[00:00:00.000] - Chris
Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:00:11.240] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours.
[00:00:20.970] - Chris
I'm noticing that and I really appreciate it.
[00:00:23.160] - Chris
I thought you did that on purpose.
[00:00:24.040] - Brandon
No, I don't. I didn't, and I am not happy with it. Amigo. How are you doing, man?
[00:00:30.340] - Chris
Yeah, 4: 30 start this morning. Got in the gym at 5: 00, right when it opens. The place was empty.
[00:00:38.470] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:00:39.070] - Chris
It was dark out.
[00:00:40.480] - Brandon
It's good.
[00:00:41.010] - Chris
It's the way to go. It was awesome.
[00:00:42.230] - Brandon
Yeah, it's the way to go.
[00:00:43.220] - Chris
Came out, the sun was coming up.
[00:00:44.770] - Brandon
See? Doesn't it make you feel like a million dollars, too?
[00:00:47.410] - Chris
It really did. I love knowing that I don't have to go get my workout in after I leave the office. We were talking about that yesterday. I was just like, it works so good. I stopped doing it. I'm starting doing it. Today was great.
[00:01:02.850] - Brandon
Nicely done. Up at 4: 30, in by 5: 00.
[00:01:05.620] - Chris
Yeah, in by 5: 00. Then about an hour, home by 6: 00, in the office by 7: 30.
[00:01:12.220] - Brandon
It was good. It was good. Yeah, it's good. It's a good mix. I got to It out just a little bit earlier, but I got to drive a little further. But anyways, for all the views that didn't tune in to hear about how we started our morning. I got an interesting place I want to go in the conversation today. It relates to some of the stuff that we're wrestling with as a consulting firm internally, too. Just this idea around as leaders, having these responsibilities to take extreme ownership to get the outcome that we're seeking. Sometimes I think we talk about certain topics and there's a little bit of a da element to it. We're certainly not splitting atoms. But I feel like this is one of those categories for me personally, that for some reason, it's just very easy to get disconnected from this principle and then spend too much time being frustrated with the lack of result that we are or we're not getting. Let me stage that a little bit and I think we can dive in. Maybe the easiest way to stage that is with an example. Let's say I have a downline team member.
[00:02:17.360] - Brandon
There's some expectations that they're not hitting. Let's call it a performance metric of some sort. Let's say project turn times, they're just on the struggle bus and they just tend to take significantly longer than anybody else on our team in terms of a production lifecycle, getting a construction job done, let's say. We can have a really good meeting as a leader, do a really good one-on-one, talk about the standard, remind the team member of the standard, and solicit from them some feedback on what they think they can and can't do to make improvement. I think for a lot of us, that part, even that can be challenging at times, but I think getting that far is the easy part. But then I think where some disconnect sets in is expectations on myself in terms of what I'm willing to do to get the result I want versus breaking the ship against the shoreline of principles. Using this same example, again, to just set the stage, is I can wipe my hands of responsibility. I sat down with the individual, I clearly communicated the standard again, reminded them, pointed them towards the things that they can reference for understanding the standard, and then I can get their input to tell me, what are you What are you going to do differently moving forward to help increase your performance, blah, blah, blah.
[00:03:33.900] - Brandon
Really, for all intents and purposes, I've done what's probably expected me as a leader, and now I simply inspect what I expect. The problem is that I believe a lot of us do that well, at least get that far in the equation. I know I can at least get that far in the equation. But then where sometimes the real difference maker and happens or doesn't happen is what actions are you Are you willing to take and own yourself to increase the likelihood that that employee will make the change that is required? Not do the job for them. I'm not even tiptoeing into that category, but just what am I willing to do to ensure the likelihood of that team member doing what I need and then therefore, my company and my organization reaping the benefit of another employee doing what is required. I think where we would drop the is either one, we do instead, so we take over whatever, or we just do that, now I'm going to passively wait, and in a couple of weeks, I'll return to this topic with the individual, inspect what's happened, and likely be frustrated because it didn't move.
[00:04:44.710] - Brandon
Or in alignment with extreme ownership, maybe I do a series of things. One, I schedule several reminders throughout the week that signify to me to reach out to the individual and just check in midstream. Hey. How's this going? We're focused on this. How's that been going? Give me an example. Yeah, walk me through that. Great. Good job. Keep it up. That could be an example, which I think we rarely do. You might do something like, this is great. What I'd like you to do is this X, Y, Z thing to increase your turn rate or decrease your turn rate. Then you might set up an intentional follow-up process where you review specific examples or behaviors that they tried, that they leveraged in the field, and then you almost do a mini one-on-one, going back and forth on said example, what you think they can improve, meaning you're doing these really consistent short-term check-ins to incrementally help and support them doing this behavioral change to get the result you want. This could show up a million different ways, but there's just this mentality. Actually, I'm going to give a shout out to a friend of ours, Lucas Sanktum.
[00:05:54.500] - Brandon
This is something that he's very aggressive about. Just in he and I and just talking professionally, he's very good. It reminded me of this. I think the story he shared was like, Hey, man, if the needle is not moving, it may require one of my people to get into an airplane and go spend a few days on the ground with the client. That seems, again, like a da, but if you're thinking about a predominantly virtual company that's trying to grow and scale and keep costs in appropriate portions, it would be easy to be like, Well, I only can do so much. The owner, the the client, the set, the blah, blah, blah, they need to also be doing X, Y, Z. The reality of it is that even though that's right, you can be wrong when you're right. Meaning it's not giving any of us the result we want. So principally, maybe we're correct, but at the end of the day, who gives a shit if it didn't yield a result that anybody cares about? I think what we're as a team internally, we're just trying to understand and wrap our head around what happens when the your team has such a commitment to extreme ownership that they often take the action that's required to create the result, even when principally they shouldn't have to.
[00:07:12.950] - Brandon
Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:07:15.520] - Chris
I mean, it's an all the time thing that we confront and we see, right? I know. I think so. The example... Well, okay, so here's another thing it makes me think of along the same lines is, I don't know if it was General McChristol or who it was that said this, but basically the idea being is as a leader, if you walk past something, a behavior that's out of alignment without saying something, you're essentially endorsing that behavior moving forward. For everyone else privy to that, to observe that same behavior. You as the general walk past it, you're telling everybody on the team that thing's actually okay. I feel like that ties in with what you're saying is that any time we can have a clarity conversation. But then ultimately, if we're not really close to that, we aren't following up and we aren't checking in on that behavior. If we wait two weeks to check on that behavior, there's a lot of room for an air gap.
[00:08:11.760] - Brandon
Absolutely.
[00:08:12.500] - Chris
There's a lot of room, I think, for the individual at that two-week mark to feel misunderstood, broad-sided, despite the fact you had a clarity conversation because nothing was said for the subsequent two weeks. Whether it's right or wrong, my experience is that if I have corrective conversation and I don't revisit it for two weeks, it's as though the clarity conversation never happens.
[00:08:35.320] - Brandon
Yeah, it is. It's like you've already come off the tracks by the time that it's happened.
[00:08:39.570] - Chris
It's like as a leader, again, whether it's right or wrong, it's just what works, is if I don't follow up the next day and the next day and I'm observing that individual's actions, and I'm catching continued misalignment and addressing it right there. Two days later, Hey, whoa, hey, this is what we were talking about. I delay instead. It almost always creates a bad outcome, and it creates a bad outcome. It rarely results in a behavior change. But when I'm on it like white on rice, that's what I hear you saying.
[00:09:06.800] - Brandon
Yeah, I think so. I think it's a matter of... It reminds me of we had a conversation now, months, maybe even last year with Springer, with Mark Springer. Not only did he allude to it just in his relationships, but then other people that we know that have had prior experience working alongside or partnering with Mark in some meaningful way, he's gotten a reputation for being really good at execution. Teams that he's leading tend to get the stuff done that needs to be get done. I think he would attribute, not to speak for you, Mark, but I think he would attribute to that to predominantly to a management process or system. I think he was an EOS guy or scaling up guy. They use that inside their business. Well, what that ultimately means for those of us that don't get exposed necessarily to the idea of an L10 meeting or scaling up or EOS is there's a process by which teams will determine the high-priority things they need to focus on collectively, and then they drive progress towards those results by identifying week in and week out actions that they can take that move the ball downfield.
[00:10:23.440] - Brandon
When a company or an organization does that minimally, they set a standard by which they identify what the team will focus on. They then establish sprints or to-dos that they need to accomplish week in and week out towards that initiative. Inevitably, you get done with the quarter, there's a strong chance that you achieve the initiative that you had put in front of you. Well, what's happening in that environment? One, there's a consistent check-in process. Two, they're measuring progress. Three, they're strategically identifying what they should do in the first place. To me, what I'm talking about now is the next layer. At minimum, if we know that companies that tend to succeed at scale are the ones that have a management system inside the organization that they adhere to, again, what do we focus on? What's the task that we need to complete, and then how do we get the task completed? This is that layer of the difference maker. Let's say two companies side by side, both of them use, let's just say for an example, EOS. Both of them are conducting similar meetings and establishing similar goals and outcomes that they're trying to achieve.
[00:11:34.780] - Brandon
One team stops there, meaning they only check in once a week, and we're either on track or we're off track. Which, again, I'm not saying anything about this that's bad. If Most of us just did this, it would change our entire lives. But then next to them is a team that did that. But then in addition, the cadence of checking in and validating and verifying between weeks that the actions are being taken, the second team that's doing a midweek check-in or a couple check-ins in between that seven-day cycle, I guarantee it that that team, more often than not, gets the things done that they said they would get done in the time frame that they originally allotted. Therefore, if you do that week in, week out, year after year, they technically will probably outperform the person to their left or right.
[00:12:26.390] - Chris
I think you're exactly right. I got to tell a brief story example because I think it's really relevant. One of our clients had a large sales team, Northeast, and we hired this guy. I should say I helped hire this guy from an adjacent service industry. It didn't really come up until after we'd hired this guy that a lot of their sales methodology in this vertical was phone-based. Sure. Sitting at home in front of the laptop and just dialing for dollars, just calling through a list, using a script. Listen, in some verticals, that works awesome. Is there niches in our industry maybe where that works to some degree? Yeah, but it's not the primary way we prospect in the restoration industries, particularly with commercial. I had a one-on-one with this guy, and we weren't seeing the sales we needed. I went into this conversation like, How do I help this guy? It came out that he was doing 50 to 100 dials a day from his home and then doing email outreach. I was like, Hey, man, that's awesome. Awesome effort But let's talk about that as a methodology in our industry in this new vertical of yours.
[00:13:35.080] - Chris
Ultimately, we had this great conversation about why face-to-face prospecting is so important. We talked about golden hours. Hey, between 10: 00 and 3: 00, we want to prioritize being out in the field face to face with prospects and clients. This is just the nature of our industry. He agreed and whatever. I thought, sweet. We had a really great corrective conversation, and now he's going to pivot his activity and go start making cold calls. Calls. He did not indicate to me that he had any concern or reservation about making these physical calls. He did not say, I've never done that before, and I didn't ask. But we agreed that he was going to modulate his behavior. Well, so I waited two weeks to our next one-on-one because I did an every other week process with them. Lo and behold, when I caught him on his one-on-one in the middle of the day, he was in his home office. What are you up to? Oh, I'm just sending some emails, making some calls. Oh, okay. Well, let's talk How about that? Tell me about your last week. How'd the cold calls go out in the field? How'd the golden hours go?
[00:14:35.060] - Chris
Oh, yeah. Well, I did that, and it just didn't work great. In two weeks. Yeah, after two weeks. Unbeknownst to me, there was a lot of reasons why he didn't fully pivot his behavior. He went out and it didn't go awesome. Well, let me tell all the rest of you right now. The first time you go out and make 20 cold calls out in the field, if that's not something you've done a lot of in the past, it's going to feel crummy. It's going to be hella awkward. You're going to feel like nobody wants to talk to you. You get gatekept at every door, and it's a complete and utter waste of time. That's exactly the experience he had. The It was my first time, but he didn't call me with that because I think he felt embarrassed. It should be different. My point in saying all this is just to your point is, I think sometimes when we ask people to change their behavior, in the moment, they're too embarrassed to ask the questions that they really need to ask to get clear on what that's going to require of them. I don't know if this applies to your ops example, but in sales, oftentimes people aren't doing a particular behavior because there's something about it that makes them uncomfortable, afraid, uncertain, whatever.
[00:15:44.360] - Chris
And so they default to the thing they know. And this was that exact example. If I had called him the next day at EOD and just said, Hey, dude, how'd your golden hours go today? It would have given him the opportunity to say, Honestly, terrible. I I didn't have one single awesome cold call, and I could have picked him up off the floor. I could have encouraged him. That's right. And just said, Hey, way to go. How many doors did you knock? 20? Holy shit. Great job, dude. Yeah, it was hella awkward, wasn't it? Well, let's talk through it. Tell me what your approach was in your first few door knocks. Oh, I just asked for the GM. Okay, well, what are some other stakeholders maybe that you might have an easier time getting to? Hey, I wonder if maybe if you wandered into the restaurant, you might been able to get an intro to the chief engineer. What do you think about trying that tomorrow on your cold call? I could have redirected him. I also could have let him know, Hey, dude, yeah, it's always going to be hella awkward some of the time, but let's see if we can work on some tips that will get you some more successes.
[00:16:45.820] - Chris
Then two weeks out, he might have had four, five, or eight days of somewhat successful cold calling and maybe even schedule some sales meetings. Then all of a sudden, we're off to the races with this guy.
[00:16:58.080] - Brandon
You got momentum.
[00:16:58.810] - Chris
But instead, he had two weeks of reinforcing to himself that cold calls suck and they don't work. Yeah, that's it. Are you a business that's under 5 million in sales, and you're just now getting ready to try and scale your company up and hit some of those targets you've always wanted to hit, but now you've got to build a sales team, or maybe you just hired your first sales rep, but you don't really know how to manage them. How do you manage, lead, train, develop a sales rep? Floodlight has a solution for you now. So we can actually assign your sales rep a turnkey VP of sales that will help them create a sales blueprint, their own personal sales plan for your market. They'll have weekly one-on-ones with that sales rep to coach, mentor them, hold them accountable to the plan. And they'll also have a monthly owners meeting where they'll meet with you or your general manager and review the progress of that sales rep, their plan to actual results, what performance improvement they're working on with them. Also let them know, Hey, they're doing really well. Maybe we should think of hiring a second sales rep.
[00:17:56.780] - Chris
They're going to have that one-to-one advice for you as an owner or senior leader on the team as well. How great would that be to have a bolt on sales manager for your one sales rep, and it's only 2,500 bucks a month? If you're interested in talking more about that, reach out. Let's grab some time and let's talk shop. Our floodlight clients this last year in 2024 generated over 250 million in revenue, supported by, advised by an industry expert who's owned and operated a business just like you. So take action. Don't kick the can down the road. Start with our business health and value assessment, and let's unlock the next of your success story.
[00:18:32.420] - Brandon
Yeah, I think what's interesting about that example, why I like it a ton, is we get in this mindset where we either have unrealistic expectations for people to produce with a lack of clarity, or we assume that anybody's a failure immediately has something to do with a lack of competency or a lack of caring. I don't think either one of those things are true more times than not. I think it's a reality that, like you said, someone does believe us enough to try something. But if we just think about most things we try for the first time, commonly the first message you get back is that this sucks, it's not good, it's clunky, it's uncomfortable, all those, right? I mean, everything from picking up a new skill, new relationships, like anything we do for the first time often just feels shitty in general. Yeah. If we know that, But then we don't iterate our behavior in order to make it more realistic for somebody to get over that part of the growth phase or that skill acquisition phase. Then that's our failure. That's not the individual's failure. I think going back just really quickly to this idea of people should be able to succeed even when there's not a lot of clarity on how to succeed.
[00:19:51.990] - Brandon
I think there's a difference between hiring capable people and then being so void of direction that you basically make it very difficult for anybody to succeed, regardless of how smart they are. People can be smart and not succeed because you're forcing them to spend the 10,000 hours to figure it out that you and your team have already figured out, but you didn't take the time to create a process or a system to then exchange those 10,000 earned hours. Sure. Then we get frustrated because we think smart people should just be able to figure it out. Anyways, I'm not saying any of this to bag on any of us because we all have these moments where we're doing some form of this or sliding in and out. I think it's just more for me, what I'm settling in on is the people that when I watch their performance as a leader and I respect the results that they're getting They're borderline right up against the line of micromanagement. That's not a bad thing. I'm saying that it's like, as long as they're not micromanaging, let's take a moment to define this. In my book, in my opinion, micromanagement is basically what's happening is you never equip or give your people the freedom to succeed on their own.
[00:21:09.870] - Brandon
That's different than being proactively engaged in their team's performance and ensuring that the team is iterating and gaining skills and competencies to become better over time. I think what happens is we say, Well, I don't want to be a micromanager or I don't pay people a billion dollars a year to micromanage them. Okay, but let's slow down and assess the definition that you're using for micromanagement. Because if that means hands off with expectations that are high, I hate to tell you this, but I think you and I are going to be disappointed over time. I think you're not going to get what you need inside your business, and you're going to grow increasingly frustrated and jaded. What's going to happen over time is that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in your business that continues to tell you, you're right, people suck and they're hard to get good employees. But I don't know how true all of that really is if we reassess the role that we have to create change in the business or to create a different skill of acquisition. Again, I'm speaking more for myself right now. I just seem to swing this pendulum from overly engaged to not engaged enough.
[00:22:25.420] - Brandon
The reality of it is it's that sweet spot in the middle where I've clearly determined what a definition of done looks like and what winning looks like. We've clearly identified the standard of how the best practices, if you will, then I need to let the team member perform, but then I have to check in against that and validate that the skills are being acquired to then give them the freedom to be independent. But I think we try to do all or the other, and neither extreme works. It's a combination of of being clear on what we need to have happen and how to do it, and then inspect it long enough and consistently enough to create the result that we want. In the early phases, it may mean that you're checking on way too often. It's not sustainable. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be done for a finite period of time to get their skills up to speed. Then after that, there should be a nice, consistent, sustainable and scalable inspection method, management meetings, whatever. But it It's this gap that I feel like that as I get older and what I'm trying to accomplish in the organizations that I have some responsibilities in or for, the sauce is right in that middle spot where how good of a job can I take action and ownership of the results of this individual that ensures I'm doing everything in my power to get the outcome?
[00:23:53.800] - Brandon
Because here's what happens. Going back to your example, had you jumped in and caught that in day two or three and problem solved, and the next day was marginally better. Then a couple of days later, you check in again, and the next day they go out, and it's significantly now better, you're teaching the individual how to have the battle patience to iterate and level up their skill, and they're gaining confidence along the way. If you did that in a consolidated period of time, let's call it eight weeks, the performance that you get at the end of eight weeks where you were much more integrated than you would have liked to have been, maybe over the long haul, it outweighs what happens if you ignore the interaction that's required from you during the eight-week time period and you let section or series of weeks after week go by where the individual continues to get affirmed that their fears were correct, that that methodology doesn't work. Then six months later, we've spent money on salaries. We haven't had the increases we've hoped for, we get increasingly frustrated with the team member. Then we ultimately become a self-fulfilling prophecy where either they quit because they're not making any money and they don't feel supported, or I fire them because they're not yielding any result.
[00:25:12.120] - Brandon
The reality of it is, is that wasn't a bad person with ill intent, and it wasn't somebody that didn't have the skill. The missing thing was, I didn't engage often enough and consistently enough to help them acquire a skill. That's all on us, right?
