are you holding onto too tightly that is keeping your team from growing?
Maybe it’s something you need to sit down each employee and have a conversation around. Or maybe you need to chew on it a bit yourself first and then use the answer to cast some vision and think through what growth looks like for each part of your business.
Think about what that communicates.
So, when will you think through this? Maybe it’s taking a client to lunch and asking them what they see from their perspective. Do you have team leaders you can grab 30 min with and roll this question into your weekly check-ins?
Here’s the pushback we get. Well, my employee isn’t ready for more yet. They can’t handle it. Ok, I get that. It’s your job to communicate that in an effective way and train them up to where they are ready for more.
That’s tough to swallow and hard to execute on, but ultimately if we are the leaders of our business, the whole team is following our lead and so responsibility for team development rests squarely on our shoulders.
Don’t take that lightly!
So what are you holding onto too tightly as a business owner? Take some time to think through it today.
Thanks so much for listening… have a great day
What is the difference between a business mentor, consultant, and coach? And why do we choose to be coaches? Let’s dive in and talk through that today.
Hey there everyone! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
We got a question last week from someone outside our network who asked us, “So what really is the difference between business mentors, consultants, and coaches?”
I thought it was a great question because to most people it’s just a different way of saying the same thing. So what do each do well, and what are the shortcomings of each?
Well, let’s start with business mentors. Kind of the most unofficial of the 3. Everyone should have a business mentor. Someone who you can take to lunch and just fire off 100 questions. Someone who is a step or two further down the road and may have survived some of the battles you’re facing.
A mentor is a sounding board but largely stays in an unofficial capacity. The beauty of a mentor relationship is they have typically experienced what you are experiencing and can give you some perspective of life on the other side. The drawbacks, well, they are typically not as available to you as you need and are not responsible for holding you accountable. And, from what we see, accountability is huge.
Business consultants are hugely valuable, too! When you think of consultants, they will largely be industry-specific. And there is a time and a place for consultants. If you want to launch a new product line or need industry-specific decision-making help. You need someone who has been there and understands the CRMs and supply chains. Someone who knows the yearly cash flows inside and out and can help you make specific decisions that those outside your industry may not be as knowledgeable about.
Consultants downside? They tend to have a reactive approach to their work. Tell me what hurts and I’ll tell you how to fix it. They can help you through problems in the future, but the majority of their work is reactive vs. proactive.
Consultants typically are temporary. If you hire a consultant who wants to work with you long-term (greater than 2-3 years), run away. They have no stake in the game to help your performance. No metric to reach, just some ambiguous consulting relationship that is open-ended. Now, if you have a 5-year goal to get somewhere and go into it thinking that way, then great! But be wary, if not. By definition, consultants should have a date by which your relationship is dissolved due to the goal being met.
Lastly? Business coaches. Business coaches are somewhat of a hybrid between the two, but like any coach in sports…they have a system. A methodology and philosophy of the way they run a business. Be vary wary of a coach who doesn’t have their system. Just like you would never hire a football coach who couldn’t walk you through their offense or defense, any good coach should be able to tell you what they are walking you through and how much time to install in your business.
Most coaches don’t reinvent the wheel but repackage and organize content in a way that is approachable for business owners and provides incredible oversight and accountability. Coaches don’t want to teach you how to run a contracting business, they want to teach you how to run a business that happens to do contracting work. They don’t want to teach you how to run a landscaping business, they want to walk you through the skills in business that you need to master, to provide a new set of eyes to spy on your business and organize the back end of your finances…for a business that happens to do landscaping.
The downside of business coaches. They are not industry professionals. They may not know high-level accounting or what the perfect sales software is for your business. They can’t be professionals in all industries.
But what they can do is teach you how to run your business, no matter what industry it’s in.
So there you have it! You will probably need all 3 of these positions at some point in your business ownership. We typically coach our businesses to spend between 1 and 3% of their real revenue on coaching or consulting. It’s that vital! There’s a reason guys like LeBron James spend millions of dollars a year on personal trainers, nutritionists, sports psychologists…you name it.
They know that to reach peak performance and to maximize their potential, they need people walking alongside them and holding them accountable to a standard. To use their expertise to bring out the best in them.
The business world is no different. So what are you waiting on?
For us, we specialize in liberating business owners from chaos and we use business coaching as our platform to do just that. If you want a metric for how in chaos you are, take the next 5 min and take our healthy business owners assessment. It’s super easy and will give you a score for how well run your business is on the things that we truly value.
Head on over to boproadmap.com/healthy to take that now!
And please, ask yourself which of these positions could be a value to you today. Have a good one!
3 weeks ago, Shackleton’s ship the Endurance was located 9800 feet beneath the Ocean's surface near the antarctic.
Foundational reality: Your seas are changing, the weather patterns are becoming more unpredictable. Today the swells are 1-2 feet, and in an hour they are 5-8. Chaos is the standard and unpredictability is the new predictable.
Your choice: either take your existing boat out into the unpredictability of the seas… OR learn from what the seas are telling you, and build a different boat.
Would Shackleton, knowing the tumult of the Antarctic, have taken the same boat? Would he have not gone? NO! He would have built a better boat and designed a better map.
Let’s look at the route of the Endurance
28 total men, in barren ice, with torrential weather, full days of either all light/ all dark.
Every single person made it out alive.
