My Business On Purpose

"Hey, Brent, what are unique core values?" Well, they're just that! Not to sound flippant, they're unique to you, to your business, to your family. 'Cause yes, we create those with our clients for their businesses and for their family because operating out of those filtering decisions through their unique core values makes a huge difference in life and work. I got these the other day from a client that we work with. These are their family core values. Listen to these. These aren't integrity. These aren't discipline, these aren't, um, honesty. Those are core values. We should all at our core have those values. Unique core values are just that. One of theirs was "Be where your feet are". And they, you know, the challenge is to, to define that. What is "Be where your feet" are mean. It means to be present. When we are at home, we are focusing on family and relationships. When we are at work, we are focused on work. We're being intentional. Uh, being intentional to be in the moment, to be present and checked in. One of theirs is "Rest". Good gracious! We all need that. This is how they defined REST- Create space from the chaos by giving your mind, body, and soul time to relax. This is vital to give us margin. They said spontaneity to keep, keep things light and fun. We value... listen to that. We value unplanned activities to challenge us and get us out of the day to day rut or predictability of life. What do you think their family's gonna look like if they filter decisions based on the unique core values that they've cultivated? It makes a difference if you implement them. And if you define them, they are game changers. So question, "What are some things you and your family value?" Create a space maybe around the dinner table, cut off distractions, set a timer, and just brain dump on a piece of paper, a Google doc. Just start throwing descriptors out there… We value.. being together… we value laughter and goofiness… we love having folks over to our house… and building community… Make the list then go back to the list and start narrowing those descriptors down. If you value being together then maybe your Unique Core Value is "togetherness". Use a thesaurus. No, seriously. Type in some of the keywords and get some synonyms. Use some words in front of the main world to make it stick… Cultivating togetherness… Intentional ___________ you get the idea. Make it fun, make it YOU. Then, make sure you have no more than 5 Unique Core Values. Have them displayed in the house, talk about them at dinner. One question we ask is "Where have you seen us live out a Unique Core Value this week? Again, it really has been a gamechanger in our household, and if you would have told me even 2 years ago, that I would be excited about having the Whitaker Family Core values. I would have looked at you like you were from another planet. What do we want to instill in our family that will leave a legacy? Trust me. Your family will feel differently from taking the time and investing in these. Check us out at mybusinessonpurpose.com/roadmap.

LinkedIn Strategies for Success! Join Patrice Miles (Business Coach, BOP) and Carter Polsgrove (Regional Sales Manager, Momentum) as they dive into the power of LinkedIn on the My Business on Purpose Podcast: Tuesday Tools On Purpose Learn the best practices, tips, and tricks to maximize your presence on this professional platform. Discover how to use it strategically, whether on your personal page or company profile. Uncover the secrets to building a meaningful network and boosting your business! LinkedIn Tips and Tricks: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YfLs65P-GolMBKUSTfrgXfQNW4HWQLnh/edit?pli=1 Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://bit.ly/healthypatrice SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

Futurist Bob Johansen describes our modern context with the acronym VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. He goes on to explain, "Leaders will be buffeted, but they need not allow themselves to be overwhelmed, depressed, or immobilized. Leaders must do more than just respond to the whirl of events, though respond they must. They must be positive change agents in the midst of chaos." That is our very aim, to liberate owners from chaos and make time for what matters most. Since 2008 virtually every business owner has thought, "when will the next recession come and how bad will it be?" Yours truly has wrestled with the same question during moments of emotional and mental weakness in my well-documented struggle with fear. Recently though I have wondered, "could I approach a market dip with enthusiasm and expectation rather than doom and gloom?" I believe so, here is what I mean. The lowcountry of South Carolina, where our family lives, has been on the receiving end of active hurricanes almost every year since 2016. It is nice to believe that we can hurricane-proof our home. The reality though is that the best we can possibly work towards is a thoughtfully hurricane-reinforced home. I was in earthquake plagued Northern California a few weeks ago and saw first-hand the construction efforts of code enforcement mandating an over-engineering of residential spaces in an effort to thwart the devastation of an earthquake. And yet, there could always be a scenario where the disaster-proofing is just not enough…but we can work to build up a healthy resistence. Even some well run businesses were knocked off of their foundations during the Great Recession. In most cases, the businesses that were recession-reinforced were able to withstand. Here are a few non-negotiables to reinforce your business so that if a market dip comes you can go into the storm with expectation and anticipation instead of doom and gloom. These are in no particular order. First, your Vision story is even more important than cash. Liquidity (accessible cash) is a delightful tool that we would all love to have in excess, but what is more crucial is vision. In a market-storm debris usually gets thrown around and if your perspective is lost your course can get easily thrown off. Ed Sheeran says in his song Lego House, "I think the braces are breaking…" In a storm braces have a chance to break and equilibrium thrown for a bit. While the storm is raging, and when the storm is complete it is both refreshing, comforting, and re-centering to know and have confidence in your heading. Ship captains and airplane pilots would surely agree. The only way you can lead a team to run is to write the vision down (literally...write it down) and communicate it with incredible repetition. Second, cash will offer buoyancy and give you options. In a typical room full of business owners if I had everyone raise their hand who could make it through three months of business with no revenue...not many would be able to respond. The hurricanes here in the lowcountry exposed some businesses to the reality that they could not even survive one week of zero revenue generation let alone a few months of market correction. We recommend that businesses have an accessible stash of three to six months of cash reserve to live on under the assumption that no new revenue was generated. This is not a move based on fear, but instead on wisdom. A decision based on fear (or greed) is to have two years of cash built up (unless maybe you are a farmer:). Hoarding is not healthy either. The likelihood of zero revenue is not very high in most industries. If you have cash, you have options. One option is to float the entire business with no reduction of overhead, personnel, etc. Another option is to thoughtfully trim the business expense in line with the new revenue. Obviously this is easier to do with a team of subcontractors verses a team of full time employees. The most exciting option is to have cash available to purchase other businesses at a discount. Remember all of those hands in the room that would not go up? Many of those represent good products that are simply poorly managed and can be revived by your leadership. You may be able to purchase their business (assets, people, contracts, relationships, etc.) at a discount during a stormy market. You cannot do that though if you do not have cash. The smoothest way to build cash that we have seen and exposed hundreds of business owners is to subdivide your bank accounts and metaphorically cut up each receivable that comes into your business so that every penny has a home immediately. When you begin thoughtfully watching your money…your money magically begins to be used with intentionality. A third tool of reinforcement are team meetings that ensure the right things will be communicated in the right way. Having endured the geographical displacement of a few hurricanes now has helped train us on the importance of predictable communicatio

Unlocking Health Benefits Solutions for Small Business Owners Join Patrice Miles- BOP Business Coach and Dr. Jessica Mendelsohn-New South Family Medicine and Medspa on My Business on Purpose Podcast as they dive into the world of Direct Primary Care (DPC) - a game-changer for business owners. Learn how DPC can transform your employee benefits, making healthcare accessible without breaking the bank. Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://bit.ly/healthypatrice SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

January 1 is too late to begin the annual preparation for your business. Studying the habits of elite military and sports organizations you will see a theme of early and relentless preparation; a willingness to bypass the chaos of the moment and all of the random fire-stopping that comes with it, and instead electing to focus time and energy preparing for what is coming. In business, we have a poor habit of future preparation and instead give ourselves to chaotic duct-taping and a strategy of "crossing that bridge when we come to it". You can do it differently and reap the benefit of early preparation with the satisfaction of long-term predictability. What you plant today will be harvested 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from today. If you plant chaos today, chaos is the rotten fruit that will be gathered on the ground. If you plant repetition, predictability, and meaning today, the robust and fulfilling fruit of preparation will be harvested and replanted over and over. Every year beginning in November, we walk our heroic clients through a thoughtful series of exercises to get them equipped for the coming year in an event called ANNUAL PREP WEEK. The name is a bit misleading in that we now spread the work out over a series of three weeks (we used to do it all in the same week). Our solitary focus is to liberate owners from chaos to make time for what matters most. The purpose of the BOP ANNUAL PREP WEEK is to provide one place each year for each owner to master plan the next year. We have structured PREP WEEK over a series of three days (one per week for across three weeks), and ask for a distraction-less two hours each day. The first 20 minutes of the two-hour block is spent on a Zoom meeting in a mastermind including every client that BOP serves across the country. We use that time to inspire, instruct, and provide the action items that will be required of each owner for that day. Each owner will then break from the Zoom meeting and spend the next 100 minutes on their own, with no distractions working through the various elements based on the theme of that day. Day One of ANNUAL PREP WEEK is a day spent on preparing and tweaking each owner's Vision. During their 100 minutes of day one each owner will work first on reviewing, tweaking, and updating their vision story. They will then begin writing an annual letter to their team reflecting on the year that has gone by and casting vision for what is coming in the next year. They will then open their culture calendar and update any cultural ingredients they want to ensure get embedded into their business culture for the coming year. Finally, on day one, each owner will send out the Healthy Employee Engagement Survey. This is a twice annual survey of their team to determine the backend health of their business based on the perspective of their team. A week later, we follow the same outline; 20 minutes on a group meeting via Zoom and then 100 minutes of undistracted, focused time and use that time for a powerful time of Financial preparation. Most business owners go into each year hoping for the best with their fingers crossed instead of a budget set. During Financial Prep day each owner will first go back and evaluate their subdivided bank accounts and tweak the percentages placed in each account and in some cases add an additional account based on the goals set out in their vision story. Once updated, each owner will then open up their Level Two Dashboard. This is a simple dashboard that tracks the flow of cash within each bank account week by week. It is a real-life gauge of the finances of their business in REAL CASH. They will use this time to update their tracking dashboard with new accounts or percentages. Finally, each owner will go through a simple process of allocating dollars towards a basic budget for next year giving a snapshot of where all revenue dollars might be allocated based on the vision they have written. Down the final homestretch, we lead each owner into Day Three of Prep Week with a focus on the future legacy of both the owner and the business. After a powerful and final 20-minute Zoom meeting with all owners, each one heads off into a healthy time of solitude for 100 minutes to first review their own weekly schedule. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. It is a sobering exercise to ask, "How am I spending my day?" Next on Legacy Prep day, we have each owner walk through a sequence where they reach out to supportive 3rd party professional advisors (legal, insurance, financial, etc.) to ensure they are adequately diversified, protected, and equipped to deploy their assets in such a way that will ensure the vision they wrote is obtained. Finally, in what has become the most invasive and freeing moment of PREP WEEK is when each owner sits down to have a necessary financial discussion with whoever they share their household with reviewing their personal budget to ensure it aligns with their personal vision. We call it the Financial Barn d

A question we are asked by every person interested in business coaching is simply, and honestly, "So, what do I get?" The first answer to your question is equally as simple, "Our goal is to get you what you said you wanted." The very first question we ask any heroic business owner after learning of some of the details of their business is, "What do you want?" The question is both broad and direct. Ultimately, your goal becomes the coordinates of the destination we set our sites on. If we coach you to somewhere you do not want to be, then chaos grows and overtakes. Our aim is to liberate you from that chaos. Being coached by the Business On Purpose team also means that you gain immediate access to the BOP community, a team of coaches, support roles, and heroic owners just like you outside of your local area that we will connect you with both virtually and in person at one of our four annual live events. You get priority access to ticketing to one of those four local events all taking place near Hilton Head, SC in the artistic town of Bluffton. Each quarter we host a planned event with over a hundred owners and key leaders to build out their 12-week plans, or invest in an off-site team day. We want you to come to at least one per year so you can connect with the BOP community in person. Many times, we will work to have you spend time with a local owner so you can physically see how they are implementing the chaos-busting roadmap of BOP in their business. Throughout the year, you have unlimited access to 24 optional group coaching meetings; two each month. These virtual meetings are live and tailored to the struggles and challenges you are facing. You get to work through those challenges with the mastermind of a BOP Coach Team and other owners just like you altogether at once. As a BOP client, you and your team will have unlimited access to the 24/7 On Demand BOP coaching content. Every single module of the Installation Roadmap has been digitized so your team has access to this important resource outside of your mandatory 1 on 1 coaching times with your dedicated coach. Many businesses now use the BOP coaching content as initial training when onboarding a new employee to their business. It's there, why not use it! The hallmark of your coaching experience will be your 1 on 1 relationship with your dedicated, and highly skilled BOP coach. This is a relationship that will start in the weeds of your business and grow into a connection that adds lifelong value to your life and business. You will have 24 mandatory annual meetings with your dedicated 1 on 1 BOP coach that are scheduled months in advance, hold to a tight agenda, and are complete with coaching notes, action items, and follow-up discussions. These meetings are air-tight so you focus your time working ON the business. Each year in November, your coach will get you set and ready for the anticipated BOP Annual PREP WEEK. Over three additional coaching sessions, you will join the entire BOP client community of owners to focus on three areas of preparation for the upcoming year: your business purpose and culture, your business finance and budgeting, and your personal life planning around estate planning and personal budgeting. Finally, also included in your BOP coaching experience is the value added when the entire BOP coaching team meets each Monday at 4pEST to walk back through the scenarios and realities of the prior week so each coach learns from the others and we re-deploy new wisdom and principles back to you during our 1 on 1 time together. BOP has perfected the communication feedback to benefit you both directly 1 on 1, and indirectly behind the scenes. There are over 52 available touchpoints in our coaching relationship with you so that you are never left feeling aimless and unaccountable. So "what do you get?" You get way more than you probably need…but most importantly, you get what you said you want…liberation from chaos. Hop on a no-strings-attached meeting with one of our coaches by going right now to mybusinessonpurpose.com/contact

I've heard a million excuses for why people don't have the time to write things down, so why do we do it? Well, let's dive in to that today. One of our Core Values here at BOP is Write it Down. Now, it has a ton of different applications. From Writing down our Vision to taking notes at team meetings, to documenting processes, and even to producing Coaching Notes from every meeting we have with clients. The list of ways we write things down is exhaustive. And yet, we get pushback all the time from clients and key leaders about whether or not it's truly necessary. All I can say…it absolutely is. Don't believe me, well two instances in the past week, not month, week, of when it's been worth it. A little back story from the first instance. I was working with a contractor who was frustrated about the cash in their business. We were looking at their Level Two Dashboard, and pause, this is the simple tool we use to, you guessed it, write down the weekly cash position of the business. In looking at it, his cash position was somewhere in the neighborhood of 450k. "There's just so much pressure and so much fluctuation with paying vendors and subs and still not feeling like we have the buffer we need." So, what I did, was scroll back to the first week in January and just started laughing. "Hey, if you look back at January you only had 125k in cash in the bank to start the year. So that's a 300 thousand dollar improvement in cash over the first 8 months of 2023. That's a pretty impressive amount of progress!" And the business owner was blown away. He could see with his own two eyes the undeniable progress that, if he hadn't recorded his numbers consistently, he would have still felt stuck and unsure of the growth of his business. But taking the time to write the numbers down and record them provided freedom from the chaos in a refreshing way as he entered the fall to where he knew his pricing was sound, and his operations were leading to predictable profitability for the foreseeable future. And he doubled back down on continuing to record and write it all down. The second story. I was working with an installer who was so frustrated about some employee issues. "My guys just don't get it. We're so busy and so working so hard that they constantly complain about how hot it is and how they don't like what they're doing and we just don't feel like a team right now." So, after listening to the conversation for 30 min or so, I scrolled back down through our coaching notes to look at what we were discussing this time a year ago. Sure enough, some of the same thoughts came up then, too. It was a seasonal discussion in August of every year as the summer just takes its toll. But, the good news is he saw that there would be an end to it. The other thing we noticed is that we had spent 2 to 3 coaching meetings talking about materials and pricing delays and revisiting his estimates to make sure he could hit his margins. It was a period in his business that was so exhausting as he never knew what was going to happen next. He looked at me after I finished and laughed, "Well I'm glad I'm not fighting those battles anymore!" Perspective! Hits you right between the eyes when you look back and often realize how far you've come and the battles you're no longer fighting. When you can pull the plane up to 10,000 feet and survey the landscape with clarity. To give yourself some sanity in the midst of owning and running your business. So what do you need to commit to recording? Is it your cash position, so that you can know how your business is performing? Is it your vision for your business, so that you can know where you're headed and make sure your team knows? Maybe it's some systems and processes, to ensure your team is set up to thrive in their job roles and can be held accountable to a standard? Maybe it's even just writing down your Core Values and your mission, so your team can know who you guys are trying to be as a business! It all matters and it all adds clarity in the midst of chaos. That's the goal friends. But remember, it doesn't start big…it starts small. Think of one thing to record each week and then build on that. And, as always, if you need tools or accountability for this…we'd love to help! Thanks so much for listening, have a great day!