[00:25:30.000] - Chris
You know what this makes me think of? I've been thinking a lot lately, even just in the last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot more specifically about sales management. You wonder why. I go back to my early days. The folks that are regular listeners have heard me talk about my days with Cutco and Vector Marketing is the sales arm of Cutco Cutlery. Anyway, I was a branch manager and later on a district manager. At any given time, I had about 100 sales reps there in my office that were working for me. I had I had an assistant manager also that helped support my sales reps, and I poured into them, and then they poured into a group of the reps. But we had a universal principle or universal management practice that they taught us. It was really maybe the most important thing that we did as managers, and they called it PDI, personal daily interaction.
[00:26:20.500] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:26:21.400] - Chris
That you're talking about. The best of the best managers. We're talking, some of these were offices that had 200 plus sales reps. Big organizations and four or five assistant managers. There was really an infrastructure to that team. They were religious about doing their PDI calls. The really big organizations would split up their rep list between their assistant managers and them. But on average, I would say as managers, we were doing personal daily interactive calls to 25 or more sales reps every single day. Now, granted, we were working with 18, 19, 20, and 21-year-olds. But what I've been thinking about lately is we have a generation that's coming up in our businesses in this, let's call it 19 to 30 crowd that desperately want more connection and engagement with what's happening in the company. We've been learning this about Gen Z and whatever generation we're on, that meaning and relationship and being a part of something bigger than themselves is really motivational for them. It's really important beyond the money. I've been thinking about this PDI concept and how important maybe it is, and particularly with sales. For the same reason that we talked about, if I'm having in this topic of micromanagement, it never felt like micromanagement.
[00:27:44.650] - Chris
When I was a rep and my manager would call me. Now, part of the reason was, is certainly one bullet point of that call was, Hey, tell me about your day. But the other part of it was, they would tell me about their day, and they would ask me what I had planned for that evening, and what Whatever. And so there was both a social aspect to it and a what are we both up to today? How did the day go? And so, again, part of it, when I later became a manager and I started doing these PDI calls, the whole purpose, and this is they trained us from the jump on this. They're like, look, some of your sales reps are going to go out. And if they have a single crappy sales meeting, they're done. It's going to take them out. It's likely going to take them out for the remainder of the day. But if you don't talk to them, it's going to take them out the next day, and it may actually just cause them to quit. So that came back to me full force a couple of days ago as I was just thinking about sales management, because obviously we have our floodlight sales partners and we have VPs of sales partners that are working with clients, and I was just mulling over this and I thought, Man, I wonder if that's an essential behavior, a valuable behavior, and maybe even something for owners and GMs to think about relative to their downline leadership staff.
[00:28:56.580] - Chris
Because how often do we go days at a time without having meaningful interaction with our people. There's this part about accountability holding, certainly, and follow-up and so forth. But how much of that gets solved for if we as leaders build it into our day, that every single day I have certain key people that I'm responsible for, and I make it a point to have a daily interaction with them, period. You used to do something like this in the morning when you walk the shop. But I think for so many of us now, after COVID, we have so many team members that are either working remotely or deploying from their home with their vehicles. It's difficult to do that without intention. Yeah.
[00:29:37.020] - Brandon
You know what it makes me lean into a little bit is, and I'll discuss this through two different lenses, one smaller company, two a little bit more mid-size, more sophisticated. Small company, by definition, what I'm saying is probably more owner-operator environment where there's not many levels of leadership outside of, let's say, the owner, maybe an operations manager or something. Then a mid-size entity, maybe you've got several departments and you might have some leadership at the department level as an example. I think one of the things that we undervalue is the... Okay, two things. I think we undervalue and we misdefine. What do we need a leader to do? I think what happens more times than not, and we've talked about this in different ways and shape, but we have people inside the organization that are just better at taking action. They don't need a ton of direction. They take action. We trust them, they're bought in. That person becomes, in quotes, a leader. Really what we've done and set the stage for is actually they're very good doers, and they're consistent at getting the thing done we ask them to do. We continue to pile on top of them a workload that has to get done, but we've grown increasingly frustrated with other people not doing it.
[00:31:00.000] - Brandon
What we think, and we define this person's role as a leadership role in the organization, and technically what we've done is, lifted a freaking killer workhorse into a leadership title, but the expectation the training, the equipping has never diverted from they're just good at getting shit done. The challenge is, well, not only do they not have good leadership skills yet, but they don't even know what their job is. We've talked about this in a myriad of different ways, but I think how it ties into what we're talking about right now is this idea of if a leader is meant to be a force multiplier, what that means is that they're capable of equipping and then getting people to do the things that need to get done in the business. That's a force multiplier. That's always going to be more valuable to me as a company than any one person that can do a job well done. I think that what I'm trying to hone in on a little bit here for myself and for those listening is that if I do that, if I find somebody that just gets shit done in my business and I continue to have them do more and more and more, and then in quotes, I give them the assignment of being a leader inside my company, if all I've taught them to do is get stuff done by doing it themselves, I've set the stage for one of those two outcomes that we talked about earlier.
[00:32:25.720] - Brandon
Either someone that micromanages, from definition meaning They take over, they do it for people. They're not equipping others. They're not sharing knowledge. There's no one else getting better. Micromanagement is you not allowing others to get better by the way you're behaving, or they're not in touch enough because from their seat, they know how to get shit done and people should just get shit done. It's not even their fault that we have an environment that we create where I've got a handful of people doing 80% of the work for the organization, and yet I still don't have any force multipliers inside my company. Because all I've done is I've elevated workhorses and continued to affirm their value in my business is them getting stuff done with their own hands.
[00:33:13.360] - Chris
Well, and they're relying on your direction of what to do next.
[00:33:16.600] - Brandon
Yeah, it's unbelievably limiting. I think when, and this is true, when companies start looking at, and again, guys, reminder, we talk about this stuff out loud because we wrestle with with it as business owners. I'm never preaching to anybody ever, please. Don't misunderstand that. But this is one of those scenarios where, again, when we're trying to grow as a business and we think about, well, I'm investing back into the company for growth, and it's very easy for us to see that number, let's say, going into a sales position or spending more on marketing or paying for more PPC or paid ads. Okay, yes, that's a version of spending into the business to create growth. I I think the one that we ignore is creating enough bandwidth in a leadership position, meaning at times pre-spending. Instead of you backfilling every minute of their day with shit that they can get done to make you feel better about the spend, what if we got really intentional about allowing them the relational bandwidth to assign tasking and then consistently in a finite time period, follow repetitively enough with that individual to equip them to then become independent? What if that individual was doing that on a daily basis, equipping another person to be a workhorse to get the shit done in the time allotted by the standard?
[00:34:44.640] - Brandon
Then They work with another person and they make them better. The scaling that you get, the revenue generation you get, the gross profit margin that you keep makes whatever investment that you had in that individual worth it in spades because they become a force multiplier. That one person is now equipping several individuals to become highly productive and efficient members of our team. That line is difficult for us to proactively lean into as owners and leaders. It's difficult, but when we do it, that's when you become an organization that gets known for their ability to execute. You're always running at good margins. You're always growing. You're always keeping good talent. The reason you can do all of those things on so many fronts well, consistently, is because somewhere along the line, you decided to promote leaders and give them the time in the day to do what it requires to create force multiplication. That is, I need to identify what priorities we spend our time on. I then need to identify the tasking that will help us get said thing achieved. Then I've got to follow up consistently often enough to ensure that behavior is changing to produce the result we want.
[00:36:05.100] - Brandon
That's leadership, and leadership requires time. If we burden leaders with task lists that are a fucking mile long, you're not going to You're going to get people that create force multipliers. You're going to get micromanagers and people that just have their head down doing the best they can to get some shit done because they don't have any other time to do anything else.
[00:36:26.320] - Chris
I spoke with an owner this morning. I was making my own sales calls this morning, and I talked to an owner and I said, Hey, you have any appetite for a conversation around your sales team? He's like, Oh, we don't have salespeople. I said, Oh, it's interesting. Are you guys just getting ready to retire or sell or something like that? He's like, Well, no. He said, I've just learned over the years that if you want something done right, oh, boy, you got to do it yourself. It doesn't entirely... I mean, this is tangential to what we're talking about, but I just think it's funny because I think a lot of people still hold that mindset.
[00:36:56.660] - Brandon
For sure. And I see how they get there. They still hold that mindset. I do.
[00:36:59.560] - Chris
But At the same time, I think if I asked this guy, Hey, so are you one of the leaders in the business? He'd be like, Well, yeah, I'm one of the owners. But of course, a lot of owners, a lot of general managers, and we run into this all the time. It's not an accusation. It's like we've been in some aspect of that at some point in our careers as well. But boy, it's a real glass ceiling. It is. When we continue to hold that. I think sometimes we don't even realize that we're continuing to hold that mindset. We just instinctively We lose a PM, and we're like, Well, guess I'm going to be PMing some jobs here for a while rather than getting into the mix and helping supporting our people, the remaining PMs, as an example, to take on that extra workload effectively and us leading and directing. It's just so much easier to get in and take over files for some of us.
[00:37:52.350] - Brandon
Yeah, I think part of what I'm trying to just really settle in on in regard to this is I'm trying to get better at slowing my pace from time to time and reevaluating the priority or the outcome I'm attempting to achieve. I think sometimes when we just slow down long enough, instead of just showing up, I got to do better, I got to add to my to-do list, you're right, I'm going to work more hours. If we show up and start getting really good at identifying, Okay, what is the end goal that I'm trying to achieve? I think when you really settle there and you get good at staying in that space and that questioning pattern and that posture, I think it gets clearer on what actions then are required in order for you to get the outcomes that you're looking for. I think that that's why we get so disconnected on what a leader's job is and what they do to actually create return on investment for the business is because we don't slow down long enough to remind ourselves, are we trying to get a file put through the system? Is that the ultimate outcome that we're shooting for or is the outcome shooting for a well-equipped, well-trained, independent fighting force that consistently achieves the mission.
[00:39:06.970] - Brandon
I think the answer is clear. When we look at each situation and we say, Okay, my job is to equip a team to do this stuff without me, it should change the way that you create value by a role or a position. I hope that connected the dots there. Leaders are a great place to start. Your downline influencers and leaders. Slow down for a minute. Ask yourself what you really need from that role that will change the business moving forward, and then reevaluate what it is that's taking up the majority of that person's time. My gut tells me you're going to identify a disconnect between the result that you really want versus what we've allowed or task the individual to be responsible for. Not every time, but unless your business is just breaking all records and you literally show every day and there is no worry in the world, chances are there's some progress to be made on this front. Yeah.
[00:40:06.920] - Chris
Okay.
[00:40:08.500] - Brandon
Yeah. That's it, guys. I think our goal sometimes with this show is, not sometimes, the goal is always to just be honest about the bullshit that we're fighting as entrepreneurs and as leaders. We happen to exist inside the restoration space, like a niche construction blue-collar world. But other teams that are listening to the show, single trades, other home services, this stuff, these principles apply. Our stories just come from doing it inside the disaster restoration environment. Anyways, my point in that little diatribe is just to remind all of us, we're just processing out loud our own lived experience as leaders and entrepreneurs. That's all we're trying to do here. We're going to say things that we're experiencing that are going to be something that you're currently facing or fighting yourself. That's the whole point of the show. You guys aren't alone. That everyone to your left and right has some version of a similar struggle that you're fighting with. There is a way for us to skill up and solve these problems and get better. It starts with all of us just being a little bit more transparent where things are broken. We're trying to just do that.
[00:41:16.420] - Brandon
Head, Heart, and Boots is designed to just do that. I think naturally, as Chris and I remain curious and want to meet with people that have answers and experience to share with us, and we're honest about those experiences and sharing those guests with you, we all level up. Anyways, I wanted to share that with everybody. Good reminder. Yeah. Okay, gang. Thanks for hanging out with us. Till next time. We'll see you. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots.
[00:41:46.260] - Chris
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 listening.