[00:00:02.680] - Chris
Welcome back to another episode of the MRM podcast. I'm Chris,
[00:00:06.370] - Brandon
and I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life and legacy.
[00:00:11.380] - Chris
It's business time.
[00:00:13.810] - Chris
I've got an idea for today. I want to talk about this element of business culture and we'll just see where the conversation goes. But I feel like in spite of the fact that working smarter, not harder, is a concept I think all of us believe in, we value and we're starting to kind of rethink how we do work. I feel like there's a glory and I don't think it's just in the restoration business. It's just business culture.
[00:00:36.640] - Chris
We glory in how hard and how long we work. I mean, I still routinely when I'm talking with my other business buddies and stuff like that, we get into the typical exchange of, hey, how's things going? How's business going? It's like, oh, man, you know, it's wild, man. It's like seventy hour work weeks, you know, we're just busting our ass just grinding. And, you know, I just hired three more people and there's almost like there's glory in that hustle and it gives off this impression.
[00:01:03.010] - Chris
I mean, I know when I come out of those conversations, there's part of me that is like maybe I should be working harder. I'm not putting in 80 hours a week. Maybe I'm not grinding enough.
[00:01:13.390] - Chris
And I think there's guys like Gary V. Although he's changing his tune where he's just always on, he talks about the 18 hours a day and his tune is changing now, which is kind of interesting because of like his stage of life. And he's realizing that that's not actually sustainable and or healthy. I don't know.
[00:01:33.130] - Brandon
It'd be interesting to hear his story
[00:01:34.090] - Chris
I haven't been following enough of his content because honestly, I just got burned out on that hustle game, the Hustle language.
[00:01:39.730] - Chris
And I'm a hustler, like I'm a builder. I'm a starter, I'm an activator. I'm an all those things. I'm driven. I want to grow. It's like there's no stopping for me. And I think the same thing obviously is true for you, but I don't think there's much honesty in that.
[00:01:54.080] - Chris
I guess is where I want to start was reflecting on this this morning and kind of over the weekend as well. If I'm honest, if I'm really honest, I'm at my best creatively, drive, energy, just all of that. I'm at my best for four or five hours a day.
[00:02:10.750] - Brandon
Sure. Yeah.Primal production
[00:02:13.060] - Chris
primal production. And, you know, it's like I've been in other roles and I don't think that's a stage of life. I'm forty one. I don't think that's because I'm slowing down. I think I'm getting more in touch with what my real capacity is and how I work. And I'm also realizing, too, that I'm in a creative role and I have been for like twenty years.
[00:02:32.620] - Chris
If I really look at the work I've been doing now, of course, a lot of my career has been small business ownership, sales, marketing, customer experience, like it's highly customer facing people facing work. I got out of the labor, the hands on labor roll in college. With time I transitioned into sales, business ownership, I was out of the hands on labor and I was into that creative work.
[00:02:56.710] - Chris
I realized this about myself.
[00:02:58.570] - Chris
For me, my best time is from eight a.m. until two.
[00:03:04.330] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:03:04.960] - Chris
Or nine to three.
[00:03:06.070] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:03:06.890] - Chris
It's like those are my golden hours and the more honest I get about myself with that, the better I prioritize and leverage my time.
[00:03:16.870] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:03:17.470] - Chris
And when I look at my crappy days it's because I failed to take that into account. I just got to movin' on my list and I was doing the grind thing and those are my least productive days.
[00:03:28.810] - Chris
My most productive days are when I go into the day saying, OK, I've got what it takes to hit two or three things really hard and with excellence. What are those two or three things going to be? Of course, we have clients, so sometimes that answer is I really need to engage with this one client about this one thing.
[00:03:47.740] - Brandon
Absolutely. Yeah
[00:03:48.700] - Chris
that's my priority for today.
[00:03:50.170] - Brandon
Sure.
[00:03:50.800] - Chris
In this other piece of content that really needs to be birthed.
[00:03:54.730] - Chris
That needs to happen today, too. And then this block of admin stuff that I hate, but I need to do well and I need to accomplish ok that's my third thing. Everything else I know is going to get 60 to 70 percent of me. I can only give one hundred percent to those two or three things.
[00:04:12.010] - Chris
What are they going to be?
[00:04:13.090] - Brandon
Oh, yeah. The hardest thing I think about what you're talking about is the honesty in quotation marks piece. This could spiral into a million different topics. We are going to stay on track with the specific idea, but it's that honesty piece that kind of changes everything about what we deliver and how we deliver it, because it's that honesty component that affects relationship quality. It affects our leadership capacity. The more time we spend just kind of looking at the realities versus buying into these generalities that the culture puts on us, that the business culture puts on us, whatever makes our buddy want to be us.
[00:04:54.970] - Brandon
Right. All these things. But I think you're right. Like, the reality of it is we've all been in this position. I've done this as a GM, I've done this as business start ups, where we just go, yeah, it's your buddies telling you this was like 70, 80 hours a week. And you know honestly, I did grind those hours.
[00:05:10.990] - Brandon
I spent years and years grinding hours like that. But you know what's so helpful for me to see this in the correct light? And I didn't see this correctly most often when I was in the seat, is when we get to objectively look at our clients businesses and ask them the question.
[00:05:29.320] - Brandon
Guys, what does it look like for you? Because we're struggling and this is not a negative to any specific client. This is not a negative to any of you listening because we've been in these shoes and we are often still in them. But it is so easy for us from the outside just because of our separation from the situation to be looking at a shop, a company, looking at them in dollar revenue wise and saying you've got a lot of heavy hitters on the team.
[00:05:55.840] - Brandon
You guys should just be rocking and rolling and really seeing that there's a lot of tire spinning. Right? There's a lack of traction, even though we're doing the 80 hours a week.Right.
[00:06:06.100] - Chris
And it's hard to get to that honesty because even as I share this about myself, I'm really good for four or five hours a day.
[00:06:13.190] - Chris
I'm great if I've eaten well, I've slept well like four or five hours.
[00:06:17.230] - Chris
That's really hard for me to say. There's some embarrassment that I'm feeling right now because I think our business culture wants to say, like with these icons of industry and stuff that we all read about and listen to and what not.
[00:06:28.240] - Brandon
elons twenty two hours a day
[00:06:29.970] - Chris
Yeah elon all that stuff. And it's funny because even he is starting to change his tune a little bit of notice over the last few years. But it's a little bit embarrassing because I think, again, we glorify the grind, even though I think all of us deep down, we recognize while I might be working 70 or 80 hours, I'm not actually working 70 or 80 hours.
[00:06:52.930] - Chris
A lot of times I am staying at the office late because indeed there are things still to be done. But my capacity to actually accomplish those things is severely diminished. Like I am not bringing the same genius, the same creativity, the same discipline, the same focus in that 11th hour at the office or at that last meeting with a client at seven p.m. or something like that. It's just reality.
[00:07:21.010] - Brandon
Yeah
[00:07:21.430] - Chris
but somehow we just perpetuate this limitless idea of just double down, grind it even David Goggins.
[00:07:28.060] - Chris
Right. I think it's just like pressed into the pain press into the fatigue. And I don't think that's necessarily his message. But I think that's what we are glorifying right now, is the grind, the hustle.
[00:07:39.910] - Brandon
I want to kind of add something to this, and I'm interested to get you kind of your pushback or your observation of this. When I'm hearing you say this, what's coming to my mind is we're not talking about an either or. So, we're not looking at this and saying that if you're in a startup scenario, if you're growing a small business and you have a vision for where you want to take your company, and we're talking significant growth and scaling what I'm witnessing or what my observation with this is, we're not saying that the 70 hours aren't going to happen or that they shouldn't.
[00:08:11.350] - Brandon
But what I'm hearing you say is there's an honesty about what can actually be done and how effective we can be so that we prioritize and or manage our time more competently.
[00:08:25.840] - Chris
That's exactly right. Yes. That's a great clarification, because like you, I've been through business startups outside of restoration. I've been in technology startups have been involved in retail and B2B service business startups like ground up, like start with nothing. And getting from zero to one is really hard. It's hard in that it's so undefined. You're figuring things out as you go. And I think people even listening to this, I mean, that was certainly a major part of my experience coming to the restoration businesses.
[00:08:56.680] - Chris
I had to learn it all from scratch. I didn't grow up in construction. I didn't grow up in the service sector. So it's about what do I plug in to my magical four or five hours? What do I need to give my absolute best to? And I think that's where the honesty piece is so helpful is OK, I can't bring my best to all twelve hours of this day.
[00:09:17.410] - Chris
So what am I going to spend the four or five hours on? You know, we recently met with the client and we did an activity audit with them because they were struggling with the same thing. Like they just felt like they're always on, they're always working and they are. And they've got tons of irons in the fire.
[00:09:31.930] - Chris
They got multiple businesses that they're moving forward.
[00:09:35.320] - Chris
And it was very difficult for us to make progress with them at different points because we didn't have a clear picture of where is all their time going. And I don't think they had a real conscious picture of it either.
[00:09:49.450] - Brandon
That is the issue. Like, I think we're all in this position where there's
[00:09:53.470] - Chris
so many moving parts
[00:09:54.280] - Brandon
so many moving parts, there's so many plates that you're attempting to keep
[00:09:57.640] - Chris
so many people dependent on us.
[00:09:59.170] - Brandon
Oh, man. It's just nonstop and so you just go from thing to thing to thing, the thing to think all day long and the next thing you know at 12 hours is gone by. You weren't in control of most of it. And you're not even one hundred percent that you could look back on that 12 or 14 hours spent and go, boom, that was successful.
[00:10:15.190] - Brandon
That was done. That was accomplished right
[00:10:16.600] - Chris
yeah, how many times do we get home from the office, right and our spouse or even my kids are now getting to the age where they are "hey, Dad, how's your day?" And I'm like sometimes even now in the work that we do, because there's a lot of moving parts to what we do. But certainly all those years in restoration operating, I'd have to pause. How did the day go? There's like two layers to that. I say, how am I feeling stress level? Happiness?
[00:10:39.910] - Chris
Like, did the day go well or did it go poorly? Was a challenging or cool things happen? So there's that layer. But then it's like, what did I actually accomplish? I Had that meeting, I had that other meeting. I had a phone call with that person. Like I have to go back and recreate because it's just a blur. It just oftentimes it feels like you're bouncing from one urgent matter to the next.
[00:11:01.760] - Brandon
Yeah. I got to be transparent with you about something.
[00:11:05.290] - Brandon
Here's what I've experienced in this. It is the most demotivating cycle that I can get into.
[00:11:12.770] - Brandon
Like you go home at the end of ......An all dude..... There are so many people listening right now that get this. They feel it in their bones where and again, we're not trying to get all macabre here. There's just this reality where we're out just busting our ass, trying to move this machine forward. And you do get back at the end of the week or the end of the day or you're taking part of a Sunday off that you've given yourself the freedom to do.
[00:11:35.680] - Brandon
And you just go, oh, my God, it's all going to start tomorrow. And we all hear these stories about if you're doing the right work, it's not work. OK, I think there's plenty of moms out there that have birthed children and they're in love to death of their kids. It doesn't take away from the fact that that was a really painful experience. Right. I can only fathom I feel like that with business endeavors, too, and things that we're trying to create or push into new levels, new heights, whatever it's like.
[00:12:01.780] - Brandon
There's reality that you're just grinding your face off and it's tiring. It's excruciating. And Mondays are scary because you're like, oh, hell, like, I got to go back into doing this again. It starts again.
[00:12:13.480] - Chris
And it's not that you don't love your work doesn't mean you're in the wrong business.
[00:12:16.660] - Brandon
Right, exactly.
[00:12:17.650] - Chris
It doesn't mean you're in the wrong business.
[00:12:19.630] - Chris
I think this is the thing that I've learned because I've had an eclectic sort of business career in the sense of insurance business for a big block of time in different roles in the insurance business. I've been in retail. I owned a retail business at one point. I was in the ink remanufacturing cartridge business for a while, and the feeling follows you. It doesn't matter what business you're in. Yeah, it's funny because the feeling actually comes of am I doing the right thing?
[00:12:44.710] - Chris
Is this really what I want to be doing for rest of....? But the reality is in some ways it's kind of like the feelings we get around marriage sometimes. We have these moments of truth, moments of truth, or just moments of confusion when we're like, it's a lot of work. Can I do this for the rest of my life? If my wife's listening and my wife and I have talked about this, we've had these thoughts.
[00:13:03.670] - Chris
We both have these everybody has these thoughts. Yeah, I want to have another one of those conversations. We want to have that argument one more time. I don't know. It's the same thing like we all encounter.
[00:13:15.700] - Chris
I think especially the higher you rise in leadership, the more it's those mundane, repetitive, consistent tasks that actually get us progress and move us forward. But the other edge of that knife is that we have to get comfortable with that feeling of lack of progress. I think so. I think that's part of it, is that we have to be OK without those Quick Hits.
[00:13:38.920] - Chris
It's like when we were out being a salesperson or in the really early days of our business, we're out there. We can see the results of our efforts immediately. Yeah, like when you were out running and going and doing projects, there was a very natural organic result to virtually everything you were doing. You either got those sheets done and sent to the adjuster or you didn't. Where as we start to move into different levels of leadership. There's so much more ambiguity.
[00:14:10.990] - Brandon
Yeah. In the result, yeah.
[00:14:12.595] - Brandon
likes it's delayed gratification.
[00:14:12.730] - Chris
It's like a slow burn. Yeah,so much delayed gratification. Yeah.
[00:14:17.590] - Chris
That I think that's a layer of something that's going on as well, that it makes it that much harder, I think sometimes to prioritize our time to figure out what to put in that four or five hour time block for me. Yeah, maybe you're listening. You're like I got eight or ten hours a day. I mean, let's find whatever.
[00:14:34.840] - Brandon
Yeah, that's awesome.
[00:14:36.370] - Chris
You are awesome. And I wish I was you, but I think that's another layer to it is that there's a slow burn to the most important work we do. Yeah. And that can make things fuzzy as well. Like we really have to step back and say, OK, is this important or is this urgent or is it both.
[00:14:53.710] - Chris
And I think that's the magic is when we can get really I'm still figuring this out. It's a.
[00:14:59.770] - Chris
it's a total Skill, right? It's funny, as I say this, I'm having deja vu that I think we've brought this topic up before, but it's the magic of what is the most urgent and important.
[00:15:09.970] - Chris
And those are my two or three things.
[00:15:11.980] - Brandon
These have to get executed on period. Yeah. And then the rest is I'm going to do what I can.
[00:15:17.500] - Chris
I'm going to give it my best. But I know my best on these other things is going to be probably 60 percent, maybe less if I'm having a rough day.
[00:15:24.820] - Brandon
So in my mind, this is what I've experienced before and a lot of different ideas or themes. Right, that you and I wrestle with. And I think that there's an opportunity to take this conversation this way, too, is that awareness gives us a different ability to solve the problem. So, for instance, is what we're looking at.
[00:15:42.310] - Brandon
For most of you, going from 12 hour days to eight is not necessarily even a reality. And that's not what we're saying. Although if we're being honest, I think at some point from a health and sustainability factor, maybe 10 hours is the appropriate level. Maybe it's eight, maybe it's six for some people who knows it's eye of the beholder. It's not really the point, but it's this idea that there may be long days required of you. OK, but how do we spend and or prioritize and control that time being spent?
[00:16:14.990] - Brandon
So through honesty, it gives us the tools to maximize what we're doing with our endeavors. So, again, we're not giving black and white time limits to your day or any of those agendas or any of those contributing factors. It's just a reality of, if I can be honest with the fact that I may work 12 hours today, but I'm going to be awesome at six of them. And again, like you said, then we just get to prioritize what goes into those time blocks.
[00:16:38.740] - Brandon
So there is ways for us with this awareness to be able to manage our time differently.
[00:16:43.780] - Brandon
I would go as far as saying here's possibly the reality of this.
[00:16:47.500] - Brandon
If you practice some of these behaviors long enough to where they become the new default, you'd be shocked by how much progress that you're able to make in your business. And then by making that much progress, how sustainable the grind becomes, it's like, oh, I'm actually making traction versus I'm bleeding 12 and 14 hours a day, six days a week. And I really don't feel like we're getting the company any closer to our goal than we started.
[00:17:13.290] - Chris
Yeah, you know my guess is and I would go so far as to say this, you show me your 12 hours and I'll show you at least three that you're bullshitting.
[00:17:23.440] - Brandon
Yeah that we're probably basically time wasting.
[00:17:25.390] - Chris
We're either Bullshitting ourselves or you're bullshitting me when you say you work 12 hours. I know there's outlier events. We all have those times of catch up. We just came out of tax season here in the last couple of months, right. Where we all had to scramble to get all of our stuff in. And we all had those times to where, like in the restoration business, we get a CAT loss and it's like all bets are off.
[00:17:45.460] - Chris
That doesn't change the fact that we still have four or five hours where we're really bringing our best
[00:17:51.370] - Brandon
monster production time
[00:17:52.840] - Chris
monster production time. And so figuring out how do I leverage those four or five hours or seven or eight or two or three? Whatever your number is, right. I think that honesty with ourself is only going to help us be better, regardless of what your capacity is. And I do believe I do believe that the capacity that people bring is all different.
[00:18:09.820] - Chris
All of us are unique. And I do think that there are small, incremental things we can do to grow our capacity. There's no doubt about it. We've got our health, our nutrition. There's mindfulness strategies and things that I think we can become better. We can build our capacity
[00:18:23.020] - Brandon
well, and I think you get more motivated by finding successes. So if we're engineering our time blocks better and we're seeing more wins in the day, like manageable, measurable wins, I think you also get increased fuel from that. And it's like, man, maybe I can throw another hour at this because it's focused and I'm being proactive. I'm planning intentionally.
[00:18:43.570] - Chris
Yeah. And I think, too, we tend to use the resources that are allotted to us.
[00:18:50.470] - Chris
Let's say I'm buying an office chair. If I give myself a budget of five hundred, I'm going to spend five hundred. Likewise, if I've got a training video that I need to film for a client, if I give myself the day to do it, I'm probably going to finish that video and send it off by three or four o'clock. I'm going to use the day if I give myself an hour, the chances of me completing it in an hour very high we tend to use.... it's why Deadlines are just so powerful. I don't know what it is. It's been very powerful for me. It's what I think helps me manage or overcome my ADD tendencies. Sure. Yeah, right. Where it's like squirrel. If I say, OK, I've got this thing to do and I'm giving myself thirty minutes, it's not an open ended thing. I'm giving myself thirty minutes to do this thing. Ninety nine times out of one hundred. I'm done in thirty minutes.
[00:19:38.680] - Brandon
You can nail it.
[00:19:39.280] - Chris
Yeah I've seen that be really effective with clients to where it's like decide how much time you're going to spend on that. And sometimes I surprise myself actually you know I've joked a lot because we do a lot of content production right now for teaching and training clients, supporting them and stuff. And it's really hard like we did a previous recording. I think I'm just learning new skills and just how. And stuff that feels I joke with clients all the time, I'm like, do you realize how many takes it took for me to give you that 15 minute training video?
[00:20:07.530] - Chris
I literally did like twenty seven takes for a 15 minute video. It took me two hours. But what I found is when I'm disciplined to say to myself, I got an hour, I need to record this before my meeting with so-and-so. I get it done, takes less takes. I'm more focused. There's another thing that's a thing that's worked for me. It works so good I rarely do it. But when I discipline myself, this is as much a reminder as we talk about the subject.
[00:20:34.920] - Chris
I need to be more deliberate in budgeting the time that I'm spending on certain things.
[00:20:42.450] - Brandon
Well, let's go there.
[00:20:43.380] - Brandon
Let's get a little tactical. You had already mentioned this, and I think we need to circle back around it because I think it's a great way to get this portion of the conversation started. But the time audit, right, like
[00:20:53.720] - Chris
yeah what does that I look like, yeah, lets break it down
[00:20:55.470] - Brandon
let's dig through that.
[00:20:56.250] - Brandon
So any time we talk about a time audit, in fact, I had an executive coach do this with me years ago. But any time I think of a time audit, what it reminds me of is when you decide to take on the initiative of getting healthy and how if you're working with a coach or something, how they make you start writing down your meals from the day. And it's everything they tell you. It doesn't matter. Stick of gum.
[00:21:17.010] - Brandon
You write it down. And in the exercise, if you're honest, what you inevitably see is there is a massive difference between what actually happened versus what in your mind happened. So when I'm telling I'm eating pretty good, but then you actually write it all down in black and white fashion. You realize, oh my gosh, I'm eating like shit. And I think the same with this time audit, it's the same concept in our minds when we're communicating. What we're doing is like, yeah, man, I was working my face off.
[00:21:44.160] - Brandon
We did this. We got all sorts of things accomplished. But then when we do a time audit, wow, is it telling. So unpack that I guess. Dive into an example.
[00:21:52.080] - Chris
Yeah,so with an audit it's not easy to do this, but I think when the pain to stay the same exceeds the pain to change, that's when there's enough motivation there. And I think a lot of us are finding ourselves, especially coming out of covid covid brought its own challenges and now coming out of covid, like a lot of business owners, are really one business has accelerated a lot of stuff that was deferred over the last 12, 18 months. People are getting back into buildings that have been unoccupied, occupy all the things like our businesses are back and things are happening.
[00:22:19.860] - Chris
A lot of us are starting to bend under the pressure. And so I think what it takes to do an effective, useful audit is to have a notebook, a notepad that you carry around all day and you got your pen attached to that notepad. Everything's there. And it's just every single time you get back in the truck. So you're out doing job site visits or whatever your role is. You have that with you. You carry it all day and you document every conversation that happens in the hallway.
[00:22:48.690] - Chris
You document every phone call you take, you document every phone call you make, you document the emails you send, you document the snack breaks you take where you pull into the fast food joint on the way to a job. It does not need to be exhaustive, like taking notes. This isn't a journal for your day.
[00:23:08.160] - Chris
It's a list. I did this.
[00:23:10.260] - Chris
I spoke to this person. I had this meeting. I stopped and made coffee at the coffee pot. I went to lunch with so-and-so. It's extremely detailed and extremely tactful. It's just one to word things on this list.
[00:23:22.140] - Chris
So by the end of that day, you've probably got at least a full page of little and big things and moments that you had throughout the day.
[00:23:30.150] - Brandon
Here's kind of the sweet spot on this. Is enough detail, like don't leave out the events to include those short conversations, because here's what we're looking for, right? Or Here's the opportunity of what to look for. Is these patterns that look really normal, of having same kinds of conversations with multiple different teams, the same kinds of conversations every single day.
[00:23:58.140] - Chris
Here's an example, because this used to happen all the time when you and I were with a company for six, seven years together. Right. We worked so well together.
[00:24:06.360] - Chris
And this is true of a lot of people, particularly on our leadership team. We were just so in sync for a lot of it. We would have tons of these side conversations. You'd be on the road. You just left an appointment. You had a thought you'd call me me, do the same. I just got out of this meeting with a referral partner and I had this idea, rather than me documenting that idea thrown in my Apple notes or thrown at my Google doc for our weekly team meeting.
[00:24:32.160] - Chris
I just call you, right? Hey, dude, I got an idea, man. Do you got a second? Listen, I just talked with this customer and I think if we did this, like, what would you think if we started doing this as a part of our process? Like, I think and we just go into it, we go into that idea. But unfortunately, the rest of the leadership team is not present. So now you and I are taking ten minutes.
[00:24:52.170] - Chris
Fifteen minutes. Twenty twenty five minutes.
[00:24:54.990] - Chris
Yeah. To dig in to this potentially exciting. strategic, Or tactical subject that potentially can move our business forward, but then what happens, we have to spend another twenty five minutes bringing it to the leadership team, whereas I could have documented my idea, my thought process on that and then bring it up at once. And all of us engage on that topic. We batted around. We make a decision and we do something
[00:25:22.380] - Brandon
right and then we execute. Yeah, but what's the reality of that same conversation?
[00:25:26.820] - Chris
but you do that 14 times a day.
[00:25:28.110] - Brandon
That's it. It's like you and I have it. Then you go to so-and-so in the hallway and you're like, Oh, man, Brandon and I we're talking about such and such, today. And then you spend 15, 20 minutes downloading the concept to them. Again, all of this is happening under we're an effective team.
[00:25:42.270] - Brandon
We're agile. Our communications is good.
[00:25:45.630] - Chris
we like eachother.
[00:25:45.630] - Brandon
They're open, right? Yeah, it's motivating. Let's talk about these subjects. Right. And it just happens over and over and over.
[00:25:53.970] - Chris
Yeah. When we did this this last audit we did with the client. Right.
[00:25:56.700] - Chris
We're looking at in this case, this business has multiple owners. Both active in the business. It's very typical. Sometimes it's husband, wife owners. Restoration companies it's very common, sometimes as brothers sometimes.
[00:26:09.130] - Chris
So I just met a brother and sister that a restoration company together. So in this case, it was so funny. We had both of the owners audit their activity. And it's so interesting to see the same kind of activities, the same conversations with Downline Line employees. There's a lot of redundancy
[00:26:26.370] - Brandon
exactly
[00:26:27.030] - Chris
that we discovered and they saw it, too, and it was just immediate and obvious.
[00:26:32.100] - Chris
Now, I don't know if that results in an hour of wasted time? Now is it wasted? I don't know, you can argue about it.
[00:26:39.480] - Brandon
But efficiency right?
[00:26:40.500] - Chris
But it's not a loss of efficiency and distractedness.
[00:26:42.120] - Chris
There's a loss of efficiency and there's a distractedness.
[00:26:44.820] - Chris
Think about it.
[00:26:45.360] - Chris
If you can remove forty five minutes in your day, an hour of wheel spinning in your day, what does that do for you?
[00:26:53.010] - Brandon
Every day, five, six days a week.
[00:26:55.020] - Chris
Every day. Was that do for you? Here's the other thing too. If we can agree that we only really have four or five hours of our best work to offer, whatever that number is, but that it's somewhere less than 12, right. There's somewhere less than the Gary v. 80 hour standard or whatever. If we can agree on that. What are we sacrificing when we go into the red when we just think we're going to grind it and we're going to seven or eight, 12, 15 hours?
[00:27:24.060] - Chris
Like, what are we giving up when we go into the red? I know what I've given up.
[00:27:30.660] - Chris
I know I come home carrying more anger, frustration, irritation to my wife and my kids.
[00:27:36.960] - Brandon
Absolutely.
[00:27:37.890] - Chris
That's the opportunity cost for me. And I don't know how that hits with everybody else listening. But that is the harsh reality is when I'm not conscious of how I'm spending my time, how I'm allocating those four or five hours of genius. My wife and my kids are the first to lose every single time period. Well, you could argue that my own mental health is really what I'm sacrificing.
[00:28:06.030] - Chris
But the byproduct of that when I'm not stewarding my time and my genius and my brain space effectively
[00:28:12.480] - Brandon
and honestly
[00:28:13.350] - Chris
and honestly, it's definitely taking something from my mental health. Oh, yeah. It's negatively affecting it in the by product. One hundred percent of the time is I have less to give. And what I'm giving to my wife and my kids is often the toxic residue from my day.
[00:28:29.090] - Brandon
Absolutely. Because they understand.Their family. They get it.
[00:28:31.530] - Chris
And I'll be honest like that again taps into that's embarrassing. It's embarrassing or I'm disappointed in myself that happens. And it's sad to me because I think there's been a lot of years. I think it's becoming better for me as I become more aware of this. I'm doing it less. But every time I have a shitty day, it's almost always because I wasn't thoughtful. I didn't make an agenda for myself.
[00:28:52.800] - Chris
I wasn't a good steward of that time.
[00:28:56.160] - Brandon
And then your teams get it.your teams get it. It's funny we go back to this example.
[00:29:01.710] - Brandon
Dual owners running what is definitely a team with momentum. Sky's the limit, lots of opportunity. These guys have done one hell of a job recruiting some A-list hitters, big time, very capable individuals. But because we I'm not even going to point a finger at these guys just at myself is when you're in this position where time is managing you, no one is getting the right time from you. So they're getting it. But then these cycles, these inevitable, self-perpetuating cycles kick in where you're not giving proactive feedback.
[00:29:40.650] - Brandon
You're getting last minute hair on fire, feedback that comes too far. And in between.
[00:29:46.260] - Chris
yeah, it's reactionary.
[00:29:47.280] - Brandon
It's completely reactionary. So what they're getting is kind of OK then what we see you guys and I don't know if we have to do too much dot connecting here, but then what we see and we experience and I do it. Is that you getting this massive, self-perpetuating cycle where you realize or you don't realize, and that's part of the problem, your time is running away from you because you're spending all of this time just managing the most recent fire in front of you.
[00:30:11.730] - Brandon
There's zero proactivity and engagement happening with your teams, which means they just keep experiencing the things that causes you to put out yet another fire. And you look backwards and you go, I am going nowhere and I'm going there quickly.
[00:30:25.080] - Brandon
So again, this time audit like it's just such a powerful opportunity for you to hit pause for a minute and just go, whoa, let me look at this with factual data. And again, we talked about this, I think, in a couple of episodes ago. Don't come in with good or bad value. Just look at it. Give yourself the moment
[00:30:43.890] - Chris
no judgement
[00:30:44.220] - Brandon
don't pre-judge yourself, put all the items down on the piece of paper, all the snacks, all the pre meals.
[00:30:49.560] - Brandon
Right. Put it all down on paper and start looking for those rhythms. This is repetitive. This is repetitive. I know I can really only do this from eight to three. Why do I keep allowing this to happen at six thirty at night then what we have an opportunity to do and you can do this in isolation as an individual or reach out to a peer, a business partner, a coach, and start looking for ways to reengineer the day so that you're capitalizing on things like you mentioned this before.
[00:31:22.440] - Brandon
Are we taking notes and saving those conversations for the pre scheduled operations meeting that we have every week? Did we schedule a once a month strategic leadership meeting with both owners? And we say we're going to protect each other. And when you come to me with this item, I'm going to give a little push back and go, man, I want to engage in that conversation. But you know what next Thursday is?
[00:31:43.590] - Brandon
It's our strategic meeting time. bring the note.
[00:31:47.290] - Chris
oh man. Because I was the guy often I was coming to you with that stuff. And you were you were so disciplined. It was great. And eventually I got the message and I started to put it in my notes. And to this day, that is a way more sticky strategy for me because we practiced it so much when we were in the trench working and day to day operations.
[00:32:07.050] - Chris
It's a new discipline.
[00:32:08.550] - Brandon
oh Yeah.
[00:32:08.880] - Chris
You know what this makes me think of, like, to create sort of a word picture. There's this thing and it just went through my Facebook or LinkedIn feed, this concept of Aristotle. Aristotle had this thing called the Golden Mean, and it was this idea that virtue sits right smack in the middle between extremes, between vice and what's the other word that I'm looking for? Virtue sits between excess and scarcity. How does this apply? I think we oftentimes when we're not stewarding, when we're not intentionally picking, where we're going to allocate our time, like how we're going to use that four or five hours, what tends to happen, the behavior we tend to default to is one of the extremes, micromanagement where we're so scattered, we're fighting one fire.
[00:32:53.670] - Chris
Another is we end up calling and checking in on our people. Hey, where are you at with this?
[00:32:57.990] - Chris
Hey, what's going on with that? We tend to micromanage and bother our people to try to feel like we're staying on top of everything. So that's one extreme we get to when we're not proactively, and intentionally managing that four or five hours of magic like our best time, or we end up being totally hands off and stuck in our head, just kind of flighty from one thing on our list to the next. And we're disconnected from our team. Our team doesn't know what's happening.
[00:33:24.960] - Chris
And we see both of these.
[00:33:26.400] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:33:26.910] - Chris
We tend to fall into one of those extremes.
[00:33:29.970] - Brandon
I would even say that the same person can fall in both extremes in the same day and week.
[00:33:35.040] - Chris
Certainly the same week
[00:33:36.300] - Chris
Yeah, we just flip flop.
[00:33:37.920] - Chris
It just depends on the day and the stimulus.
[00:33:40.260] - Chris
How's your day start?
[00:33:41.250] - Chris
Oftentimes will determine am I going to just calling around, checking in on this and micromanaging my team or am I disconnected?
[00:33:48.570] - Chris
So to me that's like those are the extremes that we tend to default to versus the middle. And I have this word picture or I have this archetype, this friend of mine, who to me is just he's the model I see when I think about the middle there, that intentionality, that purposefulness of what are my two or three things that are most important for me to accomplish today? his name is Steve Bittner. I don't know Steve will ever listen to this.
[00:34:14.310] - Chris
But Steve, he's an educator. He was actually the principal at my high school.
[00:34:18.540] - Chris
Right, as I was graduating. Anyway, he's now getting ready to retire. Steve was one of those people. I really admire him. But more than that, I like to be around him because he is so steady.
[00:34:30.480] - Chris
When I'm in a conversation with Steve, I feel like I am the most important person in the room.
[00:34:37.230] - Chris
Steve is in the conversation with me. He's one hundred percent present. I trust Steve so much. It's a private school. We're getting ready to roll our kids in this private school. And a big reason why I want them to go there is because Steve is there. I just want them to have some interaction with Steve. He's like the uncle that you want your kids to spend more time. I'm seriously and. To me, I think that's such a great example and model for what I think we can be to our people when we are disciplined in focusing our day that way, it allows us to be less on fire and be more grounded for our team.
[00:35:13.590] - Chris
Yeah, and I think the other piece we were chatting about beforehand, when we're able to be that we're not a to be all the time and I'm sure Steve has his moments. Sure. One of the things we're doing is modeling that way of being for our people. And I really think I know it's hard, but I really think this conversation doesn't just apply to us as owners and leaders and department heads and stuff. I really think these principles can apply to our downline.
[00:35:40.190] - Chris
Despite how chaotic this industry is. I think it's possible for us to apply the same principle to all the different roles in our company, regardless, again, of the pressure and the stress and all the moving parts and stuff. I think we can really coach and develop our people to approach their day with the same intentionality. How do I apply my energy, my focus, my physical capacity towards the most important critical things? And we can over time introduce a calmness and a stability to our team, you know what I mean?
[00:36:11.330] - Brandon
Oh, yeah
[00:36:11.900] - Chris
I felt it. We felt it. We've had seasons of that where when we're modeling that as a leadership team, it tends to trickle down. Oh, yeah, you've got to stay in it for a while. It doesn't happen immediately.
[00:36:22.250] - Brandon
No. And I think it's an excuse remover, too. I mean, time and time again, how often do we hear like, oh yeah, we really want to work on that initiative or that's a great idea. We've just been so busy, just been so busy.
[00:36:33.170] - Brandon
And really if we're honest about an assessment of that organization, it's because from the top down, that's the same dialog that's happening, which when you see a key leader or a key influencer within the ranks begin to adopt this concept of being more honest with the way and how they're spending their time. And you start to see them gain some objectivity and some proactive skill set in that that you begin to see the same thing happening. Even if it just starts, by the way, that people are dialoging within the team, that now all of a sudden the excuse to fail to make progress is based on being busy.
[00:37:08.720] - Brandon
And when that starts to fall away from key leaders, then you begin to see your downline. Personnel also not use that any longer.
[00:37:17.240] - Chris
Yeah, when you start to take a look at this, we've been spending, however much thirty minutes or so talking about the subject. The more I think about it and we talk about it, the more you realize the foolishness of a lot of the conversations we have in our industry. We are in the disaster restoration business.
[00:37:32.480] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:37:33.230] - Chris
Of course we're going to have crazy busy times. It just is the business.
[00:37:37.220] - Brandon
It's the nature of the beast.
[00:37:38.810] - Chris
That's not an excuse. Like our whole business is responding to unexpected, unplanned disasters. That's the whole business of what we do.
[00:37:48.680] - Chris
So using that as an excuse, if we're really busy right now, you're supposed to be really busy from time to time. It ebbs and flows. It cycles. It doesn't matter how good or successful you are.
[00:37:58.130] - Chris
Yeah. It doesn't matter if you're a belfor a three billion dollar company or if your X, Y, Z, mom and pop restoration that's doing a million bucks.
[00:38:06.770] - Chris
That's just the nature of what we do. Like the Buddhists say, be like water. You encounter the rock, you keep moving around it. The rock doesn't stop you. It's just what water does, what it does.
[00:38:18.320] - Brandon
Can we work through an example or a couple?or a couple Maybe examples?
[00:38:21.050] - Chris
Lets do it and then let's do that and then let's give some tactical stuff
[00:38:25.190] - Chris
because there is some things we need to share on this.
[00:38:25.190] - Brandon
because I think that's what I mean. Let's go let's dig into this, because I'm thinking in my mind, we probably have anything from owners to you know, I'm just imagining even a project manager. I'm thinking back through all the conversations that we have with time blocking and booking into your days.
[00:38:39.740] - Brandon
So let's dive into this. Let's grab a mitigation department manager or equivalent something in that line. Inevitably, they're going to feel or exist in a space where incoming workload drives the majority of their busyness right through the day. And we get it like we understand there is some element of truth to that. But the really powerful thing to remember is that our clients do not know our schedule. They do not see it. They don't know what's in those blocks.
[00:39:06.170] - Brandon
They don't know what clients, non clients, internal, external. And really, at the end of the day, they don't even care. So we control that portion of the conversation. We do control our schedule regardless if we're busy.
[00:39:17.180] - Brandon
We're not going to use in this example. We're not talking about CAT event or maybe something where just something really out of the extraordinary is happening. But these concepts do still apply, really. Let's think about our day as a mitigation department manager. The very first thing that's happening is this rush of activity, if we're doing our job well. Where we're receiving our team. We're preparing them for the day's missions and we are stewarding them out of the building onto their missions.
[00:39:44.060] - Brandon
Right. And we teach consistent AM-PM battle rhythms. And part of our AM strategy that we like to see happening is we are not talking about getting your trucks ready in the morning. That should be done at the close of day when you finish your job.
[00:39:57.230] - Chris
That's one of the PM
[00:39:58.580] - Brandon
That's one of your PM activities in those hours are being logged to the last project you just finished, right? So anyways, AM activities start, that AM activity looks like vehicle inspections, preventative maintenance, right.
[00:40:10.828] - Chris
Morning stand to
[00:40:11.080] - Brandon
Morning stand to is what we like to call it. And it's this idea of we're talking to our team, we're ensuring that our vehicles are maintained and that we're proactive in the management of our equipment, our gear. We're doing some spot checking on the specifics of the jobs that we're going to do that day. And so we might need to tweak our basic gear out to fill the needs of that specific job. Maybe it's safety training that day, a little bit of housekeeping, whatever. That happens.
[00:40:35.490] - Brandon
So as a mitigation department manager, you need to be there in that moment, not you're so busy because you didn't catch up on an estimate that you're writing an estimate when you should be in the stand to with your team. So for that half hour block on your schedule and I use the word block, you're not doing anything but being engaged with your team.
[00:40:52.970] - Chris
You're not scheduling anything.
[00:40:54.140] - Brandon
You're not scheduling anything there.
[00:40:55.520] - Chris
Your not planning an adjuster call. You're not doing anything except for that thing.
[00:40:58.830] - Brandon
that's what you do. You're present with your team. You're looking for opportunities to coach. You're looking for opportunities to affirm, to point out exceptional behaviors that you're mirroring across your team. You're using that opportunity to equip your team for success for the day. Be in that moment. And if it's blocked out on your schedule, no one needs to know what that blackout is.
[00:41:22.940] - Brandon
You're there. You're present. Here's where the discipline of the freedom from discipline comes. You don't need to be bent out of shape and distracted by what you need to get to because you already know you will get to that next thing in the appropriate time block, because right now what you're doing is exactly what your job is and that's prepping your team for success.
[00:41:42.080] - Chris
And I think the reason why we suggest or we mandate that our clients take on that battle rhythm is it's the most important, highest impact roll of that mitigation manager. Even more so at the end of the day than managing the mitigation log of jobs and work. That face time is so valuable, it communicates so much...... The regularity, the stability of we have this rhythm in the morning that the boss shows up for. He or she sees me, he sees my vehicle. We talk through what the day's going to look like, what are our priorities as a team for the day like there's so much that happens in that moment.
[00:42:24.830] - Brandon
Massive amounts.
[00:42:25.710] - Chris
And not the least of which is the affirmations. At the beginning of the day, we were talking about how sometimes the stress of ownership and starting new things and changes those sleepless nights. You know, you wake up at three a.m. in the morning and you're just spinning out on all the things that are going wrong. How does that start your day? Right. Then you get up and you're up and at em and coffee at six a.m. What's the mindspace that you're beginning the day with? And the same thing is true of our employees.
[00:42:56.090] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:42:56.480] - Chris
If we can start their day off with affirmations of what they've done, well, it makes a difference.
[00:43:01.760] - Brandon
Right. And it's all part of that just being present. So by controlling your schedule and being intentional with that time, what you were bringing to the table is so productive and so beneficial because remember, we talked about perpetuating the cycle when we do the things that we need to during this specific block of time, we're actually preparing our teams to help remove some of that instability out of our day to day activity. Because you are affirming, you're delegating, you're teaching, you're growing.
[00:43:29.240] - Brandon
You're equipping them to take on the additional responsibilities so that now you're not doing the same level of micromanagement that you were doing before. You're not fighting the same kind of fires that you were fighting before because your team's now getting equipped to handle that kind of stuff on their own.
[00:43:44.090] - Brandon
So, again, there's so many benefits to this proactive engagement. Here's the other thing with that, too.... Is how on are you? for a lot of us, this is that time we're fresh, we're hitting the day. It's like boom touch on the major critical things that you need to help your team be successful.
[00:43:59.060] - Brandon
OK, that thing is done.
[00:44:01.310] - Brandon
You've accomplished a major task for the day already in terms of your health, your team's health and your businesses health. Then what we like to say happens in the space is there's this lull. We've kind of made the joke, I guess, that for those of us who have firearm training, especially long rifle training, you realize that when firing from a prone position for all you military folks out there, that there's this natural pause that happens in the human breath cycle at the base of your exhale.
[00:44:28.010] - Brandon
And it's in that moment, actually, that snipers are taught that that's your trigger pull, it's at this natural pause.
[00:44:34.220] - Brandon
And believe it or not, actually, females tend to have a longer pause and actually equips them to be better snipers.
[00:44:40.770] - Chris
That's interesting.
[00:44:41.890] - Speaker 3
Interesting. So anyways, there's this natural pause that happens organically in the breath cycle. We kind of look at that. And the day's activities, too, is that you get the team out the door. There's this natural almost calm that happens for just a few moments where the team hasn't got to their objectives, yet, so job specific questions and feedback hasn't started.
[00:45:02.920] - Chris
aren't rolling in.
[00:45:02.920] - Brandon
It's still early, fairly early in the morning normally if we're doing our timing right.
[00:45:07.180] - Brandon
We're still talking at eight a.m. at the very latest at this point. And so what we encourage our leaders to review in their time blocking is, is it realistic then for you to have an hour to two hours in that organic lull? Again, we're protecting the time. We're not allowing anything and everything to fill that gap.
[00:45:24.160] - Brandon
But we say this is a really strong time for me to get admin time accomplished. You've focused on your team. You've equipped them.
[00:45:31.540] - Brandon
You've got them out the door. Now, I've got this hour, maybe two hours where I'm just going to buckle down, focus in on getting some sheets written, getting some invoicing packages out, following up with adjusters, whatever the case may be, but block it out! So when a customer wants to meet at 8:30, they don't need to know why you can't be there until 9:30. They just need to know what 8:30 doesn't work to my schedule, but I can be there at 9:30 sharp.
[00:45:57.010] - Brandon
Good for you. Good for me. Great. And nine times out of ten, that client is not going to have an unrealistic expectation because you just like them, have a schedule. So we protect that time. We block it in. And here's what's happening with this. We actually encourage folks to do it AM-PM and again, some of us can get work done in the late afternoon, but it needs to be certain types of work, kind of like what you were alluding to.
[00:46:19.930] - Brandon
I know that from an operational perspective, I can do box checking activities after 3pm.
[00:46:24.490] - Chris
mechanical repetitive.
[00:46:25.940] - Brandon
Yeah, I could even write an estimate. I can do many things after 3p.m. What I can't do is give a really productive interaction with my employee based on kind of higher level thinking. Culture development. Like it's hard for me to be in that space after 3p.m. I probably won't go out and do heavy negotiations after 3p.m.
[00:46:47.440] - Chris
It's the emotional only creative.
[00:46:49.660] - Brandon
What do I have? What do I not right. Just being that honest with yourself in terms of the gas in the tank.
[00:46:54.520] - Brandon
So again, we're encouraging folks book in that day. Let's get some admin knocked out first thing in the morning at that organic lull in the day. Yep. And then let's do a little bit more at the end of the afternoon. You're kind of gassed. There's not a ton of client activity happening right towards the end of the afternoon.
[00:47:10.630] - Brandon
Let's give it another hour to two hours to do some proactive engagement of my administrative tasks. So here's whats happening when you do this. If we're looking at an eight to ten hour day, which most of us are working. You've accomplished some really vital things to the ability for your company to invoice and collect money. You've done some really powerful things in terms of equipping your team for success, affirming their behaviors, delegating effectively. And then you really have this massive block of time during the day where we get to go out into the field, manage quality control, do spot checking on our projects, meet with a client.
[00:47:47.410] - Chris
modeling.
[00:47:48.010] - Brandon
Meet with a referral partner, but then what we're not doing is spending ten hours every day chasing our ass.
[00:47:55.120] - Brandon
And then Friday hits. And from Monday through Thursday, we kept telling ourself we're going to stay in the office all day on Friday. We're going to stay in the office all day on Friday. We're to stay in the office all day on Friday. Friday hits. A catastrophic loss happens in a four star hotel. You spend all day chasing that, and guess what happens on Saturday morning? You look back over your week, you've done nothing to get your team started consistently.
[00:48:17.770] - Brandon
You've done nothing to get your sheets written and get your invoicing packages out. Now you have a collection issue.
[00:48:23.500] - Chris
And now you're either throwing it all to the wind and then you're going to labor over it in your mind all weekend, or you labor on it all weekend and you sacrifice your own. rest and your family time.
[00:48:37.210] - Brandon
And I guarantee you there's people listening to this going, that is my life. Not a week like that's my year. That's my last ten years.
[00:48:45.400] - Chris
That's always we're always working because we're not prioritizing our work. OK, so I feel like this is a topic we could just spend so much time on. One of the things that I think it's just worth spotlighting is we've encountered a number of companies that they don't really start rolling until eight a.m. The eight a.m. is kind of a soft start for a lot of companies. I think it's a mistake for what you're talking about. And it just seems like, well, it's just an hour or just thirty minutes.
[00:49:14.020] - Chris
But in this business, that thirty minutes, the difference between a seven thirty hard start and an eight a.m. hard start is what you're talking about.
[00:49:24.490] - Chris
It's that margin because you think about how much you can get done uninterrupted in thirty minutes.
[00:49:30.160] - Brandon
Oh,it's powerful.
[00:49:31.360] - Chris
How many sheets you can look over, how many emails you can respond to, how much value you can actually generate in those thirty minutes.
[00:49:37.300] - Brandon
Absolutely.
[00:49:37.690] - Chris
Because what I just heard you saying and you talked about all these things that happen in that morning process, you've connected with your team, you've affirmed your team members, you've identified the specific tactical needs and requirements of the jobs that are on the docket for the day.
[00:49:50.830] - Chris
Then you've gone through and you've done critical, critical path, paperwork and communication, all of this before 10:00.
[00:49:57.900] - Brandon
oh,Yeah
[00:49:58.380] - Chris
and so for the mitigation manager to close the loop on that role, if that mitigation manager is four or five hours of genius time where they can bring their best emotional and creative work, that very well may be their golden hours, very well may be the seven thirty to noon thirty for the mitigation manager, but it might look different for the controller or the office manager.
[00:50:19.360] - Brandon
Right
[00:50:19.760] - Chris
their best time is probably while the rest of the team is out in the field because they don't have people walking through the door, clicking the time cards, asking questions about benefits and logging time off sheets and requests and questions about health insurance. They don't have all of that random stuff happening. And so for some office managers, maybe their golden hours are ten to three or something like that. It's a little bit different. So I think for every single role we have to look at, OK, what are the most important things to accomplish and what's the best time of day,
[00:50:50.770] - Brandon
best time of day
[00:50:51.450] - Chris
for me to leverage that before you do your summary ,let's hit on some of these tactics. And we've already touched on a couple. We've talked about time blocking and we'll inevitably talk lots more about time blocking. We talked about doing the activity audit.
[00:51:03.840] - Brandon
Yeah, it's huge. It's kind of like that's the table to be set right, let's start there.
[00:51:09.120] - Chris
that's the first thing. And we have talked really about themes and I think we should put on that. And I think you should talk about it from the standpoint of being a general manager. Is this where a lot of your time in grade has been spent? Is in running a full operation, big and small? You were a GM over a small company and also an eleven plus million dollar, 80 plus person company.
[00:51:27.870] - Chris
So I watched you used ay themes to kind of organize your time over the years. Can you talk about that?
[00:51:34.410] - Brandon
Yeah. So I think we kind of in general call it battle rhythms.
[00:51:37.890] - Brandon
And we actually I think in general we look at it and say these things are important for the entire team to get into a consistent rhythm on.
[00:51:45.480] - Brandon
And we start by teaching people just understanding weekly, monthly and quarterly type meetings schedules. What are required? What's the minimums? And what we're doing with those is that we're talking about what are we trying to achieve? How much touches are we supposed to get with our team, with our staff to keep everybody on the same page, everybody rowing in the same direction? And there's certainly things that need to be looked at on a regular, like frequent basis.
[00:52:11.100] - Brandon
And then there's other things that it's not going to slow the development of our business down. If we do them once a quarter, a couple of times a year. And so for me, what I've always looked at is prioritizing..... What is the frequency required to keep this portion of the strategy on path? And so for us, the main one that we looked at is the bread and butter is establishing a really consistent battle rhythm with your weekly production meeting.
[00:52:36.150] - Brandon
And so identifying what are we talking about? Who are the players that will show up to that meeting? And then what that ultimately allows me to do is say "no" to distractions and conversations and save them for that space.
[00:52:50.100] - Chris
Let's go into a little more detail on that, though, with your GM role, because here's what I remember. Of course, I had my own role that I was kind of occupied with, but that production meeting or what later became our leadership meeting at a higher level every Wednesday morning. You is the general manager behind the scenes in the lead up. So outside of that meeting, you are having specific meetings each day that allowed you to show up to that leadership meeting, fully informed and engaged.
[00:53:15.880] - Chris
So if I recall you had an AR day every week where you would check with originally our county manager.