Let's be honest. As business owners, we can often be the creator of our own chaos, which means we create chaos for other people. Hey, it's Scott Beebe with the Business On Purpose platform. Make sure to go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy and you can take a Healthy Assessment of the backend health of your business and see if you're one of those that stirs up chaos. You know, one of the biggest reasons of chaos stirring in a business is, lack of communication, which means a lack of clarity. And you go, Well, Scott, we talk all the time. Well, if Ashley, my wife, and I just talked, quote, all the time, that meant we're texting, phone calling, that sort of thing. But we never sat down to have intentional conversation on a walk, a bike ride, the back porch without distraction being our constant companion, then that's not really talking. That might be communicating back and forth, but we're not actually growing. We're not developing. And so we've got to do something different. The reason I'm doing this podcast is I just got asked about the difference between meetings. See, there's a variety of meetings that we have when we talk about the five foundational cornerstones of any business vision, story, mission statement, unique core values, hiring process being the center, we've added this fifth team meetings. Now, usually we get eye rolls when we do it right. God, we hate team meetings. We don't like team meetings. They never do anything. In fact, one author wrote a book, Team Meetings Suck. Or maybe the title is just Meetings That Suck. But nonetheless, they share a lot of sentiment from a lot of people that we've got to be aware of when it goes into meetings. Here's the truth about meetings. Too often they're just a continuation of the chaos that we've done chaotically throughout the day. So we bring that chaos into the formality of a team meeting rather than allowing that to be a hub of clarity. There's a couple of different meetings I want to share with you. Number one is the good old fashioned team meeting. Now, I'm going to give you a rundown of what that agenda should look like here in just a second. But for most of you, you should also have what's called an operations meeting or a project meeting or a production meeting or in our case, for a business coaching firm. We have a coaches meeting. That's where we spend the majority of time following up on a couple of different elements around our weekly scorecards that we have as coaches. But more importantly, we dive in to the reality of our client work. Questions that we heard last week, conundrums that we were in trying to help clients through to help liberate them from the chaos of working in their business. See, if we leverage our team meeting to do our client meeting work, then we would never get to the purpose of our team meeting, and we would never create culture. Remember, Torbjørn Ekelund of that great book "A Year in the Woods"? He said that nature is God made, but culture is man made. It's manufactured. What does that mean? That means anything related to culture in your business was directly created by you. And the people you work with don't like your culture. Guess what? It's kind of on you. Like your culture? Great job. It's on you. Part of the reason we have team meetings is to create culture. That's right. We can create culture. We generate it, we manufacture it. We're not waiting in reaction to those things. There are other times that we need to communicate in a reactive format to see what's been going on and what we need to do to change that. That's where it comes into the project meeting or the production meeting or operations meeting, depending on what kind of industry you're in. Now, the over 50% of the industry that we work with are construction, infrastructure and supporting entities around that. So we talk a lot about project meetings. So we'll talk to a client about a team meeting. They'll go, oh my gosh, ours last 3 hours. Why do they last so long? Well, it's because we had to talk about all the problems at 31 21 Maple Street. Wait a second. That's where things begin to break down. See, here's the thing we've got to remember about team meetings. Project meetings is too many of them are not agenda driven and leader led. In fact, they keep the seesaw of predictability out of balance. What in the world is that? The seesaw of predictability balances two primary elements that lead to unpredictability, which ultimately lead to micromanagement. Many of you wonder what's the difference between micromanagement and healthy leadership? Well, it's the seesaw of predictability. Imagine on one side of the seesaw you have the right questions. Imagine on the other side of the seesaw you have the right time. If you ask the right question at the right time, you have equilibrium, you have a lack of chaos, you have clarity and you have leadership. But if you ask the wrong question at the right time or the wrong time asking the right question, then you are

Join Scott Beebe, Founder of Business On Purpose, and Thomas Joyner, BOP Director of Coaching, as they break down the 30-Day Business Owner Challenge. Learn about preparation, key takeaways, team strategies, and driving business growth in this insightful discussion. LISTEN HERE to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

For the last 9 years, my two sons and I have made a pilgrimage to Camp Ridgecrest in Black Mountain, NC for the annual father/son weekend camp. A weekend marked by meaning, muscular pain, intentionality, and ibuprofen, this time may be the most momentous in our relationship as dad and sons. The regularity, frequency, and repetition of daily life is wildly important, of course, and these dedicated moments of focused intentionality have bred special awareness. This year was different for two reasons. Both of my sons are now living away from home, each maneuvering through their own experience outside of the daily, in-person interaction of mom or dad. Both were working as staff members of father/son camp for the weekend while I was able to participate as a volunteer cleaning floors and watching dads walk with their sons to play frisbee golf, hike through hornet's nests, and most meaningfully, sit and read what they had written. There is a tradition that has been manufactured through premeditated repetition; if a dad is not careful, he will miss it and so too his son(s). The second uniqueness of this year's father/son camp is that a key leader and influencer of the day to day function of camp lost his father suddenly this past year. What may customarily be a localized and isolated experience impacting only this leader, his family, and a few close friends; this year, every participant at father/son camp was impacted without most being aware. A hallmark of father/son camp happens each year on Saturday morning when a couple of hundred boys and teenagers are ushered away from their dads to go lose themselves in jovial amusement for an hour or so. During the hysteria of boy fun, not yet even laced with an ounce of Mellow Yellow or Sour Patch Straws, the dads are invited into a complementary experience. For years, Mike Pineda wrote. Every single morning, Mike's family would wake up to an email in their inbox. These daily emails became a stalwart foundation for anyone who made the time to read them. Periodically, one of these emails would "leak" and those of us nearby would feel the coolness of wisdom blow to influence the direction of our day and our thoughts. I never met Mike in person, and yet Mike has a significant influence on our decision-making, our thoughts, and our parenting. Why? Mike wrote. Mike was not a New York Times Bestseller, nor a Pulitzer Prize nominee. Mike was a husband, a dad, and a friend, just like many of us. Mike made time to write so that the meaning of his thoughts could slow-release into the narrow scope of his influence. Mike's son now oversees the camp where hundreds of dads are invited on a Saturday morning once a year…to write. Each dad was provided with a piece of letterhead, a pen, and a beautiful place spread out to be alone. Writing requires time; time to think, time to reflect, time to go after wisdom, and time to get all of those thoughts down on a piece of paper so that the echo of their minds rings through the peaks and valleys of life's realities. These dads write so their sons can see and hear what they really want to say in a way that leverages the value of thought and contemplation. Saturday night, each dad walks under the night sky with his son(s) to a place prepared by quiet and clandestine volunteers with a small firepot and a couple of chairs. With limited distraction locked on the shimmering tongues of small flames, each dad sits with his son(s) and his letter(s). The son sits as a recipient, the dad as the giver. Dad reads because dad wrote. I'm not even sure it was Mike's pattern of writing that stoked the need for dads to write letters to their sons each year at camp; but I believe the continuation and longevity of this important rite has been, in part, perpetuated because of Mike's precedent. In business and leadership, we obsess about the power of writing things down because of the down-stream value of replicable systems and processes. We push you to write because it unlocks the freedom of your team to run. Now stocked with the deliberate wisdom of dads and granddads at father/son camp, sons all over can run with the freedom of knowing what their dad has to say about life; and more importantly about their son. Mike made time to write so that we could see, hear, and run.

Owning and operating a business is a continual streak of tests that ultimately prove the trustworthiness of the business that built. The business of scammers and hucksters fall apart over time forcing them to be in a state of constant reinvention and re-huckstering. Traveling various parts of our historic world over the past few months has reminded me of the longevity and duration of things. Walking the streets of Rome flanked by artifacts from late B.C. and early A.D. eras has a way of sobering the hardships of your time. Walking through the carved caves of the Cappadocia region of modern Turkey sobers you to the challenges and hardships of previous cultures. Every culture endures testing. Every generation is put on trial so as to mark the trustworthiness and endurance of that generation. Endurance allows for longevity and the hope of seeing the days that are hoped for. Without endurance, life is short and hope is fleeting. The ingredients of our words fuel much of the cocktail of what is continually being tested through the swishing and swashing of the minds of those around. Each word that comes from the mouth of a leader is filtered through the taste buds of life's mental truth machine and filed away in the vaults of our minds. "But you said" has caught many a leader in moments of double-speak not realizing that a mere fit of external processing was being received by all others as gospel truth. In your strategy to be more decisive, more creative, more inventive, or more direct, always remember that "a fool who keeps his mouth shut is considered wise" (Proverbs 17:28). Your words enter the world with the longevitous ink of a tattoo. Once out, your words are nearly impossible to cram back in and the surfaced emotions are floating for all to sense and respond. If you are a leader or an owner who uses words (ahem, all of us) then here are a few devices that will bode well for you to adopt and deploy. First, be slow to speak and quick to listen. This was wisdom provided to a group of Jewish citizens who had been thrown out of their homeland and were living a scattered lot in unfamiliar territories. Their house was not their home, their streets were not their domain, and the people were not their people. Look, see, listen. Very rarely has a winning strategy been speak then think. The fire of anger is stoked by the sparks of unfiltered words. Want to throw a small group into a frenzied rage? Make a habit of speaking the first thing that comes to your mind and you too will have created a remarkable and unfortunate riot, or at least a really frustrating place to work. Speak slowly. Listen quickly. Second, place a timeline on your ideas. An idea is often birthed into an assumption of perpetuity meaning it never ends. Want to start meeting in a small group? What happens when you are tired of meeting? Want to start volunteering? What happens when it is clear that your voluntary role has run it course? There is no shame in running ideas through a test period of limited time. Take an idea and declare, "We will try this and monitor the results for the next 3 months and then decide on DATE/TIME whether to extend or extinguish." The boundary of a start and stop timeline will allow everyone involved to feel a sense of urgency, and also a sense of freedom knowing that if the idea does not provide its intended outcome, then we mustn't be married to a bad idea for life. Third, remind yourself that your words are sticky. The words that come out of your mouth as a leader carry a volume and camera-like photograph that burns itself into the emotional landscape of the people with ears to hear. Your words tend to stick longer and with greater weight than other because they directly impact the day to day lives of the people you work with. Be careful with "just spitballing". It is probably best to remember that spitballing can be construed as truth-telling and there is not much you can do to change that. We can say, "Well it's not my fault that is what they heard!" The RPMs of great leadership can guide us in how we should speak. Repetition ensures that what we say has fidelity over time. Predictability ensures that what we say will remain consistent over time. Meaning built into our words will ensure that we have baked in the mission and the values that we hold dear to our decision-making over time. Your words matter, and the matter of your words stick.

Remember that Billy Joel song We Didn't Start The Fire? It is a maniacal mantra sequencing decades of rage into a lyrical pounding intentionally crafted as a relentless onomatopoeia; the song feels like it sounds allowing us as listeners to likewise feel the chaos. That song could be the soundtrack for so many chaotic business owners who are on a remorseless campaign to find the next great marketing hammer that will crack open a whole new world gushing with leads and sales because, in their minds, sales solves everything. The myth of that last statement will have to be fleshed out on another date and time; for now, we need to confront the restlessness and confusion of marketing. It is good to turn the volume down, or maybe off completely for a moment, and sit in the silence of what is rather than the snake-oiled and empty promises of what could be. We've said often that marketers are like gypsies and business coaches (a bit self-deprecating seeing that business coaching is our profession); the barrier to entry into each profession is low and broad. The good news for marketers is that the human brain is wired to respond to hope and promise often neglecting reality and objectivity. Marketing is always susceptible to the "Clark Stanley-anization" of theatrics and promise. Clark Stanley (aka The Rattlesnake King) was known as the true snake-oil sales pioneer. According to Wikipedia, in the late 1800s Stanley began hawking his snake-oil linament at a variety of expos and shows throughout the United States. The nothingness of the snake-oil linament was exposed in the early 1900s and eventually led to a series of food and drug laws that would be the precursor to the modern U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Stanley sold on what could happen forcing people to neglect the balance of what has happened. Both perspectives are helpful; for without seen historical learning we will miss the obvious, and without unseen hope life will lack wonder, invention, and creativity. Are all marketers like Clark Stanley? Of course not…just some. So how can you find a marketing strategy, leader, or team who will generate leads that convert to sales in a meaningful way? Let's start by looking in the foggy rear view. One question that our coaches ask every one of our clients when they bring up the topic (usually in frustration) around marketing; where has 80% of your business originated from in the past? We are continually stunned by the number of business owners who are ready to burn the boats, bomb the bridges, and cut off the parachute of what has brought predictable clients and customers in the past. Where has 80% of your business come from in the past? Start your new marketing strategy there! But wait, "most of our clients are word of mouth". That statement has become a bit of an arrogant monicker of recent as if to declare, "We're so good we don't have to market." NO!!! That misses the point. Marketing is tucked into every hidden crevasse of your business. The cleanliness of your bathroom markets. The quality of your material markets. The clarity of your communication markets. Every process, every system, every deliverable, every payable, and every receivable communicates something to your existing and potential clients and customers. When you allow your business to be lulled to sleep by the apathy of word-of-mouth marketing you are building your real estate on someone else's property and you are robbing your business of the challenging creativity to innovate on what has already worked. As an example, we work with a sizeable number of homebuilders and remodelers in the construction space. Every time we present at a builder event we are asked about marketing at because of the assumption, "If I can just figure out where the faucet is, then we can open it up and have a constant stream of business." More leads and sales added to a poorly systematized business will do nothing but hasten the end. The system must be built to handle the load. If your dominant marketing strategy is "word of mouth", then how do you build a system to capitalize on the mouths that are spreading your words? Throwing your hands up and hoping for the best is not a winning strategy. For homebuilders and remodelers, one of the best lead sources for new works are the professionals that live upstream. Who are the professions that receive early indications that new projects are coming down the pipeline in construction? Developers, Engineers, Architects, and Real Estate Professionals. Everytime we have built a simple process for homebuilders and remodelers to proactively, repetitively, and systematically make time for these professionals, magically new leads begin to come in. But doesn't that require face-to-face (in-person or virtual) interaction? A side note, generally (not always) if you wish for a digitally scalable marketing option that limits or eliminates face-to-face interaction, then the entire culture of your business will be changing also. Not to mention, d

Brent Whitaker Business on Purpose. I wanna dive right in. So we were sitting the other day with some folks, and, y'all have heard this song, "You can't always get what you want."True. Well, you definitely can't get what you want if you never define what it is that you want. This came up because I asked a couple in real estate, and I said, Hey, what is it that you want? And it was like deer in headlights. Like I'd asked them some quantum theory question and they paused and said, I don't know. And I said, well, definitely can't get what you want if you don't define what you want. I said, why is that a, you know, difficult question for you. "So we're just so busy" Ask anybody how they're doing lately, man, I'm good. I'm just, just busy. I don't know if being busy is a good or bad thing, but they were so busy they haven't slowed down enough to ask that question. What do I want? So that's the question today is if you're driving, if you're sitting, I'd encourage you, if you're in your office to grab a pen, if you're driving, maybe a voice memo after this is over, what do you want? You're allowed to ask and answer that question! And then write down what it is that you want. And dream a little bit. We're not allowed to dream anymore. It feels like we're so task-oriented that we don't dream. We get to the end of our lives and we say, Hey, how did I end up here? Well, you never defined where it is that you actually wanted to be. It's one reason we build out a vision story, both for family and work. Cuz those things intersect. You can't compartmentalize those. What is it that you want? Write it down. It's a brain dump as they say. Then ask the question, what's getting in the way of what it is that I said I wanted? Identify those barriers. Just write 'em down, all of them. Then as you kind of marinate on that, digest that, let that metabolize a little bit as they say, what will life look like? what will life feel like two, three years from now if nothing changes, if we keep moving in the same manner, on the same trajectory that we're moving in now and, and changing nothing, what will life look and feel like? And then what are you willing to invest time-wise to get what you wrote down or verbalize that you wanted? That's why we create that vision story. We write it down, we get really granular, right, with what it is that we want holistically, life, work, finances, health, and then we make a plan to move forward in the direction of what we want and decisions are made in light of the vision story that we create. So I hope you pose that question to yourself today. Maybe with your significant other or just to a buddy. Hey, what do you want? See what the responses are, but then take some time to really unpack what it is that you want. Maybe you've done this, most folks I have talked to have it. So we've gotta set the target. We've gotta create this vision of what we really want and we've gotta identify the barriers that are in the way. And it really gives you motivation when you ask yourself, Hey, what will life feel like if I do nothing different? No, I've said those several times. So unpacking the day, that's one of the things we do here at Business On Purpose. We do not start anything in our coaching roadmap, our installation roadmap until we define what it is that folks won't. Y'all have a great day. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time.

While in Turkey, we were struck with curiosity as to the various wars and struggles that entangled Asia Minor leading to the rules and regimes that have inhabited the intersection of the world in modern Istanbul. Netflix had an interesting historical presentation of the Ottoman Empire with a focus on Mehmed II that details how the Sultan empowered his forces with relentless raids on the impenetrable walls of Constantinople. They eventually took the city and rules the regions for centuries. While watching Rise of Empires: Ottoman I was struck by the number of messages that were sent by couriers, or delegation of one side directly to the leaders of the competing side. These were soldiers who had but one task; deliver a message from the leader in its exact form and for its intended purpose. Mehmed II or Emporer Constantine were the originators of the message, and the courier its delegate. Delegation is birthed from the Latin delegere and according to latin-is-simple.com carries the idea that you are assigning and entrusting an appointed trustee to carry out the wish and desire of the original delegator. Delegation is not a modern concept, it has been used in organizational growth since the beginning of time. In the midst of a time of overwhelming demand on his leadership, there is a story about Moses who was warned by his father-in-law, "'This is not good!' Moses' father-in-law exclaimed. 'You're going to wear yourself out—and the people, too. This job is too heavy a burden for you to handle all by yourself.'" Leadership is an infinite cycle of emotional labor. Leadership is the constancy of assessment (seeing, hearing, and experiencing), deliberation, decision, evaluation, rinse and repeat. There is not a clocking in and clocking out of leadership which is I why the statement "rest is resistance" is an imposing idea. The leader must artificially will moments of sabbatical (minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months) in the crevices of leadership. A strategy for healthy leadership is found in the power of healthy delegation. There is a difference between delegation and abdication. Whereas delegation aligns with trust, equipment, and empowerment, abdication is the intention to leave a post or a task with no desire to return; a resignation. Abdication does not require equipment, training, thought, care, empathy, or intentionality. Abdication simply wipes its hands of responsibility and walks away, at the ready to blame any nearby candidate for the failure that it will spawn…and spawn it will. One of the privileges and massive responsibilities in leadership is to delegate well. Three elements will stock your toolbox for healthy delegation. First, setting clear expectations which can be found in writing things down. Is it a role or a task that you will be asking someone else to complete for you? Write it down, record a video, and capture that role or task in such a way that will scale easily to those you wish to delegate. Violate this step, and you will cascade downhill into the bitter valley of abdication. Just last week we had a couple of clients that were "sort of not documenting their processes" and it was causing unnecessary delay in important hiring of new team members that would ultimately bring these leaders freedom. Their homework was easy; "Record two videos by Friday of the tasks you are going to ask this person to do." That's it. No excuses…write it, record it, video it. Second, build a simple scorecard of what success looks like. All humans will ask at some point, "Am I doing this right?" Give a simple checklist of "here are the five, or eight things that will need to be done each week to ensure that your role is airtight." A scorecard is what winning looks like. Build your first version, and then adapt as time progresses. Finally, build repetitive, predictable, and meaningful communication points. Repetitive, pre-determined meetings times are your friend. Each person who has been delegated to must have time on their leader's calendar that is pre-set and has a pre-determined set of questions that are aligned to the role, scorecard, and culture of what is being asked. We have regular (twice monthly) check-ins with our team members in addition to a weekly team meeting, a weekly coaches meeting, and every-other-monthly vision days. The goal is forced conversation. In the absence of information the mind makes things up; a wandering mind is good for innovation, but not delegation. Clarity wins, and clarity demands repetition. Are you abdicating? Or are you delegating? Abdication brings burden and imprisonment. Delegation brings clarity and freedom.

Join Patrice Miles, BOP Business Coach, as she interviews Conner Fennell, BOP Intern. Discover Conner's experiences, the hiring process, DISC test insights, tasks for BOP, and how this internship is shaping his goals. Don't miss this valuable internship discussion! WATCH THE VIDEO to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

Join Patrice Miles (BOP Business Coach) and Jessie Barber (BOP Director of Client Experience) as they share essential tips on hiring interns. Learn the hiring process, overcoming obstacles, internship length, finding the right candidate, compensation, onboarding, and communication. LISTEN HERE to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

It is my first day back and my mood is curious. Today is July 31st, on June 30th I sat in the Houston airport awaiting a flight to Paris, then Rome, and promptly deleted my email and Slack apps from my phone. For the next 30 plus days I would not be available to the BOP team for any business-related items. Of course, we could send some personal pics and updates, but no business communication. While away the BOP team had a straightforward mission: grow the business by one client. After founding Business On Purpose (BOP) over 8 years ago in 2015, it was time to take an extended time away from the day to day of the business. Ashley and I just navigated a string of massive life milestones; our daughter's wedding, our final son's graduation from High School, and celebrating 25 years of marriage all within two months of each other. I also wanted to test the sea-worthiness of the BOP ship with me not at the helm. As I write this I still do not know anything that happened over the last four to five weeks, I still have not opened my email or checked our internal Slack since June 30th. I am sharing how I plan on re-entering in such a way that does not overwhelm the team nor myself here on day one of my return. First, I spent time quietly thinking and reflecting back on the last month in gratitude for a gracious creator who provides opportunities and a vast world to explore along with a strong passport that gains access to those places. That gratitude continued as I think about the team that has led BOP in my planned absence, and the clients I serve who were kind and flexible to adjust coaching schedules and plans. Our clients were curious and excited as well because this is in part a model for what I push each of them to do as well. Overwhelming gratitude is a wave that flood's my mind on re-entry. Second, I wrote down a list of the things that would be most helpful and least intense on day one. My tendency is to come in a rain down a list of revelations and ideas that will be sure to revolutionize what we are doing. Throughout our time away, I continued to quietly repeat a Pilgrim's Credo I read that was attributed to Fr. Murray Bodo: I am not in control I am not in a hurry I walk in faith and hope I greet everyone with peace I bring back only what God gives me Hurry must not be priority mode on re-entry lest I alienate and put our team on the defensive. My first trip to Nigeria was a lesson for me when I returned home and began to tidal wave Ashley with all of the details of this new adventure. Over time I began to realize that while I was away, she was still parenting a 5, 3, and 1-year-old; right now she needed a husband and dad at home until the home calmed down at which time she would be ready to really listen and embrace the adventure. One of the things on my list is to have a simple call with each of our directors to simply see how they are doing and listen to whatever they would like to share, and then we will have a more intentional conversation about the last month when they are ready; now or later. Third, I intentionally delayed my start time today just to remind myself to be slow. I typically work from home on Monday's beginning immediately after exercise and getting ready. Normally breakfast comes upstairs with me as I launch into the work day. Today, I took my breakfast on the back porch with no work just to remind myself that I am not in a hurry. Finally, I will not open my email or Slack until later in the day; likely around mid-day. This is a step I am taking to intentionally remind my mind that email and digital communication are not the priority of our mission to liberate owners from chaos to make time for what matters most. Email and Slack (or whatever internal messaging system you use) are supporting tools instead of life or death tools like we have allowed them to become; they should never be the primary actors. Well, here we go; the time has come to go play my role on the BOP team to help liberate owners from chaos!

For too many business owners it is a pipe-dream scenario that would allow them to leave their business for one month while it not only continue, but also grow in their absence. We are in the middle of doing it right now. After a full Spring of 2023 of working as a team to liberate more clients from chaos professionally, and celebrating some major milestones for our family (daughter's marriage, final child graduating, and 25-year wedding anniversary), Ashley and I made a decision a while back that we would setup an epic adventure to lean into our family mission of being a light and creating space through wisdom, adventure, and time around the table. On the last work day of June 2023 we left; and will not return until the first workday of August 2023. By leaving I mean that I, the owner, have no availability to the business team at all. Email… deleted from my phone. Slack…deleted from my phone. The only correspondence with any team member or client has been entirely personal to share pics and stories of our adventure. Zero business talk or email. The last two weeks of our time, I will do a small amount of designated client work in specific time windows that was planned well in advance; but no business meetings for me. At this writing, I trust that all things are going as planned. Ashley (runs our financial accounting) is still working and she has access to messaging, but I have asked her to not relay anything to me good or bad. It has been a joy, but not a picnic. The value of this time is that Ashley and I are enjoying time devoted to each other, and in celebration of 25 years of adventure while we plan and dream for the next season in some inspiring places that have become pillars of much of the world's modern culture. We have walked, read, rested, and had plenty to eat. Productivity thoughts try and creep into to my mind, but a dear friend had me prepare some thoughts that I can begin to recite on repeat when distractions come into my mind, and one of those was a sobering truth that another mentor of mine shared with me back in 2015, "Scott, God's favorite thing about you is not your productivity." It stung when he told me that, and yet I am grateful. I have been productive on this trip, but I have also been "intentionally wasteful"; another sobering thought this mentor gave me. This time away did not just happen. It was not a burned-out festered mid-life crisis decided on a whim; this has been planned. Here are a few things we set in motion prior to my leaving the business for one month. First, we wrote down the desire that we had to go on this epic 25th anniversary trip. Don't skip this step. Second, we ensured that we as a business team were habitually working the systems and processes that we already had in place. Reviewing the vision, mission, values, following our financial processes, team meetings, coaches meetings, check ins, handbook training, content writing and distributing, marketing, sales, etc. We have the majority of our business mapped out in our Master Process Roadmap; it's our business on one sheet of digital paper. It's a must to have, and it is a must to implement what you have. Third, we paid special attention to, and updated our financial processes. One of the BOP Coaches asked a few months back, "What happens if something happens to both of you (Ashley and I)?" In other words, how does payroll get processed, bills get paid, and income get received? We revised our financial processes in recorded videos along with a two-page "financial playbook" complete with contact names for each area of our financial wheel (payroll, bank, insurance, processor, CPA, etc.). These videos are on a private hard drive in a secure place where one of our team members has access to in case of a legitimate emergency. Fourth, we communicated our plan about 3 months in advance both to our team and to my direct clients. Every other month we host a one-hour "Vision Day" with our entire team via Zoom. On a pre-scheduled Thursday afternoon, we all hop on a call having asked every team member to already have skimmed back through our written vision story. I come prepared with a series of Green/Yellow/Red flags based on our twice monthly Director's Meetings where we are prompted to write out some Green flags (things that are going great), Yellow flags (things we're aware of, but not freaking out about), Red flags (things we need to pay urgent attention to). After gathering those over the course of our twice monthly Director's meetings, I then share them with the entire team during each Vision Day. During a Vision Day in the Spring, we shared with the team of our plan for me to be away from the business. Fifth, we re-clarified our organizational structure prior to leaving with a focus on "who's responsible for what". We host an annual, off-site team day for our entire team each year. This year we prioritized time to work through a host of organizationally clarifying tools; a rebuilt Org Chart, new job roles (including

It's summertime… school will be back in session before we know it and the routine will be upon us! So what questions do we need to ask our business BEFORE fall hits? Let's dive in… I've sat in with clients over the last month and summer is always a weird time. It seems like there is a ton of work, but payments are slow coming in, employees lack motivation or are just absent, and we begin to see the sprint towards the holiday season quickly approaching. So what questions do we need to ask today to prevent chaos down the road? Well, I may not hit all of them today, but I'll touch on 3 important ones to ask and engage your team with. Where are we in relation to our written down Vision Story? Don't have a written Vision Story? Well, start there. Touch on the life you want for your family and the things you want in relation to freedom from work. Talk through your business financials, the products and services you need to offer to hit those financials. Walk through the team size and the culture. All of that. And write it down so you can revisit it regularly and stay on track. Already have it written down and documented? Perfect! Now pull it off the shelf and dust it off. Or open up that google drive and open it up. And read through it bullet point by bullet point. Color code it… red/yellow or green. Green means it's done! Accomplished, check it off the list. Yellow… it's in progress. Red, not started yet. Having a visible representation on the progress is so much better than just a simple reminder. If it's all red, better schedule some time to get to work! Things changed over the last 6 months? That's fine. Adjust, tweak it. It's your vision. The thing we're hoping for is when it's all said and done and we arrive after accomplishing it, let's be excited and grateful that this is what we wrote down. Not upset because we didn't place the bullseye exactly where it needed to be. So, step one, pull out that Vision Story and find out where you are! What are we consistently doing that we need to revisit? This was a question we asked every year in the Young Life world. Sometimes you get stuck in patterns and habits that you never intended to get stuck in. So, look at your team meetings, your production meetings, and any other areas you meet with the team regularly. Are they accomplishing what you want them to accomplish? If not, why not? Don't stop there, pull out your dashboards you use to track your cash and finances. Are your percentages right? Do you know your numbers? If not, what else do you need to track? Or do you need to look at them more frequently? Do you need to get better at job costing or forecasting? What help can you pull from your numbers? Even look at things like your culture calendar? Is it producing the culture your hope for? What do you need to add or take away? This is a great time to start some new habits or engage the team to see what's working! Ok, now you've revisited your vision, you've looked at what you're doing consistently and audited that… What do we need to start now that will make life better at the end of the year? Think about this for a second… most businesses wait for the opportunity to arise instead of doing the work on the front end. They end up missing out on the full effect, simply because they weren't prepared and ready to take advantage. Maybe it's making a hire by the end of the year. Great! Start your hiring process now. Interview multiple candidates. Update the job role. Put the performance metrics together. Add processes to support the role! Maybe it's knowing your numbers for next year. Great! Start forecasting and job costing now so you have 5-6 months of data to pull from for your budget. Maybe it's adding a new sales role or productions role. Great! Add the processes needed to train that role now. That way when you hire or split job roles up, the support is there for them to succeed. Maybe it's adding another bank account to your business and starting to file away some cash for the next truck in the fleet or maybe even the next hire. That way you have the cash on hand and don't have to pull on your line of credit or finance anything and can simply take advantage when the time is right. Thinking through all of this now gets you ahead and allows you to take full advantage of the opportunity. Don't wait. Don't let the fall sneak up on you. The next few weeks will go by quickly! You can keep your head down and push through them, or you can take one question a week to think through and prepare for the end of 2023. It's going to be a great finish to the year… but prepare to completely maximize it. Look over your vision, think through what habits you do consistently, and begin doing now what will make the end of the year better. Hope this is helpful for you! Have a great week

What do we pay our new hires? How do we know what the compensation package needs to be? Well, I can tell you it doesn't start by asking, what is industry standard! One of the questions we get most frequently right now is "What should we pay our new hire?" Now, the first thing I'll say is if you haven't listened to any of our podcasts or content on your hiring process, you need to start there first. You need to make sure you have a Job Role, performance expectations, all the processes needed for their role documented, and have communicated the Mission/Vision and Values of your business. Great, we've got that out of the way…we're ready to hire someone, how do we know what to pay them? Well, I've sat with multiple business owners in the past month who have asked the same thing. They always start with, "Well, what are other businesses paying their Project managers, or admins, or sales guys…whatever they're hiring for." Friends, let me stop right there and say…that is a dangerous game to play! And it sets you up to either under or over-compensate your employee from the get go. Let's talk through that. If you start with industry-standard, instead of what your business is designed to pay that role, you will always be chasing the industry instead of what your business can afford. In two cases recently we moved past the industry standard conversation quickly and into what the business can afford. We walked through the numbers and what the role would allow us to grow our sales to or free someone else up to sell. It was like a lightbulb went off. To maintain the profitability they wanted, it was in black and white. One scenario the business actually could afford to pay significantly more than industry standard for the position they were hiring. They were able to go after their number 1 target and make an incredibly competitive offer. In the second scenario, they realized that they couldn't afford to pay industry standard. The business was not ready to hire for the position yet. So they either had to find someone new who they could train up and pay a bit less than was typical, or build up some more cash reserves, improve their forecast from the sales side, and re-enter the hiring process in another 3-6 mos. Either way, they didn't get themselves hamstrung from a cash flow perspective by offering MORE than the business can afford. And yet how many times does this happen? We don't really know our numbers so we throw a random number up and decide that the business can do it. And then we look up 6 mos from the hire date and wonder what happened to our cash! That's no way to set your business up for success. We need a job role. Need clear expectations. Need to know what will happen BEFORE we hire. And then once we have all that we can make an educated decision based on projections and adjust as necessary. Here's the awesome thing about this. A lot of people want to say that it's being too stingy or it pushes you to underpay people for maximum profitability. And yet what I've seen is the opposite. It actually allows you and frees you up to pay what the employee is worth to the business and takes the stress off of that relationship. You're not coming up with a number out of the blue to where they can say, "Oh my boss won't pay me more, because they don't like me." No! It frees you up to say, "Here's what your role is worth to the business, and with your experience here is what we can pay you." It takes the relational side out of it, which is necessary during the hiring process, and allows you to base compensation on value added to the business. Let me say that again, compensation must be based on value added to the business. Not how long the person has been in the industry or what a past employee made or even what the person wants to make. It has to be directly tied to what value they will add to the business and what they will free the business up to make or grow to in the near future. So, the next time you hire…leave out the "Industry standard compensation" myth. It will lead you down a road you don't want to go down. And if you need tools to walk through this or an extra set of eyes, please reach out. This is part of the chaos that we wake up every morning to liberate you, the business owner, from. And we'd love to work through it with you. Thanks so much for listening today, have a great week!

I'm a huge NBA fan… but I was struck by something the coach of the Denver Nuggets said minutes after winning the championship this year. Let's dive in and talk about it today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here, thanks so much for listening in today. People who say the NBA is trash are just flat-out wrong. It's absolutely incredible to watch what the Denver Nuggets were able to do this postseason. Their win percentage for the year actually improved in the playoffs, which is unheard of. They humiliated arguably the hottest playoff team of the past few years in the Miami Heat and Jimmy Butler. Nikola Jokic found about 25 different ways to impact the game whether it was driving the ball, launching threes, getting assists, playing defense, you name it! It was insane to watch the way that team came together to reach the mountain top of professional basketball. But here's what was fascinating to me. The confetti is falling, everyone is holding their kids, hugging, crying, laughing, dancing… all of it. And in the midst of the trophy presentation, they bring up the coach Michael Malone to interview him. The interviewer does her job and basically just invites him to give his thoughts. He thanks the fans, rightfully so, but then, without flinching, says "I've got news for everybody out there, we're not satisfied with one, WE WANT MORE!!!" And the crowd goes wild. "We want more!" I was up entirely too late, and it just hit me. That's so sad. Think about the message that sends to everyone. The players, the coaches, everyone. We're not satisfied with a career-defining moment. We've worked our entire lives to reach the mountaintop, only to realize that there's another mountaintop and another. So sad that you don't even have time to celebrate before voicing your discontentment and realization that maybe it's not all that it's cracked up to be. And if there's one prevailing thought that would define our culture right now it's probably that…We're not satisfied. We set sales goals and hit them, and then without celebrating, we set more that are bigger, and that are the goals that we should have set all along. And then we subconsciously say… WE WANT MORE. We hire a new crew and begin to enter a new corner of our industry and become really good at whatever it is we do…and at the end of the year, we hit our numbers. And what do we do? Ok, that was cool, let's do it again, but bigger and better next time! Why? Because…WE. WANT. MORE! I felt so sad for the Nuggets coach. He's worked his way up from an assistant coach in college, to head coach in college, to assistant in the NBA, had multiple stops as a head coach in the NBA and now sits atop the throne and in what would be the crowning achievement for most coaches, he blew right past it to whatever's next. I remember hearing a story about Urban Meyer, head football coach at the University of Florida where they won multiple championships. He said he knew it was time to hang it up for a bit when immediately after he won the National Championship for the 2nd or 3rd time he found himself in a dark room texting recruits, telling them how excited he was to run it back with them. He had lost his way and so have we. So… what do we do with this? I think it starts with two things. We've forgotten the ability to celebrate and truly be grateful for the journey! Or… we don't spend enough time on the front end defining what we want and what truly matters! Let's start with being grateful and celebrating. What do you do as a business to celebrate? When was the last time you celebrated without feeling the need to drop that motivational minute at the end that quietly tells the team they aren't doing enough? I think we're terrified to celebrate without motivating. We think our team will just stop. And yet, what we see, time after time, is that people just want recognition for their work and effort. Not to have it glossed over and minimized by the thought of…We. Want. More. We're terrified because we don't know what to do with the feeling that we actually got what we said we wanted and it's still not enough! So… we do what everyone else does. Oh, it must mean we need just a little bit more! So we push and push and push and burn out everyone around us with this endless hamster wheel of success. We need to set up a time regularly just to be grateful and celebrate. Now there may be years or periods where we don't do this. I'm not saying we just blindly celebrate mediocrity or subpar results, but I am 100% saying we set time aside to celebrate a job well done. The second thing we need to do, and this needs to be done way before this, but we need to spend some serious time contemplating what we truly want out of work and life. There's nothing more depressing than putting years of work into something to only realize that it wasn't what you hoped it would be. So what are the things that, if at the end of a chapter in life, are worth the work? Is it making sure you set aside times for kids' games,

Business owners are in a constant state of wondering to what depth they "share the numbers" with employees regarding revenues, budgets, profit and loss statement, and/or balance sheets. A client relayed a story of their administrator going to the mail and coming back with a check for $38,000 to which the administrator looked straight at the owner and said, "Wow, your going to be able to do a lot with $38,000." Ugghhhh. Business ownership is challenging enough and demands continual responsibility around the health and well-being of employees, budgets, products and services, marketing, sales, customers, and clients. It is a game that does not stop so how can you relay financial information in a way where employees can begin to understand and positions each employee to see how their work has direct impact on both the top and bottom financial lines of the business? First, you must have clarity on your numbers. Owners that "wing it" with the finances will scale down their confusion. Every business owner must carry a past/present/future perspective regarding the business finances. The profit and loss statement and balance sheet offer a rear (past) facing perspective of a business finance. It is a static snapshot of what has been in the past (and in some cases, what is today). For the present look at finances, each business should have sub-divided bank accounts. Think of it as a Dave Ramsey-style cash-envelope system, but in digital format for the business. When a dollar enters the business (receivables), that dollar ought to be sub-divided into various homes (bank accounts) for which the portion of that dollar is earmarked. A portion to profit, a portion to cost of goods sold, a portion to operating expense, a portion to taxes, and so on. The definitive work on the subdivision of bank accounts has been whimsically written by Mike Michalowicz in his important (and fun) book Profit First. Supporting the sub-divided accounts should be a weekly tracking sheet that we call the Level Two Dashboard (Level One being the sub-divided accounts themselves when pulled up on your bank's portal). The Level Two Dashboard is simply a weekly snapshot of your sub-divided bank accounts for that week so we can watch a historical flow of cash (that's the REAL cash flow we like to see). We can also add line items for receivables, payables, debts, etc. to help us see what actual cash the business has access to today, and historically has had access to. The future look of our business finance will be spelled out in simple budgets and pro formas. The budgets give us a general idea of how much we have allotted for the various systems of the business, and the pro formas educate us on what would happen if we took on a certain decision. When you have the confidence as a business owner of knowing that you are taking a three-pronged, past/present/future snapshot of the business then it is time to do some based financial literacy for your team. There are three principles that would be helpful to communicate along with a fun exercise. The first of these three principles are A dollar is not a dollar. When a dollar comes in the top of the revenue funnel, to our earlier example of the administrator's dismay…not all of that goes to the owner…in fact the majority of that income goes elsewhere. It leads to principles two and three… A dollar out is always MORE than a dollar A dollar in is always LESS than a dollar As for principle two, a dollar out is always MORE than a dollar, I went to a pizza place this weekend with my family. The pizza was a published price of $20 but for some reason, I paid almost $22. Why? A dollar out is always MORE than a dollar. With taxes, fees, and other surprising elements, the price that is published is rarely the price you pay… a dollar out is always MORE than a dollar. As for principle three, a dollar in is always LESS than a dollar, has there ever been a receivable that has come into your business where you have been able to retain 100% of that receivable for yourself? Not even an all-cash business can say that. Even an illicit, all-cash business must pay overhead, employees, cost of goods, etc. A dollar in is always LESS than a dollar. There is a fun exercise that we have shared with our clients and their teams a number of times where you take a roll of 100 pennies and a solo cup. Dump the pennies out onto the table and start working through the percentages of your profit and loss statement in general terms (or you can use an example company from a similar industry). 35% goes to cost of goods? Put 35 pennies in the solo cup. 26% goes to employee payroll? Put 26 pennies in the solo cup. Do that until you're left with your remaining pennies and then remind the team that we still have not accounted for taxes or mistakes and other overages. So even if the profit and loss shows a profit, that number is rarely the cash that is actually available to the business. It is not reasonable to assume your employees understand the bas

"I don't have much to do in my business these days" were the exact words from a business owner I met with last week. You could get a sense that the words almost scared him as they came out of his mouth and left a concerned sense somewhere between, "I can't believe this is actually true, " and, "Am I missing something that I should be seeing?" As business coaches, we can't help but be excited, and offer a bit of a chuckle when we see business owners arrive at the place where their business is running consistently without their direct, hour by hour, day by day input and effort. Not by unhealthy abdication, but instead by thoughtful, consistent, intentional leadership rooted in purpose, people, process, and profit. After a few seconds of joy and enthusiasm, we quickly move into a mode where we want to ensure that the owner is in a healthy place, and the team is in a healthy place. Frankly, it makes me a bit uneasy to think about a driven personality with a forward-leaning mindset to be equipped with marginal time and marginal resources. Ever heard the story of the successful entrepreneur who was engrossed in a twisted and bazaar mid-life crisis? The marginal time and marginal money paradox is the most common breeding ground for such an unrestrained crisis. The very first thing you should do if you are bored in your business is to pause and make sure you have health in your personal disciplines. Boredom has been made out to be a non-productive territory littered with heat, dust, and tumbleweed...a wasteland to progress. It's not true. Boredom can actually breed healthy solitude which becomes the catalyst for proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see. It is in boredom where restoration can happen, insights can emerge, problems and opportunities can be clearly seen, and experimentation can flourish. Busy automatically cranks the volume knob to 10, boredom gives you control of the volume so you can think. Boredom is not bad; it offers value, flexibility, and opportunity. Boredom provides an opportunity for you to indulge in your thoughts, either good or bad. Instead of asking "What should I do?", if and when boredom sets in, change your perspective to "What can I hear?" or "What can I see?" now that I have the wide open space of boredom. The Jewish Rabbi compelled his followers to allow for "eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to understand". Your mind has a trainload of thoughts, and boredom is the train station for those thoughts to disembark and lounge for a while. The second opportunity that emerges with boredom is a chance to revise your future destination. We travel back and forth to Nigeria on a regular basis, which usually requires four airports along the way. I follow a similar, subconscious routine at each airport reviewing my flight app to check boarding times, seat assignments, and the itinerary on the ground once we get there. Inevitably, sitting in the boredom of the airport terminal, a new idea that alters the itinerary will pop in my mind, and bring with it some fresh ideas that I can breathe into the trip. You have a written, multi-page vision story, and that vision story will be tweaked (as opposed to wholesale changes) throughout the year as you have new insights in the context of the boredom spaces. Boredom allows a business owner to re-evaluate and revise the written vision, drawing in a tighter and tighter focus on the final destination. Boredom can also be an impulse to revise your role. You should never be without clarity in your role within the busy, especially when you are not in the day today. A unique way to gain insight into your new role is to ask your key leaders, "What does the business need from me above all else." I asked this question of my team and here is how they responded, "We need you to help provide momentum, organization, tools, and leads." After some discussion and clarity, their insight provided clarity on my role and allowed me to craft it towards the elements where I too thought my time was best spent. That vision and role may include doubling down on what you have already written. It may involve selling your business and starting something else. You may uncover a pivot in your business or personal life that you simply had not seen or heard prior because the distraction and the volume were too loud. The third thing you can do when you are bored as a business owner is to embrace the time and rest. It is said that even God himself rested. Probably an indication that we too should have moments of rest. Rest defined is to "cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength". Rest can be reading a book, self-converting a sprinter van, napping, writing, exercising, or just sitting and staring. This is where you need to be mindful of where your rest leads you, and it is best to have someone else help hold you accountable to how you rest so you maximize that time for good, and not for backward movement. Finally, when boredom

In business, money is constantly moving. A cash flow statement is a bit counterproductive. As the cash flows, we can see trends and movement. The moment we snapshot the flow of cash into a static cash flow statement, the cash stops flowing. Taking a snapshot of a rushing river means the river is no longer rushing; it is still. You can clearly see the river, the level, the color, and the shape, but the rushing-ness of the river is lost in the stillness of the snapshot. The mass publishing of the now infamous story of Chris McCandless documented in John Krakauer's book In The Wild has led to a surge in the number of me-too explorers who wish to track McCandless's fateful footsteps. To reach the famed bus that McCandless made home explorers must trek through and across the Teklanika River. After safely crossing the river many inexperienced explorers fail to take into account that rivers trough and crest often at unpredictable times leading to many of these post-McCandless explorers stranded in need of rescue, or in some cases left for dead. The metaphor is not much different in the trough and cresting of the cash in your business. With a little preparation, you can begin to have greater insight into the reality of the future tides of the river of your business. Static financial statements and reports are incredibly valuable, including the cash flow statement, and yet still can be of only momentary help to a business owner who lives in a dynamic, constantly moving world. The statements and reports themselves need a means of tracking the flow, the peaks and troughs, and the standard deviation of that volatility so we can make a point-in-time-decision in the midst of a constantly flowing market. The Executive Leader is looking to create proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see, therefore must be able to cut through the financial fog and pay attention to reliable instruments that are always calibrated within the values of the business. Just as in an airplane cockpit, the pilot maintains a panoramic view of the horizon (vision) the Executive Leader must also build in a panoramic view by which to view the financial health of the business that is tracked with repetition, predictability, and meaning. Three tools will aid the Executive Leader in having such a panoramic view past, present, and future. First, the well-tested profit and loss statement (P&L) provides a still shot of what has-been with one major caveat; the data you retrieve is only as helpful as the data that has been input. The P&L helps you to understand your Cost of Goods Sold which in turn immediately helps you to understand what Mike Michalowicz calls your Real Revenue. Your COGS is a number that theoretically goes away if sales goes to zero, everything "below the line" would continue as-is and gives you a great snapshot into your other expenses or overhead. A great monthly exercise is to simply march down the P&L and see if any of the percentage numbers have changed from month to month, quarter to quarter, or year over year. The net income number on the bottom of the P&L is nice, but let's be clear, it is not an actual reflection of how much cash remains in the business. It drives me crazy when someone says, "Congratulations, you made X in net income." Your net income seems to be more advantageous regarding your taxes than it does in showing your actual cash profitability (the funds you really have access to). You could not take your P&L to the bank and ask to withdraw your net income…I know it's silly to say, but that is how many think of the net income number. Your P&L is more of a value of past "actuals" related to income, real revenue, costs, and expenses…it is the history less for your business. For the present, merging two ideas has been of significant value to so many business owners making the pivot to Executive Leadership. The first of those two is the subdivision of cash entering the business. When a dollar comes in, that dollar should be physically subdivided into separate accounts or expense homes where you are able to see what cash is actually available to the business for real-time decisions. You might begin to feel a draw to defend the balance sheet, or the cash flow statement, or a simple spreadsheet as a means to do the trick. Here is the major problem, most business owners and executive leader (heck, most accounting professionals) struggle to keep up with the daily tracking of cash on a spreadsheet. Also, the balance sheet or cash flow statements are static, not following the flow of cash (different meaning than a cash flow statement). When the cash is subdivided into multiple bank accounts the decision-making for the executive leader has a much faster turnaround because whatever is in the account is what we have to work with, period. Each week, a team member documents the balances of those multiple accounts and begins to watch the peaks, troughs, and up/down deviations. Sure, you can always log into your bank

"Soaking it up in a hot tub with my soul mate." How many of you played sports in high school? How many of you have listened to a voicemail that you left for someone else and cringed at the sound of your own voice? For some reason, we decided having a podcast was a good idea, and every time I hear one of mine I'm like…is that really what I sound like? It's Painful! I remember being in high school and watching film. Anyone remember film sessions? All the guys in here who peaked junior year of high school are like… oh yeah! Should have seen my film! They called me freight train! Haha. Here's the thing with watching films… there's nowhere to hide!!! The film doesn't lie. Here's the thing in that first clip…Uncle Rico, the character talking there wasn't willing to look at reality…and probably NEVER watched the film. He wasn't willing To look at hard things and say…maybe I'm just not any good. To think critically. No, he lived in this dream land where he was the victim and wasn't even remotely living in reality. So what's the opposite of that? What's naming the hard look like? For us…we started adding questions regularly to our team check-ins…yep the same check-ins we ask you guys to have, we put into practice every two weeks. Here's the question we ask… Where are we, as a business or team, NOT who we say we are? Where are we overpromising and underdelivering? Because here's the thing. I guarantee when you get referred from someone, they are hearing about it. Everyone who works with you already knows. So, if we're not answering that question internally, we're lying to ourselves. We have to pull back a bit and watch our own film as a business owner. To listen to our sales calls, which we do also, and ask…are we delivering on what we promise our clients? To look at our marketing and ask if that's really what we offer? To intentionally make time to identify the hard things so that you can move past them or at least deal with them…and for lack of a better word, to watch the film on our business and know what we truly look like? So here are 3 questions I want you to kick around as a team… 1. Where are you, as a business or team, NOT who you say you are? 2. What are the biggest pains in the business today (which ones have we overcome in the recent past)? 3. What frightens you as a business or what adversity is coming your way?

We assume, because of our modern loneliness epidemic, that being alone is bad, not realizing that there are healthy forms of loneliness and unhealthy forms. The legendary John Prine wrote a powerful song entitled The Speed of The Sound of Loneliness. His lyric lends insight into a common reality for leaders, "you've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness, you're out there runnin' just to be on the run." After launching, incubating, or purchasing a business, the owner or founder begins running at a speed that very few can or will match in the remaining days, years, and decades of the business. For many, it is a hyper-speed, superhuman pace, unsustainable over time. There is a sound to loneliness, a narrative, a rhythm that can be of great value to the leader, but for most, they ignore and blast right through the speed of the sound of loneliness and they continue running at a superhuman pace because it is the only way to give momentary satisfaction for our obsession of productivity. We make excuses and say that we really do care about "quality" or "customer service", when in reality what we really care about is that this "perfect" business we grew has no spot or blemish when placed into the care of others. Loneliness forces us to see the warts, the blemishes, the imperfections. Loneliness forces us to reckon with our own humanity… our limitations. Loneliness offers an opportunity to find joy in the imperfections, or to deny that imperfections can exist and pick up the speed of our running so that we can "feel like we're doing something". A dear mentor of mine told me in November of 2015, "My favorite thing about you is not your productivity". It stung. I am well known and regarded precisely for my productivity and affinity for systems and processes, and my friend to a surgeon's scalpel to the thing that I embraced the most. His encouragement felt like rebuke, and it was needed. It would have never been heard without time and space for relationship…an ironic twist on solitude. There is healthy loneliness and unhealthy loneliness. There are healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships. If you are to be an executive leader of impact, then you will make time for solitude. Recalling the story of how Nike wooed Michael Jordan as its game-changing endorsement personality Sonny Vacarro was shocked when Nike founder Phil Knight decided to change his mind and commit the entirety of the Nike basketball endorsement money to one player. Originally against the unprecedented idea, Vacarro asked Knight, "What changed?" Knight's response? "I went for a run." The story may not be true… but the principle is. A portion of that solitude will be committed to a few, meaningful, sincere, and intentional relationships. Relationships with people in person, and with people in publication. Nearly one out of every two adults has not read a book in the last 12 months. That is not an option for an Executive Leader. If Executive Leadership is creating proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see, then part of the proximity you create are towards relationships that can provide mutual sourcing for motivation and vision. Rarely does a person develop a vision from nothing. We all generate vision from a body of source material, experiences, and inputs. Leaders need curated input, but too often we crank up the volume of the masses in the search for a non-caloric "silver bullet" instead of eagerly pursuing the small, subtle voice of wisdom that is dripping with sustenance. How do we know if our time is being devoted to wise solitude, whether alone or with someone, or to noisy isolation as we infinite-scroll the doomsday logs at the ready in our feeds? The Solitude Matrix helps us to understand where we can make time for solitude; both alone and with others. Imagine a quadrant where your horizontal axis on the top is devoted to substance and on the left and surface on the right. The vertical axis on the left side is devoted to solitary at the top and social at the bottom. When a leader devotes themselves to surface-level conversation in a solitary surrounding (top right) it leads to the hopelessness of unchecked voices in our minds, a belief that what you see is always because perspective has no access, and solutions are fabricated many times to problems that don't exist (or at least are not significant). When a leader devotes themselves to surface-level conversation in a social surrounding (bottom right) it leads to an interaction that feels fake. Not a relationship, but instead an obligation. In these fake interactions, we find ourselves obsessed with "who's got it more together", and wanting to become the highest "spender" so we can steal the show. Fake conversations leave us empty as we leave hoping that our social standing improved during the interaction. When a leader devotes themselves to substance-level conversation in a social surrounding (bottom left) they are actively building relationships. There is a focus

Sitting in a room listening to a variety of presentations, most of them non-engaging with slides that looked like this. HUH? Then a physician stands up and begins to relay a series of statistics accompanied by stories. The suicide attempts among college girls have increased from 1% to 2%...a 100% increase in a 2-year span. Nearly 1 in 3 girls have contemplated suicide. We have a college-aged daughter and two college-aged sons…this woke me up. After the presentation, I waited until the presenter was finished shaking hands and walked over into a quiet corner where he was refreshing coffee and asked, "What happened?" His response, in paraphrase…" it is well documented that there is a two-year reversal in behavior among HS and college students in general…so instead of an 18-year-old dealing with 18-year-old things, you have an 18-year-old who is developmentally 16, trying to deal with 28-year-old things because of the unfiltered availability of information." Thirty years ago, a small subsection of people in the lowcountry of South Carolina would have known of the intimate details of the Alex Murdaugh trial… now there are people in New York, California, and Indonesia whose lives have been impacted by a very very local story. That is 28-year-old Grown Adult information, being straight-veined into 16-year-old minds in New York City while also trying to deal with acne, prom dates, and asking, "Should I download Snapchat OR TikTok OR Tinder OR all three?" There is a narrative that we have heard around the country as we have spoken to groups in Tampa, CLT, ATL, Houston, Dallas, LA, and Vegas…. "Nobody wants to work anymore." The business owners are looking at the labor pool, and looking at the modern "flexible work environment" and concluding… "Nobody wants to work anymore." The key leaders are looking at the teams they are leading, and/or the people they are trying to hire and train and conclude… "Nobody wants to work anymore." But let us reason together for a moment. Really ask, do people REALLY not want to work? REALLY? Do people REALLY want to wake up in a fog, sit around on the couch, indulge in meaningless things all day, eat dinner, watch Maury Povich and Dr. Phil, go to sleep, and do it all over again day after day after day? No. You know what people want? What YOU want?" MEANING You want to be-the-better you know you have the capacity to be! You want what you do to matter! You want what you do to move the needle! You don't want to stand around the cubicle wasteland and drone on and on about the TPS report. To do meaningful things, things that matter, there are 3 things that I want to reiterate, remind, and regurgitate… First, you need hard coachING and you need TO coach hard A reshaping is needed (chucks pottery example sermon 2/26) It offers mobility, portability… And yet, periodically needs to be reshaped and reformed. Pottery shifted an entire economic culture Allowed for portable societies The beauty of the pottery metaphor is that… Solid, hard coaching re-forms, both as you receive and give thoughtful coaching The alternative of this is to ignore coaching, the sound of which just sounds idiotic. Kyrie Irving/Kevin Durant (audio) Nothing good will be done that is done outside of wisdom and accountability Tech will change, languages will change, empires will come and go Wisdom and accountability have and will always be Instead of seeking principle wisdom, We PURSUE THE BEST books, conferences, podcasts, and new strategies to find non-caloric solutions that will run themselves so we don't have to work. THEY WILL NOT… We keep trying to buy the BEST project management software, CRM, billing system… The BEST software is the software that you will actually use!...it requires action The BEST town is the town you will actually live life in…it requires action The BEST car is the one you will actually drive…it requires action The BEST spouse is the one you will actually enjoy spending time with…it requires action ALL of these require YOUR choice, and YOUR action WHY did we see a regress of maturity and cognitive capability among a younger generation? Not realizing that solving problems IS THE JOB ROLE Because outside forces stepped in (including us in this room) and did not allow them to work the muscle of their own independence! What we touted as flexibility became inactivity and apathy…just waiting. We've done much the same in our business trying to remove people from the challenge of solving problems… We have a tool called the Ideal Weekly Schedule…it is among the SIMPLEST tools a BOP coach brings in their toolbelt. You want the adherence level of an Ideal Weekly Schedule is? 30 minutes of pre-work 2 minutes of review daily UNLIMITED discipline and implementation Parkinson's Law tells us that "work expands to the time allotted" Was challenged to do a duel The night before the duel, he wrote letters to friends… Then wrote his "Mathematical Testament" that changed the entire landscape of modern math…IN ONE NIGHT

How do your customers and clients feel after they've done business with you? Do they feel your gratitude? Well, let's talk about that today! Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose. I spent 4 days last week in Mexico with my wife celebrating our 10th anniversary! Gah, what a special time as it was just us for an extended period of time for the first time in 5 years. We've done a night or two getaways, but having 3 kids in 4 years meant that we always had a little one at home and so getting any more time than that was challenging. We walked into the resort and from the moment we were there we were welcomed in a way that we never have been before. Let me paint the picture for you. The first morning, because it was the west coast of Mexico and 3 hours behind… I woke up wide awake around 4:30 am. I'm used to going 0-60 when I wake up and it was so strange to wake up and NOT be needed by anyone. The tricky part, breakfast wasn't served until 7 am! I remembered the concierge telling me they had 24/7 room service, so I picked up the phone and dialed it…half expecting it to ring and ring and ring. They picked up on the first ring. Remember, it's 4:30 in the morning! Hey is there any way I can get some coffee for two of us? Absolutely, sir! We would love to. I apologize that it will be about 20-30 min to brew a fresh pot for you and your wife, but we will have it there as soon as we can. Great! 20-30 min later, there's a knock on our door, at 5 am with a fresh pot of coffee, a tray of fruit, and a basket of chocolate croissants for us to enjoy. It was incredible. I just said thanks so much for bringing it so early and they thanked me multiple times and talked about how grateful they were to serve us. Wow…that leaves an impression. Every time we ate dinner, ordered a drink, asked for a towel, needed anything and everything we were met with gratitude and feeling that the employees of the resort were overjoyed to be asked to serve. So… the question at hand as I was flying home. Is that how our clients and our customers feel when we do work for them? Do they feel the gratitude at being chosen for their work? Do they know that it truly is a joy to get to do the work and serve them? If I had to wager, I would say not! I would say more often than not you are at odds with your clients. Left cursing them under your breath as they walk away or as you leave the job site. Maybe even thinking, if we can get through this one nightmare client, maybe we can get back to the good ones! And some of that's true. There's entitlement and a lack of gratitude on the customer side. There's no doubt about that. But I think it's more than just that. I think that we've forgotten that work is a gift. That we were designed to work and create and problem solve and all of that, in and of itself, is a gift. Because think about this for a minute. If what you were doing is easy, if it didn't come with problems, people wouldn't need you to do it! They would do it themselves and probably not pay someone like you to do it for them. If it didn't require expertise and planning and calculation and learned skills, you would not be able to make a living doing it! So maybe there's a mindset shift that needs to happen. Next time there is an issue, can we train ourselves to be thankful… to feel gratitude for that problem. Because behind the problem itself is the reason we can build a business around solving that unique challenge! That is exciting! That's something you can retrain your team on. To feel joy at the challenges because each and every one of them is job security and the opportunity to support your family moving forward. I think that's what the employees of this resort thought. They were grateful to serve because they knew the more people they served in an exceptional manner, the more people would want to come there and a better life for their family! But not just that, I think the gratitude that was present helped them not just, "get through the day," but helped them enjoy their days working. And there's a huge difference between the two. So, how do you need to shift your thinking? What problems in your work need to be seen with gratitude? And do you need to take an inventory of how your customers feel when they are done working with you? I think it's a great place to start and a great way to enjoy your work more! Bring it up around your team and see if it changes your culture and deliverables. Alright! Have a great day…and if I'm practicing what I'm preaching. Thank you for continuing to listen and allow us the opportunity to keep delivering content like this to business owners. It really is a gift to us and a joy to keep doing it. Take care!

If you have ever been interested to see a group of business owners conduct a communal eye roll, bring up the topic of bonus and incentives. A few years ago we had a client who decided to reward their team from a banner year and forego distributing a substantial six-figure margin to himself and his partner. There was no expectation created for this one-off distribution. It was a $200,000 sum that would be distributed to around 25 employees… you can do the math. Not bad. The response? Crickets. Of the 25 employees, there was a thoughtful "thank you" from three, a casual "thank you" from a few more, and crickets from everyone else. To add insult to unexpected injury, the next day an employee came in and confessed, "I just got a job offer to go make $10k more per year and I don't know what to do…" Candidly, when calculating an employee's compensation, most owners in businesses with less than 50 employees have not considered the additional investment of bonus or incentive outlays. When the thought finally arrives the plan is usually built from a position of fear rather than a position of joy, celebration, and sharing. In other words, "What can I do to make these employees feel more valued so they don't leave!" Most owners wish to generously share in some of the margin that has been created over and above what has been budgeted for base compensation and commission. There is a chasm that exists that almost renders any over-and-above distribution as challenging at best, frustrating, and divisive at worst. Owners are forced to think of the business finances in terms of the net…what is left over after all responsibilities are payed out. Employees are often time locked in on the gross… the big numbers that come in at the top or total sales. An employee can do math in their head and determine the total sales of either their efforts, or the total sales of the company and think, "Well, look how much I generated for the business, and all I get is my base with a little extra (or sometimes no extra at all)." The owner looks at the math spelled out on the profit and loss statement, the cash balances in the bank account, and the budget of projected expenses and revenues for the coming year and thinks, "How in the world can we afford to pay out any additional and not be cash-strapped for the future?" It is a silent stalemate between owners and employees, top line and bottom line, perceptions, and expectations. How can employees see additional compensation as motivation and incentive, instead of seeing it as an expectation? How can owners see additional compensation as a budgeted item to be shared and joyfully extended, instead of seeing it as a fear-motivated mortgage that taxes future growth opportunities (remember, marginal cash is the prime fuel for future growth). Most owners desire and have motivation to extend extra-compensation to reward over-and-above effort and to show additional appreciation. There are however three primary negative motivations for the build-out and deployment of these plans that usually result in a lack of health and longevity. Owner guilt is where the owner feels unwarranted guilt for having access to the net income of the business while employees do not. What is often missed during boom times is that the owner must use a portion of the net to stack in reserves for when the business has negative net income and wants to continue employing personnel even though the business cannot "afford" it in a particular month of the year. Another negative motivation for deployment of extra-compensation plans is an owner's fear that an employee will leave. It is a crucial principle that all businesses be built to weather a valuable team member leaving the roster. A business will never be bulletproof from the handicap of losing great talent… but it can be prepared on how to respond. Businesses must be cautious about being held hostage by one highly valuable employee; it can damage morale and cash-strap a small business for future opportunities. A final negative motivation for extra-compensation plans are employee demands in a vacuum of understanding the full scope of the business finances. Financial literacy in a business is key to building consensus and understanding around incentive compensation and bonuses. A two step approach will aid employees in understanding the basics of business finances. The first of the two steps to financial literacy is communicating with all employees that a dollar is not a dollar because… A dollar out is always more than a dollar (think when you pay for a sandwich that costs $9.95…you will pay more than $9.95 with taxes, tip, delivery, time spent, etc.) A dollar in is always less than a dollar (think when you receive a payment for $9.95…you will send the majority of that $9.95 to other people before you get to keep what is left over) The second of the two steps to financial literacy is communicating with all employees that business finances are reviewed in a past, present, and future

For six years Ashley and I coordinated the meeting of a group of young men who met weekly during the school year. Some weeks there were four, and others there were sixteen. All between 15 and 18 years of age and all at different stages of maturity. We walked these young men through a variety of discussions, situations, and scenarios and even adapted a five stage growth pyramid for each to understand where they were at in their level of maturity. For these young men we relayed the identification of those stages as Boy Adolescent Man Mentor Patriarch Upon introduction many of the young men in our group presumed that age was the entry point to each stage. Turn 13 and you become an adolescent. Turn 18 and you become a man. One astute young man asked a resonating question around our communal fire pit, "at what age do you become a mentor?" It was akin to asking, "at what year do you become an expert in your field?" In 1964 US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was providing an opinion on the use of obscenity in the public square in the State of Ohio's case vs. Jacobellis who had been reprimanded for showing what was considered by some to be an obscene movie. Justice Stewart explains, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…" We will certainly do our best to layout helpful marks of maturity within a civil society, and yet maturity can be validated in part under the mantra of "I know it when I see it." My response to the young man asking at what age you scale the stages of manhood? I asked, "have you ever seen a 19 year old boy walking around in a 54 year old body?" He understood a primary principle of maturity: Maturity equals maturity. Age equals age. You can have age without maturity. You can have some maturity without age. You cannot have full maturity without the combination of age and wisdom. Wisdom is a cocktail of time, understanding, trial, error, learning, teaching, consideration and circumspect, humility, confidence, and curiosity. Wisdom gone right is shrewd and helpful. Wisdom corrupted is deception and gaslighting. The secret to wisdom is this…GO PURSUE WISDOM! How do we know what to pursue, or what a wise person, a mature person even looks like? Here are NINE marks of maturation that we can pursue ourselves and begin looking for in others. These marks do not prove full maturity, but simply a pursuit of maturity at some particular mile marker on the highway. First, a maturing person is someone who has written and defined principles (mission, values) for their life. We all like to think that writing things down and defining "purpose" in our lives is good for the self-help section at Barnes and Noble, but in real life we can never find time for that. The maturing person makes time to articulate the things that drive them and the things they value. Our family has a drive to create space and be a light through adventure, wisdom, and time around the table. One of the more sacred spots in our day to day is any table we find ourselves at together whether it be our dinner table in Bluffton, a bleacher seat in Winston-Salem, a tray table in row 31 seat C, D, and E somewhere over the Atlantic, or a restaurant table in Cinque Terre. The table is an indicator for us to limit distractions, share peaks and pits, discuss a wide range of recent events and future plans, and to play 3 rounds of a twitchy card game. It's written, we talk about it, and it has become a habit at this point. If you don't write them down, they do not exist. Second, the maturing person invests a bulk of time into a recurring "thing" (Reps): Distraction has become chaos' tool of choice in our modern battle to fight. Desire is rarely the enemy that keeps us from progressing to expert status. We have a desire to fly planes, learn a language, love yoga, travel to Siberia, or hike the Cascades. Distraction then hijacks desire in mid-flight rendering us aloof and frustrated not being able to achieve that thing we know would satisfy and re-energize. While at the Chick Fil A mothership in Peachtree City, GA we heard a recurring idiom that for a while felt like classic corporate goofiness and then over time was sobered up to a well trained conviction; "Full Time…Best Effort". It's one thing to "be at work" all day vs. "working all day". While we are at work all day, distraction begins hovering like sand gnats on a warm May afternoon at a southern coastal ball field. It nips, bites, frustrates, until we either leave, or take measures to battle against. Three hours at work is not the same as working for three straight hours. One gives the allusion of maturity. The other implements boundaries which lead to maturity and exponential value to you and the people you impact. When you mature to give your full time…best effort, choosing not to work in a short

Before English was widely spoken in the far corners of the globe, Latin was the lingua franca for much of the European world from the days of the Roman Empire into the middle centuries. Latin stands at the root of many of our English words and offers us contextual insight into the flavor of our language. Some Latin words proved so powerful in the fullness of their meaning that we simply adopted them without alteration into our common language. Such it is with the financially laced Latin phrase pro forma. With past-centric financial statements like profit and loss and balance sheets, it is helpful to see what-was in the lifecycle of our business. With the power of subdivided bank accounts and the Level Two Dashboard merging the perspectives of real-time cash, real-time receivables, and real-time payables, it is helpful to see what-is in the current state of our business in real cash. We need the what-could-be picture to help us with a complete past, present, and future snapshot of our business. The pro forma is a common financial statement with powerful insights. Pro forma literally means "as a matter of form(ality)". In other words, if you want to know the hypothetical future of an element of your business, especially a financial element, then create a form or a formality and run hypothetical scenarios. The pro forma allows for such scenarios and provides powerful insight. The downside is that it takes time and focus. It feels unproductive because it is a future that is not promised. It is the perfect work and effort given by an executive leader looking to have proximity to the business. The good news for a pro forma is that when you have the initial foundation of calculation built on a simple spreadsheet, you can continue running scenarios with often nothing more than a few tweaks to the calculator each time. Here are some of the key areas you would implement and utilize a pro forma: Determining the compensation of a new hire Discovering impact to the bottom line through any role (new or existing) Uncovering future revenue and or expenses projections based on anticipated sales Future plan your product inventory (or billable hour inventory in a service business) and availability based on seasonality To simulate a variety of "what if" scenarios with business finances, personnel, and production A simple pro forma is often the first step to answering the question, "what would happen if…" If we hire that person? If generated that revenue? If we stocked up on that inventory? If we saw a 10% reduction or a 20% increase in sales? There are a few basic elements needed to build a simple pro forma calculator for your business. First, you will need to define the purpose of the particular pro forma calculation. An example purpose may be to answer, "What is the financial impact to the business of hiring a new person?" Next, define what categorical outcomes the pro forma will provide… what is the ultimate result or number you are looking for? In our example, the "financial impact" means looking at the net income of the business if we hire the person and they receive a compensation of X and produce a work-product of Y. Once you have your ultimate result defined then begin to work backwards to fill in the gaps of values (inputs) you will need to know in order to calculate a final result. Typical foundational cells or values to include in a compensation pro forma are: Base compensation values Incentive compensation (bonus) values Any other expenses (overhead, etc.) values Type(s) of product or service(s) Average ticket price of product(s) or service(s) A spread of months and years to run your scenarios (Year One/Month One, Year One/Month Two, etc.) Pro formas can actually be quite addictive as you become equipped with greater objective information to make decisions in a constantly moving subjective climate. A pro forma is best situated within a business that runs the RPMs of great leadership. A culture of repetition ensures that the necessary communication feedback loops are in place to regularly run pro formas for decision-making. A culture of predictability ensures that the results of the pro formas find a home in the decision-making process. A culture of meaning ensures that the decisions made based in part on pro forma generated data is properly and appropriately integrated into the day to day aligned with the vision, the mission, and the values of the business.

Listen to Jessica VanBrunt, owner of Van Brunt & Company, as she talks about how she implemented processes, a strong company culture, 12-week plans, and effective meetings to achieve business success.

"It's just easier if I do it myself." "No one does it as good as I do it" "They just don't care as much as I do." These are all statements that I have heard you make, and they are all statements that will sabotage your Executive Leadership. The leader could drive the tractor, could fulfill the order, could supervise the build, could execute the transaction, could meet with the client, and could negotiate the material pricing. But the Executive Leader reminds herself that she has "Proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see" The Executive Leader creates proximity. They receive a phone call from the client and elect not to respond, or to immediately pass it to the trained and capable team member who can respond within the core values. The Executive Leader intentionally withholds their response…even when it is helpful, knowing that their discipline will create an opportunity for their team to get more reps in a crucial part of their business. When an Executive Leader willfully withholds a natural response in a display of self-discipline, it will be misunderstood and will be questioned… and it will create the value of another rep for the leader to whom that response has been delegated. John Maxwell famously stated, "If someone else can do a task at least 80% as well as I can, I give it to them." The math of that reasoning tells us that 20% of their work may not hold up to your personal standard… and yet, the 80% that they take from you allows you to be freed up to pursue the highest and best use of your time. Money can always be regenerated… time and attention cannot. An Executive Leader must guard her time because nothing she has dominion over is of more value than how she spends her time. Yet, we waste it on task management and decisions that others could easily make (even if they don't perfectly align with our decision). You might have selected a circle while your leader selected an oval, but either way the decision is done and allows the organization to hit on the mission within the guideline of the values. That's a WIN! Starting and building your business required a relentless, red-eyed, sacrificial devotion to doing and seeing it all. Be free from that. What you have built is good, valuable, helpful, beneficial, and powerful… but not if you are going to insert yourself in every little task and decision thereby sabotaging growth and therefore opportunity. When the growth of a business is stunted so too are the growth opportunities for each team member. As a business grows, so too the roles required of which existing team members have opportunity for promotion. Executive Leaders are more like pilots; build the initial systems to operate the plane, and then set the GPS coordinates and allow the people and systems to get you there. What are the indicators that you are moving in the right direction of Executive Leadership? First, You will spend far more time on vision and people, than you will on process and task. The executive leader will have multiple calendared times throughout each year they gather the entire company together in person or virtual and read back through their written vision story, mission, and values followed by a self-evaluation of "Green/Yellow/Red" flags in the business. These vision days with the added addition of flag-reflections offers the executive leader and the team a sobering, in-the-moment consideration of where they think they stand in a number of business and personnel areas. The executive leader will be in a continual state of learning and understanding the art and science of human psychology and personality. They will take seriously the objective insights of profiles and assessments while pursuing acumen into generational diversity, trends, and norms while training their leaders on what they see and hear.. Second, you will have a defined and published group of tapped leaders in place, and those leaders will begin showing evidence of building and refining the team to carry the heavy loads of business. In this case, published means a visual org chart, formally communicated to the team, while you make space in team meetings and check ins for investing time and attention through line item training and with the culture calendar review. Published is public and the Latin root "pub" means a collection of people. If the people have confusion about who is leading, then your leadership is not published. The third indicator of executive leadership is revealed when you begin having greater proximity to your leaders; both close and far away. Proximity towards your leaders comes by way of the RPMs of great leadership that we talk about frequently. Repetitious proximity is an engagement that happens over and over realizing that once is never enough. Predictable proximity is an engagement that happens without surprise allowing for clarity and sobriety in thoughtful and timely conversation. The micro-manager asks the wrong question at the wrong time, whereas the executive le

Listen to Thomas Joyner, Director of Coaching, and Brent Whitaker, Business Coach, as they discuss the importance of having a clear mission statement. They talk about the difference between passion and purpose, and how purpose is what drives us forward even when our passions change. They also discuss how a mission statement can guide a business and why it's important to define your own mission instead of letting others define it for you. Ultimately, a well-defined mission statement helps us understand the "why" behind our work and keeps us motivated to push through difficult times. LISTEN HERE to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

Partnerships are hard. I've heard it said, "the only ship that doesn't sail is a partnership." Partnerships sound great in theory, almost a no-brainer structure for a small business. You get two (or more) minds, two skill sets, and twice the available time that in many cases can lead to an exponential outcome. You also typically get two visions, two opinions, and divergent expectations. Many partnerships function just enough but don't thrive. In the hundreds of partnerships that we've been exposed to we've only seen two that can seriously claim that the business is in far better shape due to the partnership than without. I met with a startup excavating contractor who laid out his plan for his young business, including the threshold levels that would be achieved in order for a second person to be given 49% of his youthful company. My first question to this eager and excited business owner was, "is this formally agreed upon and in writing?" "Yes." He assured me that the friend-soon-to-be-owner would be bringing skill sets that the founder does not have. While I'm sure that is true, often it will also force the owner to miss out on lessons that will be crucial for him to learn up front that will be buffered and absorbed by someone else. Nonetheless, the deal is inked, so the next question becomes, "how do I work with a partner in a synergistic, agreeable, valuable, and productive way?" There are three non-negotiables of working in a co-owner environment that must be committed proactively. First, you must co-write a multi-page vision story that defines the future snapshot of the business. Where there is a vacuum of vision a business and its people become chaff subject to the various swirls of the wind and will (not might… but will) be blown in a variety of non-congruent directions. You will scatter. Once written the partners will be well served to review the written vision no less than every-other-month and make appropriate adjustments based on new information. The partnership is akin to a boat floating out on an ocean in need of an immovable lighthouse reminding each of the unified direction of the business as life evolves and emotions manipulate. This regular review of the vision offers each owner a reminder of the agreed upon direction along with an opportunity to clarify. Second, the partnership must prioritize a dedicated, face to face check in no less than once monthly. This check-in should incorporate pre-determined questions that will uncover desires, blind spots, encouragement, frustrations, and a platform to have the conversation that each may wish to avoid. This meeting will be easy to bypass due to "busy-ness" or an apathetic "we're ok". This meeting should be non-negotiable no matter how good or bad the relationship is going; preset on each calendar and no excuses to allow retreat. The third element to help maintain the communication channel of a partnership; each partner needs a written non-owner role that supports the organizational day to day of the business. Most partnerships play the excuse card of "we're too busy to have roles, we just need to do what needs to get done." This is an endless cycle of chaos and inefficient busy-work which leads to bitterness because inevitably one partner will perceive themselves to be working far harder in the business than the other. Each partner needs a written job role and that role carries a salary. All partners should be compensated in two channels; salary and owner draws. The partner salary may include incentive compensation based on the role, and is the salary that the partner budgets her life around. The owner draws should be scheduled throughout the year with a pre-determined draw schedule or agreement. For instance, Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First recommends setting up a bank account entitled "Profit", a set percentage of receivables gets swept into the profit account twice monthly and then the first of each quarter (April 1, July 1, etc.) the owner's draw 50% of whatever is in the profit account. You can coordinate whatever draw schedule you would like but it should be predetermined, written, and followed with no exceptions. Money disagreements will implode a good partnership with swift expediency; most never see it coming till it is indeed too late. When a partnership has a collective vision, a means of regular communication, and clarity of day to day role, then the partnership has the necessary channels for partner communication setting the stage for a thoughtful flow of your ideas, thoughts, concerns, desires, and dreams to be heard, vetted, and decided-upon. Partnerships of any kind are hard because they involve the moveable and oft unpredictable variable of emotion and subjectivity. Not all is black and white, but there are foundations of understanding that can be poured well in advance of an emotional hurricane. When you enter a partnership you willfully give up certain levels of predictability and controls. You can fight to mainta

For 21 years, Ashley and I raised, led, and parented our daughter. On a beautiful Friday afternoon in April, I had 56 seconds to walk her down a sweepingly curved walkway of gray pavers under an aged live oak tree into the hands of another man who within a few minutes would become her husband. My time as her dad did not end in the 5 o'clock hour of that Friday afternoon, but my time as the primary male influence in her life did. In the months and years leading up to this moment, I felt calm and intentional thinking through where we were trying best to lead our children. In the hours and days after those 56 seconds, my emotions began stirring in realization of a new reality, and one that can bring a man either to joy or regret. I will relish those 56 seconds. I remember them. Those few paver-stabilized steps were clear, and I even remember telling my daughter that we should slow down because I had waited 21 years for this short walk together. The song being sung in the background was entitled Gratitude. The wind swayed lightly. The sun peeked through the canopy of the oaks to catch an overhead glimpse of a Dad soaking it all up. Remembering the meaningful steps that you will take in the future begins with taking intentional steps today, and those hard, often unseen steps set the moments to experience gratitude when we are invited into the brief, 56-second steps. The question you will answer on the backside of the 56-second moment is this, "was I present?" Too many Mom and Dad business owners are too busy in the weeds of their business that they don't make time for the intentional steps that are required before the 56-second moments. The presence of the 56 seconds is earned in the minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years leading up to it. Then, poof, life moves on. Were you present? Were you in this moment while you were in this moment? A banner that you can begin to fly over the hope of your life is the word intentional. You own the years and the 56 seconds when you create a life of intentionality; of being deliberate. A deliberate business owner is one who has carefully thought through the weight of life, the relationships that matter, and actively builds a business that will support the desired life. Too many owners are growing just to grow and the growth leads to increased burden (more time at work, more people to lead, more money to steward) that they have little desire for. Being deliberate carries with it the idea of carefully balancing weight on scales, slowly and carefully adding an ounce here, and removing an ounce there to get the scales balanced. Balance will rarely be achieved of course because we are human, fragmented, broken. A third-century Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani said that: "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are." If you are chaotic, frantic, distracted, and unintentional, then life will remain that way for you, even in the 56-second walk. If you are boundaried, scheduled, coordinated and thoughtful, then life will shape itself in that way for you, even in the 56-second walk. Intentional owners hold to a mission and values and repeat it over and over again. This does not lead to the misnomer perfection of The Truman Show or Disney-like perfection. Life is hard and business is hard, but it is made all the more meaningful when we have a mission to pursue and values to guide our decision-making; both in life and in our business. Intentional owners decide now what they wish for their future presence to look like. I did not want to be distracted in the months, weeks, and hours leading up to our daughter's wedding. I began maneuvering my schedule months prior to the 56-second walk so that I would think of nothing but this stunning bride and leading her to her husband. Nothing else had my attention except that walk in that moment or in the moments leading up to it; no personnel thoughts, client thoughts, billing thoughts, service-delivery thoughts…nothing. Just walking with smile-induced tears. Intentional owners necessarily empower others to do the work day to day leaving space and margin in the schedule and in their heads to do the hard, uncertain, un-kept work of pioneering, visioneering, and direction setting. We have three primary meetings in our business. Two of those meetings are weekly, and one is twice monthly. I lead none of those meetings. Our team has been and is being equipped to lead in a powerful and agenda-driven way so they have autonomy and freedom to lead within a clear set of boundaries and outcome expectations. You will only have 56 seconds for one action that you will have waited her whole life for. Will you be present?

She sent us a voice memo saying, "I don't see my husband or my kids anymore… money is not the issue, I just don't have the time…I feel trapped by my business." This Mom is trying to wear the superhero cape in life and at work and feels she is doing neither very well brewing a mental cocktail of disillusionment about the value and gift of business, while also fueling 100-proof guilt straight from the still of societal expectations. Life and business necessarily intersect and can be of mutual value to each other. Humans were created as a gift to one another, so to work was created as a means of mimicking small little moments of creation each and every day. This treatise that I am penning now is a small act of creating something new… a small contribution of work. This morning I was able to sit with my daughter for a short breakfast a mere five days before she is to marry her fiance. I cannot hide my family emotion from my work creation, or vice versa. The space for breakfast was set and crafted long before this morning. Without a predetermined understanding of what our business was intended in the first place, I could have easily slotted some urgent-felt task into that slot that was unmoveable. Years ago I made the determination that I would not do my core work of coaching on Mondays or Fridays. Why? I needed space… margin. Foregoing Monday and Friday coaching options was also a confession that we would also be limiting our possible income due to the restriction of available revenue-generating hours in any given week. This does not mean I do no work on Monday and Fridays. On the contrary, some of my deepest creation work is done on Monday and Friday as I create a series of one-on-one appointments with myself to create and implement that work that will ultimately benefit hundreds and thousands beyond me for years to come…including this humble article I write now. Those are hours that I have cashed in for the margin of availability. Availability for my daughter to have a final breakfast before she assumes a last name and role that I no longer have a primary say in. Availability to hop on a call with a frustrated client, to chat with a wisdom-seeking team member, to stare out the window and contemplate next steps. The burden of being trapped is usually at the fault of providing ourselves no boundaries, and therefore no margin. Watching a basketball game on television, you will quickly see that the boundary of the court offers the margin for spectators, journalists, team trainers, coaches, and a variety of other support that allows freedom for the players to do what they are best at. Could the leagues cram more games into a season and theoretically earn more money? Yes, to what damage? Exhaustion. Fatigue. Bitterness. Frustration. Isolation. All are planted in the soil of a boundaryless life; a day to day without proper forethought, scheduling, and perspective. Five days out from walking my daughter into a new life, sending her off into a new narrative with a new teammate it is hard to run from the cliches of time chasing you down reminding you that your parents and grandparents were right when they pinched your cheek, pitifully cocked their head and softly spilled the truth that time really does move fast. Success is not a metric, but instead health, presence, eyes to see and ears to hear. In the popular book In Praise of Slowness Carl Honore writes, "studies show that people who feel in control of their time are more relaxed, creative and productive." Apps have turned much of life into a competitive league of perpetual window shopping through the grams, reels, and snaps of our incessant posting. In her well-written book Saving Time Jenny Odell laments that "you can shop for life itself in a virtual mall where posts about self-care and retreat come across as ads for self-care and retreat. Tap to add this to your life." No corner of our attention is spared from the incandescent glow of the best of everyone else in contrast to the dark world of my own limitations. We work harder like desperate gamblers trading in another bank of minutes from our limited supply out to the open market in hopes we will strike it big in the form of achievement knowing that it too will soon be gone. Ironically, I was at a funeral yesterday, six days prior to my daughter's wedding. A powerful paradox. A juxtaposed emotion from what soon will come. In two hours of funeraling, there was not one mention of the 89-year-olds net worth nor one accolade of the overtime that he put in. The one theme throughout the two-hour reflection was…presence. "He was there." "He was silly." "He was faithful." It used to be thought that she who dies with the most toys wins. Instead, she who boundaries her time to be available both on the court and in the margins… wins. She who makes time for breakfast with her daughter and the planned team meeting. She who makes time for exercise and budget reports. She who makes time for kids activities and sales appointmen

For many, work has become an unavoidable and sustained pot hole along the chaotic highway of our day to day that knocks the alignment from the goal of peace each of us has in life. Beckoning a variety of responses from the menu of emotions available to us throughout the day, we respond to life's potholes with entitlement and exasperation feeling betrayed when we get thrown off track. We want happiness, when truthfully, we expect a nonlinear annoyance to be the theme of our Monday through Friday. It would serve us well to contemplate a novel concept; happiness is spasmodic, temporary; joy is manufactured and intentional. Canadian psychologist Philip Brickman and American psychologist Donald Campbell coined the aptly named phrase "hedonic treadmill" in the 1980s. It is the thought that happiness is fleeting, always seeing it in the short jolts by which it comes, and yet always looking for more. The elation or misery that comes typically returns to a baseline emotion quickly. The happiness we seek in our work will under-satisfy because the treadmill of life marches on at a steady pace forcing us to continue moving on rarely allowing us to sit in those happy moments for long. Each moment ceases quickly to become embraced with gratitude in favor of being installed as a new level of expectation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warns that "these conveniences (think happy moments) by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable… men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them." In our work at Business On Purpose with heroic business owners, we've achieved a notable level of chaos-busting tools and coaching, and yet a failure that we have had since we started in 2015 is building an incentive compensation structure and coaching module that works for everyone. We have never seen more than 10-15% of employees offer a sincere and non-expectant thank you for additional compensation received (bonuses, etc.) Why? Maybe the joy of possessing them was immediately rooted out by the numbness of expecting them. Employees are hoping for a "hit" when they get the next pay bump or are lauded with the next award. It wears quickly and returns to baseline leaving us in need of more. More hits. More substance. More of something to numb the reality I feel that you cannot see… the reality that I live with internally but rarely share with you. Recently, we began asking a new question during our every-other-weekly individual check-in with team members: Can you describe a hard moment that you experienced these past two weeks, and how you found joy in that moment? We focus on joy rather than happiness because it seems that joy is a choice, where happiness is a feeling. Feelings will not sustain because we rarely control them, choices will sustain precisely because we have the option to opt-in or out. James was the son of an Israeli Construction worker who lived in a village town between Haifa on the Mediterranean and the modern Sea of Galilee. When they were older, his brother was falsely accused of a crime, and murdered in public. James himself was later beheaded because of his teaching and his body buried in Spain. What sort of teaching could be so vile that it results in a man's beheading? This is a paraphrased excerpt of a key element of James' message, "(In all things) joy… make it your in-front-of (first before any) thought". That's it. A message of actively choosing joy in front of any other response is a core part of the message that ended a notable man's life. Joy is the "willful acceptance that a situation has brought you favor" and it brings long-term value. Hard things bring testing, testing provides conditioning and endurance, that endurance reinvests into growth and fullness, and fullness counteracts the isolation of emptiness. Joy says, "I accept hard things to endure because the outcome is fullness." Our modern work environment shuns and works endlessly to mitigate difficulty. Conditioning, endurance, growth, and fullness cannot divorce themselves from quandary and perplexity. To garner the refreshment of fullness, we must walk through the pluff mud of decomposed problems. If problems did not exist, then there would be no need for your labor to solve those problems. Problems are a fundamental reason for work. Problems provide opportunity both to solve the problem and to build endurance. How do we choose joy while staring down the barrel of problems? Joy willfully accepts the problem realizing the outcome and the long-tail value that outcome of endurance and fullness. How do you rediscover joy at work? Begin by reframing problems as endurance-developing opportunities knowing that fullness is on its way leaving you spent and satisfied instead of exhausted and vexed.