But in order to survive, Shackleton displayed the RPMs of Navigating hard things…
New employees are less concerned about the technical expertise from day one, and more concerned about having access to what they need to succeed and feel connected to the culture.
The U of SC football program had just won the first Bowl Game in the 100-year plus history of the school.
After joining the rugged and tough SEC in 1992, the Gamecocks were still struggling to be the elite SEC teams like Florida and Tennessee.
Tennessee had a young QB with a head-turning last name…Manning. We had a pony-tailed enthusiast named Taneyhill, along with two offensive lineman, two running backs all headed eventually to the NFL.
We were desperate for a signature win in the SEC.
JAMES DEXTER STORY at Tennessee turning the table over, driving down to the five-yard line
Often, in life, sports, and business, we do desperate things in desperate times in order to solve desperate problems.
The last 2 years have created a desperate longing. Let’s articulate the challenge that you are up against today.
PAIN - Skyrocketing material and sub Pricing, Uncertainty, Subcontractor frustrations, Schedule delays, unrealistic clients, and PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE!
Let’s think through some of the desperate things you (or someone you know) may have tried in the midst of a desperate situation in your business…
We are running around, spinning in circles, a slave to an over-heated market, the client, to the employee, to the sub, to the vendor.
And we just want it to STOP. Just for a second so we can catch our breath.
Talked to a custom builder in Kentucky two weeks ago who said, “I’m actually looking forward to a market slowdown.” I was waiting for lightning to strike.
You had a grueling week, and then you have a Saturday where you are fired up about a late breakfast where you are going to eat donuts, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, bacon, cheese grits…then after you’re done you turn on a game on tv watching world-class athletes and think, “I need to work out!”
Chaos can often translate to unhealthy habits because we are vulnerable. In the chaos of the market, we tend to rest in the cash flow, while KNOWING that we are neglecting the discipline of purpose, process, and systems that will create a long-term FIT-ness for us, our team, and the mission we are on in our business.
I’ve seen it reported recently that both Quarterback Russel Wilson and basketball megastar Lebron James each spend over $1 million on the health and fitness of their mind and body.
A friend of mine, Chad Jeffers is the lead Dobro player for Carrie Underwood. He was passing through Columbia, SC a couple of years ago as we were in town and we had coffee in the lobby of the downtown hotel he and the other band members were staying at.
I asked Chad a simple question that I had never asked, “what is it like to play in front of all of those people?” His response was sobering.
He mentioned that most nights he forgets where he is at, and that the “repetition of the event” can get quite boring. In order to be great and find joy in touring, you’ve got to go back to THE FITNESS of your repetition and training.
In preparation for Carrie Underwood’s Las Vegas residency shows, Chad said
"Typically for tours (including Vegas), we will rehearse for a month and a half to 2 months (7 days a week) prior to the first show. Personally, I prepare for the rehearsals about a month prior to that (especially if we are learning new music)."
Kobe Bryant was 41 when he and his daughter died tragically in a helicopter crash in January of 2020.
He was notorious for his relentless work ethic. Writers Scott Davis and Connor Perrett chronicle some of Bryant’s more remarkable disciplines.
Here is a question for us. It’s easy to scream, yell, turn over tables, run out of the tunnel with a new idea, rally the troops for a momentary push.
But what about the long hard grind of repetition over a long period of time?
The best bourbon is aged and evaporated.
The best wine comes with full ingredients and time.
The best friendships have intentionality and longevity.
Some of you are coming to the BuildExpo hoping for a hail mary, hoping for a silver bullet, a bright idea that will change the game for you.
I want to offer you something else.
When explorer Ernest Shackleton was preparing for his Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he needed the right team. It is said that he published an advertisement…
"Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."
The advertisement may not be true, but Shackleton’s expedition with his crew aboard the “Endurance” was heroic and transformative for an entire British society.
Reading through Alfred Lansing’s aptly titled book “Endurance”, you realize what kept Shackleton and his men alive during months of isolation and loneliness in what has been billed as one of the most remarkable pictures of survival in modern history.
What two things kept these men going, when all other expeditions facing similar challenges, died?
FITness and repetition.
In the new Post-COVID reality, do you want to stop spending your days putting out silly fires? You want to discover REAL purpose in your business? You want to make time for what matters most?
To emerge out of the fog in this post-COVID reality, you must commit to becoming F.I.T.
1. Fundamentals
The most fundamental step to creating a FIT business, is to painstakingly spend time on the fundamentals. Blocking, tackling, throwing, catching
The second step in becoming FIT, is to…
2. Invest In People
We must go back to the fundamentals, we must invest in people, and in order to grow in the post-COVID reality, we must…
3. Trail A Mentor
FINAL STORY:
Sitting w/ the APD team. Nicole’s biggest win…the OWNER being away from the business for 7 straight days with little to no check in. That was NICOLE’s BIG WIN!
Tim and the APD team have spent the last few years getting FIT: focusing on the Fundamentals, Investing In People, and Trailing Mentors…
And a distraction-free picture from the Mountains of N. Carolina is the outcome…
THAT’s punching chaos in the mouth and setting yourself up for growth in the NEW post-COVID reality.
ACTION: Which of the 3, needs to be your 1st priority after you get out of your seat?
Fundamentals?
Invest In People?
Trail A Mentor
If you want to test your business fitness, go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy
