[00:00:07.370] - Chris
Welcome back to the head, Heart and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:00:10.870] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead.
[00:00:17.590] - Chris
Man, I love this industry.
[00:00:21.010] - Brandon
I almost did a what's up, brother with my mic. The ceiling.
[00:00:25.130] - Brandon
That would have been. I don't know.
[00:00:27.050] - Brandon
That wouldn't have worked very well.
[00:00:28.620] - Chris
Am I the only one that probably, like, I open up spotify? You don't even use Spotify.
[00:00:34.370] - Brandon
I know. I'm like, dude, listen, do not look to a.
[00:00:38.570] - Chris
I'm so surprised when you said that.
[00:00:40.700] - Brandon
I'm a budding chat user. Chat GPT user.
[00:00:43.860] - Chris
Okay.
[00:00:44.620] - Brandon
But technology in general, right? I don't know if I'm lazy or what the thing is, but I tend to wrestle with wanting to advance my skill set in certain things. I mean, you know, you have to give me, like, apple help. Like, every other day. I feel like I'm like a grandpa.
[00:01:00.850] - Chris
I was going to say, am I the only one? I can't be that. I open up my. I'm so simple in some ways. I open up Spotify to see, did Rogan upload a new. Is there a new Rogan episode? Like, there's a thing. And when you go to the home screen, the ones that you're subscribed know, it'll have the little blue Dot showing. There's a new episode for that. So I have my. What are my podcasts right now? Like, in my featured, or what do they call it in Spotify? Like ones you follow or subscribe to. Anyways, so Rogan, I think I talked about it in a previous episode, the Te Ching, which is a Buddhist thing, and it's this white dude.
[00:01:47.090] - Brandon
Well, of course.
[00:01:47.880] - Chris
It's just like, he got into Tao, and he has just this really cool way of talking about Buddhist things that I'm like, oh, this is very interesting. I find this useful. It's this monk looking guy. The icon for the podcast is this monk looking guy with Bose headphones on and these dark aviator sunglasses. So funny. Anyway, so that's one of mine, Lex Friedman, I really like his stuff. Jordan Peterson's in my short list right now. And Theo Vaughn, who's one of my just favorite comedians right now, he just makes me laugh so hard. And then lately, I've been getting into these sleep pOdcasts. Remember how I recommended that to you when we were on the road? It is really useful to me, helping me get to sleep, man, at night. Like, my know, I think a lot of people can relate to that. I just get in my head and I can't get to sleep. And this particular podcast is called Get Sleepy.
[00:02:45.590] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:02:46.400] - Chris
And one of the things I like about it is it's a British. So they have a whole bunch of different voice actors that produce these stories. They're bedtime stories for adults. Okay, listen. It's the goofiest thing ever, but I always pick the British ones. So they put like a British flag or an American flag to the accent that you're like, it's the British thing. I don't know what it is, but anyhow, so I do that. It's like, oh, blue Dot. On one of my podcasters, I got a new episode. So anyway, this is another Rabbit Trails episode, and this is something we've been experimenting with partly, I mean, just to be totally honest. And I know sometimes if I say Joe Rogan, some of you are like, oh, Rogan. Everybody's talking about, you know, I like his shit. I'm way into it. I'm a total fan. Not every show, like, some shows are boring.
[00:03:34.440] - Brandon
Oh, yeah, some shows, yeah.
[00:03:35.530] - Chris
Like the fight companion shows.
[00:03:37.460] - Brandon
That ain't my thing.
[00:03:38.460] - Chris
Not so into it. Some of his comedian buddies, not as into. But anyway, so I thought as part of this, just kind of, if I was looking back over the different podcast episodes and stuff I've been listening to for cool shit that I've been thinking about, or it's forced me to reflect on. Before we do that, though, what should do?
[00:03:59.470] - Brandon
I mean, before we do that.
[00:04:00.530] - Chris
Yeah, we got to thank our sponsors, don't we?
[00:04:02.180] - Brandon
Yeah. I'm dropping, man.
[00:04:04.210] - Chris
Yeah. So liftify.com, floodlight.
[00:04:08.350] - Brandon
I feel like we need to come up with a jingle. Well, yeah, that's next year we're doing jingles.
[00:04:14.310] - Chris
That was the thing. You remember when I had my State farm business back in the day. And before that, even with rapid refill, we'd get these radio ad sales people that would come, and they're know we could come up with a cool jingle. We have this music partner that'll actually make you a dedicated song. And I think of Albin's plumbing here in Corvallis. There's like, these Fitzpatrick painting also has one I used to know a can. Oh, yeah, it's legit, these theme songs.
[00:04:43.430] - Brandon
What about, like, old school? What was the guy, it worked so well, I can't even remember. He had the high and tight, like, old school furniture. I mean, this is old school. I saw this guy, like, when I went to my grandparents, and it was his wife. I think it was he and his wife. And he had this old school high and tight like from the late.
[00:05:02.150] - Chris
I know who you're talking.
[00:05:02.990] - Brandon
You know what I'm talking about? Sold furniture.
[00:05:04.890] - Chris
Yeah, I remember that.
[00:05:06.530] - Brandon
He was all jingled out.
[00:05:07.430] - Chris
Well. And there's a big thing back in the day. So how do we go down that trail?
[00:05:11.690] - Brandon
We need to thank some sponsors and get off that thing.
[00:05:14.210] - Chris
I know that liftify.com. But part of the reason what we're trying to do, by the way, our faithful listeners is we really try to keep these ad reads as interesting as possible. So maybe you don't even skip ahead, which of course we all do at times. Like I do it sometimes when Rogan is doing his. So we try to keep it forward slash floodlight. You owe yourself a demo. Just go do a freaking demo.
[00:05:42.370] - Brandon
Yeah, check it out.
[00:05:43.500] - Chris
Check it out. It's a 1 hour investment for your business. That potentially is a useful lever.
[00:05:49.930] - Brandon
It's worth millions.
[00:05:51.080] - Chris
Force multiplier could be literally. Literally.
[00:05:54.550] - Brandon
Literally worth millions. And that's not an exaggeration. That's not tongue in cheek. That's not us being.
[00:05:59.800] - Chris
No, like right now of all of our clients that are using it. Georgia Michelle Gutierrez. I don't think there's anything wrong with highlighting them. Big Surf Pro team over on the East Coast. Awesome people. Crushing really great folks. Doing a lot more right than just their liftify account. But holy cow, they're number one in the Surf Pro network right now. And actually as far as I recall, out of like 1300 operators.
[00:06:25.750] - Brandon
Well no, I think they're twelve or 1300 reviews and clocking.
[00:06:29.570] - Chris
It's unbelievable. And they were at like 570 or something when they started with liftify just three months ago and now they're at like 1300. Oh, it's unbelievable. I'm not sure they were number one in the, in the SerPro network to begin with and they've just continued to widen their margin. And this is against, I mean listen guys, they're competing against when we say they're number one. That's amongst surf pro operators that are doing 50 8100 million dollars of revenue. And George and Michelle, they are number one in terms of Google reviews. It's incredible. It's unbelievable.
[00:07:08.230] - Brandon
Crushing crush.
[00:07:09.170] - Chris
If you want to crush, go do a liftify demo. Yeah. How's that? Yeah, I love it. And props to George and Michelle for making yet another great choice in their business. Right. Onboarding liftify.
[00:07:18.640] - Brandon
But you're not biased at all in that.
[00:07:20.180] - Chris
I'm not biased at all.
[00:07:22.190] - Brandon
Answer force, answerforce.com floodlight guys. Answer force. Bolton partner to ensure that we have redundancy, professionalism and consistency to our call intake process.
[00:07:33.170] - Chris
That was so boom.
[00:07:34.950] - Brandon
Boom.
[00:07:35.380] - Chris
Sure, man.
[00:07:35.970] - Brandon
Boom. Do it, get it.
[00:07:37.560] - Chris
Okay.
[00:07:38.000] - Brandon
And then last but not least, our dear friend CNR magazine, Michelle and her know, it's actually getting to the point where we're going to have to stop using, starting with Michelle and her team, because she has become an outstanding leader and is building a fantastic team. And that team is now, I'm not giving.
[00:07:59.930] - Chris
They're badass.
[00:08:00.980] - Brandon
They're doing the dude. They're taking care of us as industry participants and continue to raise the bar in terms of being a friend to our industry, bringing top tier knowledge, information.
[00:08:13.180] - Chris
She has podcasts, too.
[00:08:14.750] - Brandon
Podcast. And not only does she have a podcast, though, but she iterates consistently to do these series where she brings in total studs and studs. You got Phil in that mix. You got a bunch of other just fantastic names of people that just so quality.
[00:08:31.570] - Chris
She's had every who's who on her podcast on LinkedIn lives. It's remarkable.
[00:08:38.130] - Brandon
That actually reminds me, we have not had her on for a really long time. Shameless plug. It's time to get them on. So, CNR Magazine, guys, if you're not subscRibers, you should be. It's essentially free information that comes to you and your team. And then more importantly, it's just another resource helping unify our voice in the industry in terms of information and expression of what we do and how we do it and getting better across the board. All right, there we go.
[00:09:01.280] - Chris
Rabbit trail.
[00:09:02.420] - Brandon
So you started us off on this whole podcast deal with.
[00:09:07.090] - Chris
You know what?
[00:09:07.730] - Brandon
I'm not even going to let you go there. I'm taking over.
[00:09:09.660] - Chris
Okay.
[00:09:09.950] - Brandon
We're going to go down a rabbit trail. All right, Rando here. This is almost like Friday Live. Okay, guys, we have been doing a boatload of stuff with folks lately on time management. I won't hang here forever. I won't hang here forever. Okay, time management. Here's the story. All of us, regardless of the position or the role that we play, time management is probably our Achilles heel in most cases. And I know some of us are awesome at identifying as multitaskers and all the things, and I would still say that most of us, if we don't get a grip on creating some real tools around owning our calendar and owning time management, we are going to suffer the consequences. And I have just learned over the years that. Not that, it's because I'm a monster at this, because I'm a work in process, but man, I have met some folks over the years that absolutely have their calendar in a stranglehold, and they are powerful producers. What they're able to accomplish in a consistent way day in and day out, the level of productivity, the level of accomplishment that these folks can achieve is unsurmountable.
[00:10:19.440] - Brandon
And at the end of the day, it literally is not their skill set. It's not necessarily that they're better at the role or they know more than their peer or their counterpart. It's because they've developed a skill set around owning their calendar, and it's hard not to recognize the fruit of that endeavor.
[00:10:36.850] - Chris
Power of discipline, man.
[00:10:38.140] - Brandon
Power of discipline. So here's just the one piece I just want to kind of lay on everybody. Think about this. When we allow white space to exist in our calendar, and this might sound a bit counter when we have these big open blocks, or if you're one of those people that runs off of a to do list instead of calendars like actual blocks of time on your calendar, you run a great deal of risk of not knowing when to prioritize what. And inevitably, what happens with that to do list is that it just kind of keeps rotating because the tyranny of the urgent takes over. You don't do anything to actually actively manage your calendar. And when you get to the end of the day and you look at that to do list, you realize that even though you had this awesome list of functioning priorities, you got to two of them, and the tyranny of the urgent took the rest of your day. And so what I've seen people do is when they get really good at removing the white space from their calendar, meaning they intentionally put in these blocks of time that they're going to focus on two, three, four, handful of items or priorities, and they commit to that block.
[00:11:42.760] - Brandon
When they then look at a to do list, they realize how much more of that list they actually got accomplished.
[00:11:47.830] - Chris
Yeah, they didn't react, they didn't bleed.
[00:11:50.760] - Brandon
Into something because it just was the thing that popped up next in their mind. They actually did the priorities based on the blocks of time they committed to. And when they get to the end of the day, they're often more of a scenario of winning than being frustrated.
[00:12:06.090] - Chris
Well, and then I think it's worth saying in that context, too, how do you time block when you're in our, you know, we just had a little bit of a workshop that we did over in the East coast with construction teams, and you talked about sort of some of the kind of the natural cadence of our business. Talk about that, dude. Because I think it's really relevant. I think a lot of people are like, well, how do you do that in our business when every single second of the day you potentially have something tugging at your sleeve, something that was unplanned, you couldn't have predicted it, right? And yet there is a natural ebb and flow to our business that we can take advantage of, right?
[00:12:50.870] - Brandon
There is. And I think a big thing for us to kind of always hold on to is although our industry can feel or present itself as being chaotic, the power of being restoration contractors is that you learn to control the chaos. You learn how to maneuver within it, around it, leverage it to your favor and ultimately filter our customer from experiencing the chaos. That's kind of our job, right? That's our role.
[00:13:17.130] - Chris
This is like the biggest thing we all forget is if I commit to having, say, a morning stand to from 730 to 08:00 I get my guys out. I get my guys and gals out. I have an agenda, I have objectives, things I want to accomplish in that morning stand to. In the back of our mind we know that there's customer calls coming in, customers that want to meet with us, customers that want to call back, all that kind of stuff. And our tendency is we don't have time for morning stand to today because we got to get out to the Joneses, right? And it's like customer request or inbound call trumps everything is how some people operate. I think all of us, every single person listening to this and saying this has been in that mode at one time or another, right? And we forget in the midst of the urgency and the desire to go claim the dollar service, the client do, the thing is that if we tell them, hey, we're busy between 730 and eight, and so therefore I can't call you back or I can't meet with you until 839, ten, whatever, for all they know we're meeting with the president or we're visiting another customer job.
[00:14:33.130] - Chris
Yeah, but somehow we don't feel the freedom to intentionally schedule our time because we have to be able to react and respond to every customer opportunity that comes.
[00:14:44.120] - Brandon
Yeah, that's so true. So again, like with everything when we talk about time blocking or time management, it's not something that can exist on its own and it solves the business's problems. Right? All these things, they're layers of opportunity and tools for us to deploy that help make sure that we can do what we need to do. But you're right. So some of the pushback that people will use in terms of reference to time blocking is that I can't control when somebody calls me with a new loss. Okay, well, okay, let's actually jump into that right now. I'm not asking technicians to block out their morning for administrative leadership responsibilities.
[00:15:24.330] - Chris
No.
[00:15:24.840] - Brandon
I'm expecting them to get in a truck and go deliver service. Department heads, project managers, key leaders. I don't know that it's realistic or appropriate for you to be reacting to everything that happens. If we're designing a team, training a team, and equipping a team to do their job, a lot of our reacting, or the immediate execution should be getting done by our team members that are field staff oriented. For leaders that need to be proactively managing our teams, their clients, and their referral partners. You're going to need to slow down a little bit. Like it is your job to give yourself the space to think about ten minutes from now, possibly tomorrow and maybe next week, and lead out of that versus reacting. Okay. So when people say, well, I could get a call for a new loss at any moment, you sure could. But did you design an intake system? Do you have field technicians that are properly qualified to do the job? Then fucking let them do the job. And you don't need to react. You stick to your time blocking.
[00:16:23.700] - Chris
Yeah, stick to your system.
[00:16:24.840] - Brandon
Stick to your system. Stick to the leader. Standard work.
[00:16:27.120] - Chris
Right.
[00:16:27.690] - Brandon
Another thing to keep in mind with this is that the busier we get, the more important it is to adhere to the time blocks, the systems and the processes, because that's what prevents us from allowing our system to come off the tracks when we punt. Consistent systems, because we get busy. We've literally unleveraged the very tool that is supposed to help us prevent the chaos in the first. Like, we shoot ourselves in the foot. So remember that. So just big picture time blocks. Basically what we're saying is, if you think about our business, there's a little bit of this weird moment in time in the morning. It's not overtly obvious, and if you're not paying attention, we miss it. But if you just slow down for a second look at your company, there is a time. It's not exactly the same, depending on how you deploy your teams, but it's probably around, let's call it 08:00 a.m. Maybe 915. And it's this idea that we've done all our morning stuff. The teams are deploying from our shop, but we haven't gotten to enough jobs and done enough things to really start firing up. Questions, concerns, issues, problems.
[00:17:34.320] - Brandon
It's this natural. We're traveling out to get the work started, and there's just a natural lull that happens in our business. Well, those are one of those times as a key leader that you should be maximizing to get in to do some of that proactive leaders work. Dashboards, getting into our whip. If you're a Joc tool user, our friend Chris Hill and his team, this is what I get into that pulls all that data for Dash. Get into your dashboards, look at the book of business that you're responsible for. Take advantage of that lull. Again, I use the term lull very loosely here, but this kind of almost moment of less chaos, leverage that into your favor, your benefit, to ensure that the majority of the rest of your day is done in a proactive manner. Because you've stopped long enough to take inventory of what's going on around you, looking at the book of Business and ensuring that what you had planned to do that day is still on point. Right? Not getting overwhelmed, not reacting, but proactively looking. So again, we're not going to control what you do with your time block. But the idea is kind of three critical principles.
[00:18:40.700] - Brandon
One, consistency. Two, don't leave white space on your calendar because people will fill it, things will fill it. The third piece here, guys, sorry, is bookending the day. Okay. And what that means is I want to start and finish my day with some kind of sense of proactive engagement in my dashboards, looking and reviewing at my work and process, and ensuring that I'm starting and closing my day proactively, intelligently, right? Doing my summaries, doing the different things that I need to to keep the mission moving forward. So we're not breaking up every moment into a specific task. We're simply blocking out our calendar to have space for types of tasks that make sense. Okay? So the way we kind of promote it is A-M-P-M. Routine. Bookending your day and then spending that ten to three time frame, the majority of your afternoon, outbound with your clients, your subs, your vendors, your people, but really protecting that opener and that closer to make sure that you're being proactive and remaining as proactive as possible. The last piece there, and we'll move on, is day to day consistency. All the time I did this, I still do it from time to time.
[00:19:51.230] - Brandon
I make the mistake of saying, oh gosh, Thursday is the day. I'm going to lock myself in the office on Thursday for 5 hours, and I'm going to get all the things done that I need to get done. And inevitably that's the morning that a sweet loss comes in. An employee quits, a sub craps out on you, something happens, you then punt that five hour block that you in quotes, were so locked in on. And now I've literally made the mountain out of the molehill of things I was supposed to try to get to. And now I'm intimidated, now I'm overwhelmed. Now the amount of time it's going to require to get me back on track is almost too much for me to bear. I don't have it. Right. And so we really are huge fans of incremental progress. Every day, administratively, every day we get into it, it doesn't have to be for 4 hours, it's just 20 minutes, an hour, 45 minutes. Whatever you block out, you do it every single day. And what that allows you to do is same way we eat an elephant one bite at a time, right? So that's my two cent on Calendar man.
[00:20:57.570] - Chris
And I love that term that you used, a leader standard work, and you described it, you explained a lot of what that is, right. It's getting the dashboards, it's looking at the things, it's looking at tomorrow and the next week and the next month, right. Is dedicating time. That is the leader standard work is how am I looking ahead, how am I getting in front of things for my team, how am I being proactive and thoughtful about the upcoming things that I'm responsible for and need to influence 100%.
[00:21:27.200] - Brandon
And ultimately when we do that, well, that is the activity that begins to actually remove the chaos because we solve problems instead of putting out fires. When we do that, when we're more proactive in nature, we dive deeper into systems and processes that equip our team to do their job consistently. So now I don't have to get pulled into some of these different elements. This is how we actually remove the chaos, is begin to own our calendar first and creating some level of bandwidth where I can proactively engage my role and my team and create systems and processes to pull those fires out of the system.
[00:22:05.180] - Chris
Yeah, that's good, dude. There's that piece I talked about in a previous. This is our second podcast today that we're recording. Kind of getting ready for a lot of the holiday trips and whatnot, client trips and so forth. I was talking about that chat GPT session that Jeff and I did yesterday for RIA, and he told me, I just have to pass this along because of course there was like, I don't know there was a hundred or so people that attended that RAA conference, but so a lot of people didn't obviously hear it. But he had a really cool tip about chat GPT that I had not even been turned on to. All right, Headhart and Boots listeners wanted to stop here just a moment and thank our underwriting sponsor, Bloodlight Consulting group. As all of you, you know, Brandon and I, this is our passion project. Headhart and Boots is, but it's also a way more and more that our consulting clients find us and in effect, they interview us. Right? Those of you been listening to show for a while, you get to know who we are, right, what we're about. So if Headheart and Boots is valuable to you, one of the best things you can do is share it with your friends.
[00:23:14.800] - Chris
And it's been incredible to watch just the audience grow. And we still get text messages from many of you about shows that you really like and impacted you. So that's number one. And please keep doing that. Many of you have been huge advocates of the show. We also just want to remind you too, if you're a restoration company owner and you're interested in a partner in your growth, you want some help building out systems, developing your leadership teams, helping set up the infrastructure for you to scale and grow into the company that you're trying to build.
[00:23:44.600] - Brandon
That's what we do.
[00:23:45.620] - Chris
That's what we do is we come alongside restoration company leaders, we help equip them and we help support them in that growth trajectory. So if you're looking for that, go to Floodlightgrp.com. Potentially we could be a great match for each other.
[00:23:58.720] - Brandon
Another way that we really do serve our client base and our sphere of influence is through our premier partners. We work really hard to vet those folks that we believe bring a level of value to the industry, that it can really be leveraged in a way to have a sincere, positive impact on your business. We take that very seriously. The folks that we create, those kind of ongoing partnerships, that's not a check the box kind of scenario. We really see strategic alignment in the value that they bring. We see value in the way that their leadership teams and their partners are developed. And we've done very sincere work of ensuring that these folks that we introduce our clients and our sphere to can actually create vetted value. So go check out Floodlightgrp.com Premier Partners and see if there's some folks on there that you can connect with and begin developing some other resources to support your growth and your business.
[00:24:50.510] - Chris
He recently with one of his sales leaders, I don't know, like his VP of sales or whoever he was talking to. They were researching a property management client that one of their sales reps or something got into. And just on a whim, they looked up that company on chat GPT. Hey, tell me everything you know about, oh, interesting. They were using it as a prospect research my, and it spit out, oh, I know what he said. He was doing it because he lives in Phoenix Scottsdale area and he said, tell me who the largest property management, like who holds the largest or manages the largest portfolio of real estate in Phoenix.
[00:25:33.710] - Brandon
Get out of here.
[00:25:35.020] - Chris
And it spit out a ton of intel, including total million square feet under management, total number of doors that they manage, the ownership, this whole profile of it now, I mean, I don't know if you can do it with every single question you asked, but I thought, oh my gosh, I have to dig into that. That's incredible.
[00:25:54.440] - Brandon
That is incredible.
[00:25:55.390] - Chris
Okay, now here's another idea I had about chat GPT.
[00:25:57.770] - Brandon
Yeah, that's a good one. I got some too.
[00:25:59.860] - Chris
Yeah. Okay, so yesterday again, when I was kind of dialoguing with Jeff about this, one of the things that I brought up during this session was how much I've been liking it for book. Like his leaders often we talk about that like a cool book we read or oh, I just got this awesome book. And so, and so recommended it. And the reality for have a, if you could see my office, you see my office, I have this bookshelf that's just full of books. And mostly because it makes me look smart, it makes me feel right sometimes, I'm not going to lie, sometimes I look at the stack books, I'm like, oh, that's a good one. I remember when Seth Godin came out with that one. And I've read probably half of practice. My standard leaders work is when somebody tells me I have a book, I almost always open up my Amazon app on my phone and I grab it and at a minimum I add it to my cart. So then I punt the decision to actually buy the book till later. So I don't want to forget about this really awesome book.
[00:27:01.420] - Chris
And so I'll open up when I'm with the person and sometimes depending on the person and the book author, I'll just break and buy it right there. In fact, we were at a workshop with a whole bunch of owners a couple of weeks ago. And the guy, we were at the happy hour having drinks and he said, hey, dude, give me books. What books are you reading? Frank. Frank was like, what books do you recommend? Like, what books do you guys always recommend? I'm like, well, we don't necessarily have a standard list, but here's one. And I opened up my audible and my Kindle app and all this stuff, and I looked at my order history in Amazon, dude, I bought so many books, but how many do I actually read? Well, I've got a whole lot that I haven't read.
[00:27:42.360] - Brandon
There's a backlog, if you will.
[00:27:43.720] - Chris
There's a backlog, but of course there's a lot of great insight and reminders in those books. Well, I started playing with chat GPT, and instead of buying the book, I was like, Chad GPT, can you tell me all the important takeaways?
[00:27:58.270] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:27:59.400] - Chris
Of this book by this author. And within 10 seconds I have a deep overview of that book, Bullet pointed with all the key takeaways and topics and themes. But then what I found is you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into the book without ever buying the thing. Now listen, I'm not saying there's a lot of authors that have invested their lives into bringing sharing this great content, and I'm not suggesting don't stop buying books because I think books are also an incredible gift to pass along and stuff like that. But I'll tell you what the future of chat GPT is that it used to be that only the rich people had all the information right, the Kings. Just to think about how far as a culture we've come in terms of knowledge and availability. Like my twelve year old son, man is all into this chat GPT stuff. He finds it so fascinating. And I'm like, it's so appropriate because in his lifetime, becoming an expert on how to utilize these tools and how to take action based on the information that you glean from it and how to leverage it to do tasks and to perform functions that for most of us we've had to do longhand all our lives.
[00:29:20.480] - Chris
That's right. Is just really mind blowing, to be honest. It's mind blowing because, okay, so here's another idea from that. So obviously book rEviews, but then as leaders too, I think all of us, every single one of us, wants to lead better, right? That's part of the reason why maybe some people are listening to this. It's certainly why you and I talk about all this shit, is we want to be better. Even as you and I are doing these podcast episodes, we're learning things about ourselves and we're recognizing things that like, oh man, if we leaned more into this or we did more or less of that as we synthesize out loud. It's helping us. Right. But also along with these book reviews and how we use our books, you can use chat GP to create discussion guides and meeting. I was, I was at a client on site in Southern California a couple weeks ago and our consultant that I was with mentioned a book, and this particular book was called the Coaching Habit. I can't remember who writes it's a great book. And in the coaching habit. Actually, no, it's in coaching for performance.
[00:30:24.850] - Chris
Two books that we mentioned on that trip. It's a guy who's a tennis expert, but he wrote a book on coaching. It's very good. But he has this thing he calls the Grow Method, which is just basically a discussion framework for coaching somebody. Anyway, I don't have the book, but just on a whim, I pulled it up in chat GPT and had him do the whole outline. I'm like, oh yeah, there's the grow method. It spit it out, explained it, even gave sort of a conversational example of how you do the grow method in a coaching conversation. Like, oh my gosh, this is great.
[00:30:55.880] - Brandon
It is powerful.
[00:30:56.990] - Chris
And I can literally copy it inside chat GPT app on my iPhone and I could text it to this dude as almost a leave behind for this conversation. Interaction consulting interaction that we had. And how powerful is that? Well, then he could easily use Chad GPT to be like, oh my God, this grow method. This is incredible. Chad GPT create a 15 minutes discussion outline about the grow method with some excerpts and story examples from the book, coaching for performance, and in 45 seconds.
[00:31:32.070] - Brandon
Oh yeah, it does.
[00:31:32.830] - Chris
It. It would spit it out. AnD all he has to do is print it out or freaking Leave it on his phone and open it up when he's in his team meeting later on that day.
[00:31:40.560] - Brandon
Yeah, it's awesome.
[00:31:41.700] - Chris
It's incredible. Now here's another step for those of you that enjoy our podcast, or that occasionally you forward it to your employees, here's a little pro user tip.
[00:31:49.580] - Brandon
Here you go.
[00:31:50.180] - Chris
You can go in and you could download the transcript of our shows. You could plug it into chat GPT. You could literally copy and paste the transcript from our shows in our show notes, aced it into chat GPT and said, I'm a fan of this podcast. Please produce a discussion guide for my upcoming team meeting that covers the two or three main takeaways from this headhart and Boots episode. And it'll do it.
[00:32:16.750] - Brandon
It'll do it. And then you can tell it make sure that I'm subscribed and that I leave a like, no, you still got.
[00:32:25.180] - Chris
To manually do that chat. GPT. The robots won't do all of that. But I'm just mesmerized.
[00:32:31.460] - Brandon
It's phenomenal. So, in that same vein, right. So a couple of things. One example is you and I as a team. Our team uses fathom, up till now, has just essentially been a great recorder, transcriber.
[00:32:45.040] - Chris
Fathom video.
[00:32:46.150] - Brandon
Yeah, fathom video. And essentially what it is, is it's a recording device. It records our exchanges with our clients, our meetings, team meetings, blah, blah, blah. Well, in its original iteration, it would record it all, and it would break it up into some different kind of levels of using AI, but it was like, kind of rudimentary, wonky. Yeah. And so basically you got a transcript, which is cool, but it's a wall of text, let's be honest. And then you got the recording and.
[00:33:14.850] - Chris
You got a funky outline.
[00:33:16.070] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:33:16.290] - Chris
And it did some sort of AI funky outline. That was a little bit weird.
[00:33:19.940] - Brandon
And it was so bad, we didn't use it right.
[00:33:21.730] - Chris
Okay.
[00:33:22.160] - Brandon
But they just recently added their true AI tool. Damn, dude. So this thing, I've been, like a zealot. I've been sharing this with everybody, and every time I share it with them, they're like, get out of here. This is automatic. So now when you click on that AI tool, of course, they haven't started charging us the updated rate yet. Well, can't wait to see what that number is. But we'll record. Let's say we're on a session for over an hour, and we've covered all sorts of items as we're processing through.
[00:33:50.510] - Chris
These conversations, task items to do items.
[00:33:52.790] - Brandon
Discussion topics, all the things to do. Like all the things. Well, this used to be this laborious thing where I would be trying to cram notes the whole time.
[00:34:02.080] - Chris
Your summaries were amazing and laborious.
[00:34:05.030] - Brandon
But it's laborious. Like, I'm trying to track all this information, take enough notes, and then simulate that into something where they can. Anyways, now it takes 30 seconds. I hit the AI tool, I tell it general session, and it takes an hour's worth of conversation and literally turns it into a frameworked outline with a.
[00:34:24.850] - Chris
Layout with, like, section specific bullet points.
[00:34:29.110] - Brandon
No walls of text at all.
[00:34:30.860] - Chris
It's incredible.
[00:34:31.650] - Brandon
It's even calling out the person that's responsible for the item or the topic.
[00:34:36.220] - Chris
It's unbelievable.
[00:34:37.100] - Brandon
I mean, it's crazy. And the only thing I do now is I'll just take a few seconds to clean it up because sometimes they'll get a name wrong. Sometimes maybe a date, 1111 instead. 1110 A lot of times because I said the wrong thing, but a little bit of a tweak. Boom. Send. Okay, now here's another thing, because once we started, we adopt this. Now we do all our internal meetings with it so that we can then in turn share with our team immediately afterwards get us all on the same page. Very powerful. Well, a big thing that we teach people is coaching. Coaching summaries as an example, like some kind of follow up to any kind of conversation that you have with your team. Most of us don't do it because it's laborious, takes time. We forget, blah, blah, blah. Well, now you could just very easily just run fathom, even if you're not recording the video portion of it, because you're both in the same room. Who cares? Run fathom. Do your meeting, hit click AI general, and in like 15 to 25 seconds, it'll spit out the summary of your entire convErsation.
[00:35:40.010] - Chris
I'm hung up on that. In theory. I love the concept. I think if I'm an employee, it feels weird. Oh no. Where's now?
[00:35:47.920] - Brandon
Frame it as it's a meeting. Don't do it. If you're, well, talking about their wife.
[00:35:53.650] - Chris
Maybe I just need to develop more confidence around that strategy. I get it. Well, Christopher, listen.
[00:35:58.760] - Brandon
Norweg, how dare you?
[00:36:03.250] - Chris
It's the one thing about fathom that I'm disappointed in is they don't have a mobile app. It's just for listening. Otter AI. So a little history just for all y'all. We started with Otter and thank you, Rachel. Rachel Stewart actually turned me on to Otter initially. Otter AI has an app to where you can just audio listen and it'll transcribe it and there's a free version and it was awesome. And for a while we were using it's at the time. It's kind of the best of dragon dictation was sort of the first. They haven't iterated very fast. Otter kind of has been eating their lunch. And then Fathom comes along and from what I can tell now, we haven't been in Otter for the last few months. They may have a crazy new AI function, but they were really expensive. It was like $69 a month or something per user once you get past 1000 minutes. And we clock through that really fast and so we hit a cost ceiling. So then we hunted for Fathom. And I can't remember how we found it, but it's awesome. Within Zoom teams and Google meet. But they don't have a standalone app version for just recording audio.
[00:37:10.750] - Chris
And so I imagine at some point they will. You can hack it by doing a mobile version of Zoom.
[00:37:17.230] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:37:17.550] - Chris
Or just opening a session of Zoom or teams or whatever just to record audio. Look, I'm not saying there's not value in that. The HR application of coaching summaries, I feel awkward around that. But probably just. It's all about framing. Yeah. Why are we doing it? Why does this serve you? Hey, this is for sure, but you're.
[00:37:40.390] - Brandon
Not backlogging these in your home office. Yeah, that's probably important.
[00:37:44.100] - Chris
So I can't wait until there's maybe something. By the way, all of you who are listening, if you know of a really great AI recording tool that'll actually simulate the transcript and then summarize similar to what we're describing in fathom. Oh my gosh, please.
[00:37:59.420] - Brandon
So powerful.
[00:38:00.070] - Chris
Yeah, please tell us, find us on LinkedIn and shoot us a message.
[00:38:03.180] - Brandon
But yeah, the AI thing is so interesting. Just the other day I was 30,000ft flying. We're en route somewhere. I was updating and building an addition to a training outline that you and I were getting ready to prepare and I needed to update some content and I had remembered that we had recorded shows or a video on it previously. So what I did was I went and grabbed the transcript from those previous videos, dumped it into chat and asked chat to pump out an outline. And then I was able to cut and copy that portion, put it into my new outline that I was building for this presentation. Boom, done. So it did all the hard work. You know how long it would have taken me to go back through all that content, read through the transcripts and be like, okay, here's the key topics I want to translate and pull into this training. I'm flying in an airplane at 30,000ft. I have an Internet connection. I know for some of you this is like old news, but for me it still freaking blows my mind. And I'm using AI to take what could have been hours of labor and it turned it into about a 15 minutes event for me.
[00:39:06.820] - Chris
Dude. Okay, here's another thing I just thought of. I think all of us as leaders who are thinking about how do I become a better leader? Well, one way that one skill I think we all have to develop as leaders is public speaking.
[00:39:21.160] - Brandon
Oh yeah.
[00:39:21.920] - Chris
There ain't no way around it. No. If you want to maximize your influence, whether it's in front of a group of ten or in front of a group of 10,000, the more competent you become at speaking and communicating ideas, your influence grows. Right? Yeah. And I think one of the things I've always admired about some of the iconic public speakers and CEOs and leaders is they are so good at storytelling, they're so good at weaving story examples. And I've always felt a little bit, maybe all of us, maybe all the iconic leaders feel this way, too. That doesn't always come easy to me. I don't all of a sudden like, oh, here's this really powerful story to example for this.
[00:39:59.520] - Brandon
Sure.
[00:39:59.980] - Chris
And so sometimes when I'm delivering a talk and you and I deliver talks all the time now, I can't think of a good story example around something. Dude, you're using chat. Chat GPT, man. Chat GPT. And why I know this will work and I'm going to literally dig into this today with some of the training outlines we do is help me think of some real life story examples from historical examples, whatever, because I did this as a thing for that session yesterday. One of the use cases that I was talking about is just this coming up with outlines, discussion topics for team meetings, all company meetings, soft skills trainings, like, how do we train on how to better empathize with customers? What does it mean for us to show empathy? So I want to give a talk at our next all company meeting about that because I want my frontline technicians to help people feel heard and help them calm their nerves, because all the things. Right, well, I actually played around with it for safety meetings because safety meetings are just so boring. We have to do them. And everybody just kind of snickers.
[00:41:06.750] - Chris
Now it's time to sign in and do the thing, right? So I punched in, I want to do a ten minute training for my team. I'm a disaster restoration company, and I wanted to be OSHA approved. Da da da. And it spit out a five bullet, ten minute training. And this particular one was on, like, ladder safety. I'm like, that's boring. Give me another one. I literally said, give me another one. And in 10 seconds it gave me another topic with five bullet points. And it's good. It's like, okay, what was it? It was like, the importance of PPE and examples of why PPE is important and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, that's lame. Give me another one. And I did this like five or six times, and it just kept spitting out really good, strong, clear outlines for a safety meeting talk. And then I was like, give me three or four thought provoking questions that I can pose to my team to actually engage them in this safety training. And sure shit, it did it, dude.
[00:42:08.650] - Brandon
Sure as shit.
[00:42:11.850] - Chris
And that is one of the things that I find really useful, is just how quickly and how well iterates and goes and finds more corroborating evidence or information.
[00:42:23.890] - Brandon
It's a time multiplier.
[00:42:25.430] - Chris
It is so extraordinary and amazing. So I'm really excited. You and I did a keynote, and I think it's a keynote. We'll probably deliver in other groups in the future. But even with our trainings, even just in our conversations, there's certain things that you and I talk about, like time management, we just went through where I'm like, I want to become better as a leader at connecting principles with story examples because I learn really well that way. And I think all of us, as humans do, right. I think it's an incredibly powerful leadership skill. And yet I think there's a part of me that at times tells. The story I tell myself is I'm just not good at that for some reason. Like, in the moment, I have trouble synthesizing connecting a story from my own experience. Sure, sometimes I think of good ones, but I've also talked to enough leaders and CEOs and public speakers to know that nine times out of ten, there was a lot of labor and investigation and research and exploring and book reading and note cards and bookmarks and scribbling and dog earring that went into them. Building that roster of story examples, like lots and lots of intentionality, I think, of Ryan Holiday.
[00:43:42.240] - Chris
Ryan Holiday, he's the author of the Daily Stoic. He wrote Seth Goden, wrote, all marketers are liars. Ryan Holiday wrote one when he was the head of marketing for American Apparel, was kind of his launching point. He wrote something about, like, forgive me, I'm lying, or something like that about as a marketing book. But anyway, he studied under the tutelage of Robert Green, who is just an incredibly prolific New York Times bestseller. Wrote the 48 laws of power. He wrote the Laws of Human Nature. He's just written a ton of these really amazing books. And Ryan Holiday talks about his process, how when he. Part of how these prolific writers write so much is they read so much. And Ryan Holiday actually breaks down how he sort of digests a book. He has this whole system for, like, note cards, and he has his note cards out when he's reading, and he underlines, and he usually reads books twice. And I feel so insignificant when I hear him talk about it because I'm like, oh, my God, I don't read so much that there's so much discipline and process. I don't do that.
[00:44:45.530] - Brandon
So just all of you that are.
[00:44:46.590] - Chris
Listening, I don't do that either. All that to say, to a certain degree, I think I've given up on myself many times. Like, I just don't think that way, or I don't read books that way, I don't do research that way. And now there's this realization of chat GPT. I think to level the playing field for all of us who care and want to put some effort, there's this new magic tool. So I'm really excited to dig into it to be like, all right, with the different topic areas that I routinely train, coach, lead webinars, do LinkedIn lives, like yesterday with Jeff, can I use chat GPT to scour the Internet and the universe for examples that relate to my thing? It doesn't take away from the intellectual work of, like, you know what I mean?
[00:45:30.170] - Brandon
Well, here's another way to think about this. How many times do you read a book? You're really excited about the concepts and the content of that book, but life happens, and as soon as you're done reading, you forget a bulk of those things that really, in the moment, triggered. So my thought now is, well, I'm going to read the book. I'm going to take the content in. I might do some of the highlighting and things that I do to help me assimilate information, but the fact that then I can throw it into a chat GPT platform like that and get a summary of sorts, an outline, bullets to refer back to, well, now it's a lot easier for me to leverage that learning to help My team, because when you read it yourself at the nightstand every evening, and then you get busy and forget, and then it's difficult for you to translate that information. And then ultimately, I think a lot of what you just alluded to is you then don't do anything to leverage that because it's so much work. And I think this really enhances that viability.
[00:46:25.050] - Chris
I have to try something in the moment. For those of you who can't see, yeah, we have our doordashes sitting here of our carnivore meal, and we got to wrap up pretty soon, but I got to just, all right, so I'm in chat GPT. Now, some of you listening to this, I'm embarrassed to say. Why? I'm embarrassed, I don't know, but I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know Chat GPT had a mobile app.
[00:46:44.960] - Brandon
Oh yeah, that's true.
[00:46:46.000] - Chris
Until a few weeks ago. Yeah, somebody told me about it and I was like, oh duh, been using this on my laptop. So it's incredible. In the palm of your freaking know. So I have chat GPT open. Tell me the key takeaways in chapter three of Good to Great by Jim Collins. Probably many of you have read that book. I've read it a couple times back in the day. Let's see if Chat GPT has the capacity to do that. It's doing something. And I see a checkmark. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, well, you know, we tried something. How powerful would that have been? It says, to provide the key takeaways from chapter three of good degree by Jim Collins, I'll need the text of the chapter. So anyway, apparently is not able to crawl that copyrighted stuff. But nonetheless, nonetheless. So that could have been a really powerful little live moment there.
[00:47:41.880] - Brandon
Super stardom there.
[00:47:43.380] - Chris
Oh my goodness. But somehow, I mean it still holds, right? I talked about earlier book reviews, hey, to give me the key takeaways of XYZ book. That absolutely works. I've done that a whole bunch of times since I first tried that out. But all that to say, here we are. We went on a couple of rabbit trails. We did. We got into some time management principles, which I think that's maybe, well, and here's the thing, poked People a little.
[00:48:06.810] - Brandon
Bit, this whole chat stuff. This is just leveraging different tools and disciplines to help us use our time more effectively. Because the reality of it is all of us are fighting the clock. We're always fighting the clock. There's always due dates, there's always time frames, timelines, things that are going to get in the way. The chaos, tyranny of the urgent, all the things. These are just ways for us to leverage these kinds of practices in our favor to get some control back.
[00:48:34.620] - Chris
Yeah. Why would we not, as leaders, why would we not want to stay at the front edge of these things?
[00:48:42.300] - Brandon
That's right.
[00:48:42.840] - Chris
That's our role as a leader. And I think you and I see ourselves this way not as more important or any different than any of the clients we work with or other consultants or anything else. But you and I feel really strongly like we have to stay at the front. That's what leadership is. I'm out in front. I'm out in front. I'm the one who's experimenting, falling on my face, trying things and them not working. I'm the one spending the money to try to leverage these tools and wasting money. Sometimes as you work out what works, what doesn't, that's our role. That's our role as leaders. That's your role as a leader.
[00:49:16.330] - Brandon
Explore the outer edge.
[00:49:17.340] - Chris
Yeah, you have to be on top of this stuff. You can't slow roll adoption of technology. You ought to be at the front. Maybe you don't roll that shit out across your team. Yeah, maybe you don't make your team an enterprise. GPT. We're going to roll out bots and do all the things and start delegating that shit. But you as a leader ought to be exploring that stuff, right?
[00:49:34.660] - Brandon
There's got to be an investment on top.
[00:49:36.660] - Chris
We have to. The extent to which you as the leader are getting out in front of the industry of your company is the extent to which the team behind you can be out in front as well.
[00:49:49.240] - Brandon
Well, and I think it kind of boils down to this idea of if we're not happy with the current result we're achieving, then it's on you to be exploring other options, other tools, other resources, leveraging other ideas and get the result you're looking for.
[00:50:03.500] - Chris
Let's eat our doordash, bro.
[00:50:04.900] - Brandon
Do it later, gang. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, heart and Boots.
[00:50:11.640] - Chris
And if you're enjoying the show or you love this episode, please hit follow. Formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for Listen.