[00:53:23.640] - Chris
Later, we eventually hired a controller with a higher level financial oversight. But you had a scheduled standing meeting with that person where you're reviewing AR. So you come into the leadership meeting already exploring the numbers, and then you are looking for the color. Give me the definition. You already know what you're seeing in the books, and then you can look to the team members to give you the color and help you project out. What does this mean? Why are these numbers happening? But you had scheduled a day where you knew I'm doing AR today.
[00:53:53.820] - Brandon
Right.
[00:53:54.120] - Chris
And can you give some other examples?
[00:53:55.380] - Brandon
Yeah, I think it all depends on the size of the operation, but there's key operational initiatives that you have to focus on. Like, for instance, we can't all get together and strategize about next quarter's goals. For instance, there's these moments that you break those things down and that you meet with certain people to get the kind of the lay of the land before you introduce the entire leadership to the concept or to the goal. Basically, what I would do is I just establish battle rhythms for the week of which key leaders I needed to meet with based on what the strategy or that particular area of the business was.
[00:54:26.700] - Brandon
So we always looked at our business and really broke it into three kind of primary legs, and that was general operations, finance and sales marketing. And so essentially, when I looked at my week, those three things were happening every week. I was having a sit down face time with the leader of that particular area of responsibility in the business. And then when I would meet as a leadership meeting, which is very different from a production meeting, we should note that. When I would then go to a weekly leadership meeting, you're right, I had the foundational aspects together, and now it was time to unify the team on the broader perspective of these areas of expertise that each one of you had a focus on. What we felt was important to our initiatives and us continuing to move the ship forward was making sure that once a week all leaders in general were brought up to speed on what their peers and counterparts were doing. But I didn't waste their time diving into the details that only that particular leader was responsible for.
[00:55:26.440] - Brandon
I think we can dial that back a little bit and say, OK, what is something similarly look like for a production meeting? And it's just a matter of can we get the right personalities into the same room to get everyone onto the same page, to review critical KPIs, to do a review of how we're conducting ourselves in one to two hour block of time to prevent all the one off conversations being done over and over and over throughout the week. And as your team gets larger, like at one point, we're in an organization with seven independent key leaders, depending on sales and marketing, a operational location, whatever.
[00:56:06.700] - Brandon
Well, imagine that seven different leaders are having some form of this half hazard conversation day in and day out. For us, it meant the equivalent of 10 to 12, 15 hours in a week that were being reduced and boiled down to a two hour leadership meeting.
[00:56:22.600] - Chris
So that in and of itself is a tactic or strategy that I think supports what we're talking about, which is creating a container for those conversations.
[00:56:31.690] - Brandon
Containers is a great word .time and space.
[00:56:33.190] - Chris
Create a container for those conversations, it should be if you don't have a production meeting, that absolutely should be a container you're using every single week, almost regardless of size. Right.
[00:56:43.680] - Brandon
oh,period.
[00:56:44.110] - Chris
Somebody's got to mitigation technicians and an owner. They still need to be having a production meeting. So creating those containers. And for us, you got we got to a certain size. And we had a weekly leadership meeting that we put in place where it was forward thinking it was rear facing.
[00:56:58.630] - Chris
We'd take a look at performance, but it was largely focused on where are we going this next week? That was an important container for us at some point. And then, of course, you have a container as a mitigation department manager right though.
[00:57:09.910] - Chris
One of those critical containers is the morning process, including the stand to and the vehicle checks and all that kind of stuff.
[00:57:16.870] - Brandon
Can I just hit on something with this? Here's the theme. You mentioned themes earlier. Here's the theme with this. You guys, business becomes an excuse to not use these time frames consistently. And then what we're trying to tell everyone that we become susceptible to this too. This takes a constant reminder from you and your team is that that business that becomes the excuse to stop doing these consistent behaviors for time blocking, for putting people and meeting spaces into the right time and space during the week, because you allow that to stop, you then inevitably perpetuate the fact you will never get back to it.
[00:57:57.550] - Brandon
If the excuse for not doing it is that you're busy.
[00:58:00.430] - Chris
Because again, it's our business.
[00:58:03.730] - Brandon
And half the reason you're that busy is because you're not using the right time and space for the appropriate topic, the appropriate time, the appropriate task, whatever the case may be.
[00:58:15.130] - Chris
And yet it's very normal for us to have a hard time seeing that the moment
[00:58:18.940] - Brandon
absolutely huge.
[00:58:19.900] - Chris
Busy, busy, busy, that energy can take over. And we've all done it. We all do it. But I think it's just the practice of becoming more aware and choosing differently. Yeah, OK, so, yeah, we need your magical wrap up.
[00:58:31.450] - Brandon
ok. the wrap.
[00:58:31.450] - Chris
Give us the bullets.
[00:58:32.600] - Brandon
I honestly feel like we probably could have broke all these down into individual blocks and spent a bunch of time on them. So here's the concept. Here's my perspective on the concept. There is a bravado, a false sense of security, if you will, a false badge of honor that we wear based on how many hours we're grinding every week. And I think that the real intelligent winning teams are the ones that assess production based on efficiency versus hours logged.
[00:59:00.730] - Brandon
That's a really utilitarian thing. Basically, guys, we're all grinding our faces off and we're spending a bunch of energy doing things that often when we look backwards, do not affirm in us a sense of productivity, wins or gains. But we're really good at telling people how busy we are. What the challenge is then is that as leaders, as individuals, can we stop for a moment and do a real honest assessment of two things? One is, what can I really do well? Like how many hours in the day can I actually look at my efforts spent and know that I'm going to do a great job during that time frame?
[00:59:40.190] - Brandon
Next pieces do an actual audit of your day to day time spent. Deal with some facts. Let's remove assumptions. Let's remove stories. Let's remove what we're telling our neighbors so they think we're awesome. But let's actually audit what our day to day activities look like. So that we can find areas where we are being redundant with our time spent or we're not being effective in who and when we're communicating to key personnel, and then the opportunity then is to take that information, those two very important things, your personal assessment of your personal productivity and efficiency level.
[01:00:17.240] - Brandon
The second thing is where you're spending your time and then create very consistent battle rhythms throughout the week and the month and try to push as many of your tasks and responsibilities into an appropriate block of time, day in and day out. Not forgetting to make sure that we're identifying the right participants and the right kinds of actions or strategies that we want to, I guess, covering go over during those time blocks. And then the last piece of this, what I picked up was. By doing this and making this consistent, regardless of what's happening around us, what we're going to identify is that we stop this self-perpetuating cycle of our busyness makes us more busy.
[01:01:05.600] - Chris
Yeah, I got the last bullet.
[01:01:07.930] - Brandon
OK
[01:01:08.660] - Chris
Let's all endeavor to be more like Steve. Let's set up our days in such a way that as leaders, when we're talking to one of our new mitigation technicians or when we're talking to our office manager or when we're talking to our business partner, or when we're talking to our estimator or our project manager or our restoration manager. Whoever we're talking to, that we're able to offer them our full presence and attention.
[01:01:35.840] - Chris
Let's be more like Steve.
[01:01:37.010] - Brandon
Be more like Steve. Freedom in discipline. Man, freedom in discipline.
[01:01:43.430] - Brandon
All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of the MRM podcast.
[01:01:48.020] - Chris
And if you got something out of it, share it with a friend. Hit subscribe. Hit follow. Leave us five star review. Thanks a lot.