Ick... that's what most Owners AND team members think when they hear the dreaded phrase, "Performance Review". To the Owner, you might as well have said, "Hey, you want to spend loads of hours preparing for an uncomfortable discussion that will be totally worthless?" To the team member, you might as well have said, "Hey, would you like for me to stick a hot poker in your ear?' Truth is that Performance Reviews are very rarely an actual review of performance and are more often than not a mis-matched reflection of previous work with no clear outcomes nor forward-facing objectives. Are they even necessary? We would like to propose a different type of review... an actual PERFORMANCE REVIEW!!! It's the same words with a completely different method and purpose. Ultimately, the Owner wants the team member to do what the business needs, to accurately assess the team member and how they are doing relative to what the customer and the business needs them to do in their role and beyond. The team members will want the question answered, "am I doing what is needed and beyond, and what can I get even better at?" We're going to make this quick because we want it to be intentionally simple. You need FIVE tools for a great culture of performance, and for reviewing the performance. In fact, these tools will not only be used on Performance Review Day but EVERY DAY! The very first tool you need for great evaluation of performance are the unique core values of your business. The values are those filters for great decision-making, and the curbs along the side of the road keeping you in bounds towards the vision. It is possible to have great performance and effort misaligned with the values which will lead the team away from the vision. Your unique core values serve as an anchor for each team member to ensure that all performance is progress-based performance that ultimately leads towards the vision. Next, each team member needs a written Job Role. If you have not already been through our module on Job Roles, please refer to that module and make sure that EVERY SINGLE team member in your business has a role, is clear on the role, is relentlessly trained on the role, and is reminded of the role. YES, all of those things I just mentioned. "But I showed them the role when they started!" Yes, and assuming that you are hiring humans, we all need to be reminded regularly...even you. The third tool needed to review great performance is a simple 12-week plan or whatever consistent goal-setting tool you use in your business. The goals you set throughout the year should be tracked for their implementation and effectiveness towards the vision. Again, refer back to our module on goal setting with the 12-week plan and IMPLEMENT! Finally, you need a repetitive series of one-to-one check-ins to reflect back on. These one-to-one check-ins should occur no less than once monthly and should include core questions such as… Where have you seen a true story this week that lives out our mission or values? What are you seeing/thinking? What blind spots do you see? What do you need from me? Here is what I see/need from you… Ask those questions sincerely and repetitively, document the responses, and that will give you excellent content when it is time to conduct your performance reviews. One more tool that will ensure that your performance reviews actually happen at a time that is valuable to you and your team members…your calendar. Go ahead and set the dates on your calendar in November of the previous year for the following year's performance review dates so there is no surprise. Here is how these tools will play out to create a Performance Review that actually works and doesn't suck the life out of your days! At least once per year, the you (or the immediate manager) will sit down with the team member during Performance Review day and walk through the performance review template; reflecting on how the team member has lived out the core values, how they have met (or not) their top 3 job role tasks, how they completed their priority goals throughout the year, and listening back in on the general themes from your no-less-than-monthly one-to-one check-ins. There is a final section in the template for you as leader to provide feedback on how the team member can grow in their role over the next 6 to 12 months. The values ensure each person is in-bounds with their performance aligned to the vision. The role ensures each person is owning the tasks needed to help the team move forward. The goals ensure that each person has a hyper-focus on any adjustments that are required throughout the year. The check-ins ensure that each person has a platform for feedback and coaching. The calendar ensures that we make the time for each of these items. By the way, any gaps in performance require YOU as the leader to take ownership of the disparity first. How will you ever coach the mindset of ownership if you are unwilling to own it yourself? There is one more tool... the mi

Multiple Bank Accounts are a nonnegotiable for a growing, thriving business. We've received a lot of pushback on this one, so let's talk about it. Business On Purpose is here to talk financials! Scott Beebe and Thomas Joyner are giving us an overview on subdividing bank accounts, whether or not the "it's so much work for my bookkeeper!" is a good enough excuse, and why P&Ls may not tell you everything you need to know. If you're wanting peace of mind around your businesses' financials: profitability, "do we have enough for taxes?" and growth planning, you need to listen to this episode! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

The irony of this training is the fact that I am writing the script while flying on a private plane from a secluded island in the Bahamas after spending 3 days spearfishing, eating, and hanging out with friends and clients. That was a moment of privilege. Spending your days with continual electricity is a privilege. If you are listening to this talk, you have privilege. Privilege is "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group". A more direct definition is to be "exempt from an obligation from which others are subject." How do you know if you are in a class of privilege? Others shoulder a burden you don't have to shoulder. It wastes our time to try and determine if we are privileged, and instead to ask "because we have privilege, what does that mean?" In the barren desert of the middle east, a man hears a message. "I will bless (privilege) you so that you can be a blessing (offer privilege to others)." This training is about the so that. When you have privilege that goal is not to consume the privilege you have, but instead to inventory the privilege, proximity yourself among those who do and don't have your privilege, and then offer privilege to others in a way that allows them to follow the same reinvestment strategies. The problem with privilege is that we tend to see it as terminal; either it stops with us (because we consume but don't re-invest, OR it stops with the direct person we share it with because they consume but don't re-invest). Brian Fikkert co-authored an aptly named and important book "When Helping Hurts" that opens our eyes to understand that when we have privilege, we want to share that privilege, and too often the privilege we share ends up doing more harm than if we would have just kept the privilege ourselves. It would help to redirect the privilege discussion back into the context of Executive Leadership and tie privilege back to our definition: proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see. Let's look at consuming and deploying privilege through three lenses of our definition. First, privilege can bring proximity. There is a template for leveraging the privilege of money to influence friendships. Of course, we are not condoning nor suggesting bribes or payoffs. Instead, you can choose to deploy your money in places that provide you proximity for connection. We were at a resort with our family, clearly a place of privilege…it was a once in a lifetime type of trip. This resort puts us in immediate proximity to people who had the same or more privilege than we had. We get to talking with some of the other vacationers and over time get the direct email of a very well-known and influential music industry executive who has put some of the greatest acts in the world on the stage. We sat and watched a World Cup match with he and his young son and developed a relationship. The inanimate tool of our money provided us with "a special right…granted or available only to a particular person or group." It is good to consistently ask, "how can the privilege I have provide proximity to bring that privilege to others, or to provide new relationships that breed new privilege." Secondly, privilege can breed motivation. When you have access to privilege you often have something someone else would like to have but is unable to attain. Think about the privilege of a well-known athlete who is willing to step down from his throne of notoriety and sincerely show up to read a book to a Kindergarten class, or visit patients at a hospital and offer encouragement. The athlete has the privilege of notoriety, influence, and voice…they offer that to those who do not and thus bring a unique motivation that might help that Kindergartner grow up to have a unique impact, or provide the motivation for the mental fight that a patient will need to conquer their disease. Privilege reinvested breeds new and novel privileges that can be perpetuated. Privilege consumed breeds bitterness, expectation, and myopic arrogance that pushes the privileged to think they are the ones responsible for their own privilege ignoring all of the investment of privilege that has been planted into their own lives. This training exists in part because we don't want you to slowly become that. You are too generous, and you are too intentional for your life to slowly devolve into arrogance and self-importance. Thirdly, privilege helps to jump the various hurdles on the way to the named future that you see. I enjoy Guy Raz' How I Built This Podcast…it is a fascinating look at the emotional inside of some of the world's most interesting businesses. Towards the end of each podcast, he asked a staple question, "Does your success have more to do with luck, or with skill?" I love the podcast, and I hate that question. Remember the old adage, "the harder I work, the luckier I get." When we have moments of momentum and success that we cannot explain we tend to call it luck. Pausing to

On the outskirts of Atlanta, we drove past the waterfall, walked through the front doors, and stepped into a world of positivity and smiles. Each delivered through a well-rehearsed cocktail of sincere stories that provided a peek into why this "chicken business" is a homebase of hope and life-change for so many. One small business is a powerful, accessible opportunity for so many teenagers and adults to engage in their community, develop relationships, solve problems, earn income, and develop powerful and usable skills. A collection of aligned small businesses, if well led and obsessively focused on vision, mission, and values, has the opportunity to scale the hope and life-change beyond one or two locations. This is the opportunity for Chick-Fil-A. Indeed, their chicken sandwich is remarkable, use of "my pleasure" noticeable, and waffle fries laced with a special serum of deliciousness - and their support of local small business is a Master's class of intentional scale. It is not lost on the Support Center staff that their primary purpose is the support of the almost 500,000 team members among the chicken-diaspora across North America (and soon to be other International markets). You cannot walk a meaningful distance in their appropriately named Support Center without confronting a well-broadcast corporate purpose, mission, unique set of values, and foundational principles. Purpose is as pervasive as a number one combo meal on a Saturday after the little league game or dance competition. Purpose is intentionally over-communicated with three distinctives that were tangible and delivered in a kind, sometimes goofy package of care as defined by competence and warmth. Truett Cathy took one restaurant and built the systems and the team to scale that one restaurant to nearly three thousand. That is good news for business owners with one location or three…with two employees or thirty. What scales up, can also scale down. There are three simple elements on display at Chick-Fil-A central for the exponential spread of culture that require the grit of an entrepreneur and the roll-your-eye goofiness most entrepreneurs struggle to hurdle. The first of these three simple elements is consistency. One task completed with consistency over a long period of time makes a mark. One task completed without consistency is a fad with little impact. Inherent within consistency is the concept of a fanatical and firm footing, a concrete base with very little movement that can be trafficked relentlessly. Faith is placed in solid things because reliability, albeit goofy, beats the in-the-moment hipster vibe of trendy unsteadiness. How can Chick-Fil-A ensure the now famed "my pleasure" is repeated millions of times daily? Relentless consistency…even when it is goofy. The second element that leads to the exponential spread of culture is amplification. Pandemics spread through amplification; genetic copies spread from carrier to carrier at high speeds with consistency. Your local municipal water system might be distributed through amplification. A series of pump stations systematically placed throughout the distribution channels of the pipes that run throughout your city or town. Each pump offers a boost to the system so that the home furthest from the source has the same pressure as the home closest to the source. Messages too spread through amplification. A small group of message carriers spread their consistent message to other carriers over and over again. That message requires the third element that leads to the exponential spread of culture…repetition. "Repetition is the mother of all learning"; a refrain my first manager would share with me…repetitively. I've heard it said, "if you are not annoying someone with your message, then you know your message is not landing." We tend to look down on repetition as non-innovative. Truthfully, our real struggle is with repetition void of meaning, warmth, sincerity, care, empathy, and intentionality. Business owners look around and wonder why the big companies are "lucky" to have great culture. At the Chick-Fil-A Support Center, consistent, amplified, and repetitive messaging is…well, consistent, amplified, and repetitive. Not requiring a degree, or the "right conditions", business owners big and small have an opportunity to rinse and repeat.

Business On Purpose Founder Scott Beebe and Director of Coaching Thomas Joyner talked about the importance of Vision. Know the answers to the following questions: ➡️ What is vision? ➡️ How does it differ from your mission and values? ➡️ Why is knowing where you're headed important and what does that do for your team? ➡️ Lack of vision from business owners, why does it matter? ➡️ Why do you think it's become cliche or stale and really lack the punch it needs to have? ➡️ Why does having accountability from a source outside of your business important? ➡️How does it get you where you need to go? WATCH THE VIDEO to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos? Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

An influential teacher was slowly traveling towards his intended destination and along the way would make time to connect in a variety of towns. As is the case for most teachers, politicians, musicians, and artists of influence, this teacher had supporters… followers. There was one controversial stop along the campaign route where the local population was more hostile to the teachers message. Argumentative conflict ensued. The supporters immediately asked the teacher's permission to antagonize and put the locals in their place. The teacher said "no". In effect, he censured his supporters. His supporters desperately wanted to control the narrative…to make the locals either like the teacher and the message that they themselves liked, or else they wanted to burn the place down. Instead, the teacher provided a model of having self-control and realizing that it is impossible to mandate conversion to any sort of message. Labor to control others and you will either get blind subjects or chaotic revolt. Live under control guided by a defined vision, mission, and values of your leadership, and you will create well-equipped and well-intentioned supporters who have self-elected into your sphere of influence, or you will get people who self-elect out of your sphere. Leading by controlling mandates that the leader be in a constant, exhaustive grind of devising new tactics of adherence. Manipulative strategy. The mission of a controlling leader morphs into a focus to find and retain a growing list of followers. The mission of an under-control leader is to equip the right willing supporter to go out and perpetuate the message. The leader who is controlling mandates and micro-manages the mandate and the method asking the right questions at the wrong times, or asking the wrong questions at the right times. The leader who is under control sets a clear and repetitive vision (what the future destination looks like), constantly reminds the supporters of the ultimate mission (why they are doing what they are doing), and guides each supporter to think independently within the agreed upon values (the guardrails) to ensure alignment on mission…even though the method may vary. In full disclosure, I tend to lean towards controlling. Controlling the narrative, the method, and the outcome. I am having to learn to set an overly clear picture of the destination (the vision), provide examples of how to get there, the guidelines for what the field of play looks like, and then extend trust to provide the freedom and latitude to allow each team member to run the plays they best think will get us to the endzone within the sidelines of the field we are playing on. There is not one play that has been run that I (the controlling leader) don't think can be run differently. A leader who is under control realizes the mechanics of the play are not important, but that the play is in bounds and moves us closer to the endzone. The controlling leader will never experience the freedom and joy of watching a team perform based on autonomy and proper equipment, but will be in a constant state of frustration because it will never be completed in the replicated method of the leader. Just because it worked "back then" doesn't mean it still works the same today. The leader who controls will be stuck in the small town trying to handle the uprising they have created through force and manipulation, and be deprived of the joy of their final destination. The leader who is under control will share their offering, identify the supporters, and keep moving towards their ultimate destination.

We recently hosted an online Masterclass on how to build your entire business on one sheet of paper. Near the end of the Masterclass, a business owner lobbed this question into the chat window, "How do you ensure, your processes aren't stolen and replicated by employees who leave?" The short answer is, "you don't." Owning a business is risky, leading people is risky, serving customers and clients is risky, and bringing your product and service into an open market is risky. What are some things you can do to ensure that others don't "steal" your proprietary process? First, legally it is always good to have each employee sign an employee agreement that has been drafted by a legal professional. Within that agreement, there can be language and clause that reflects the desire to maintain "trade secrets" and proprietary process. Some would say that the agreement is as valuable as the paper it's written on. Maybe, however, you would rather have that signed in the rare case it would need to be referenced. Second, this is all the more reason to work diligently to create a culture where each contractor and employee has bought into the mission and has a desire to add value instead of extracting value to take elsewhere. Owners cannot take for granted that a job and a paycheck are good enough reasons to be engaged, and remain engaged. The fruit of culture is a direct result of the ingredients that you put into the culture. While the vision that culture is leading towards is largely at the determination of the owner, the methods towards that vision can be a powerful way to engage the team and to build longevity with each person. We all have a desire to leave our fingerprints of value-add to anything we do. The best way to ensure that no one takes your process is to create a place they never wish to leave. Finally, although the fear is real that someone could steal your process, the likelihood of their implementation is typically low. YouTube hosts completely free content on how to do just about anything in the world. Want to build a sprinter van? It's there. Want to start a bookkeeping company? The answers are there. Truth is, our processes are actually not very proprietary. Remember, "there is nothing new under the sun." Instead, there is implementation. As Joe Calloway says, "vision without implementation is hallucination." Someone may take your process, and yet it will be hard to implement. There is no competition to a well-run business in a needy and growing marketplace. Build an unleavable culture, and you will be even more incentivized to share your process.

"Nobody wants to work anymore"...the problem is that has been said for well over 100 years now! I saw a headline all the way back to 1894 declaring that "nobody wants to work anymore". This is not a new problem. If we're not careful, our negativity will breed a culture where work is seen as… Cursed A means to an end As a lifeless 9 to 5, tryin' to make a livin' Hallucinating that it's 5 o'clock somewhere Something to "take and shove it" Just another Manic Monday Work is deeper than that, more powerful than that Work is an opportunity… Proverbs 12:11 - "A hard worker has plenty of food, but a person who chases fantasies has no sense." We say, "nobody wants to work anymore!"...when in reality they just don't want to work for you because you are grumpy! Instead, we need to build A CULTURE WHERE PEOPLE DO WISH TO DO HARD THINGS! There will always be a mountain to climb in building a culture of intentionality within your business. Business is hard…running a business is even harder. Let's stop pretending that our circumstance is unique…because business is hard, business can also be good. So what is the mountain of our time? Dr. Tim Elmore would argue that one primary element is the unprecedented generational diversity, we are experiencing because it is the number one topic that he is asked to speak on as a researcher of youth culture. How do you mix the soil of culture so that it is rich enough to handle the diversity of generational seeds being planted? How do we mix that culture so that it makes the next generation…ALL generations, excited to work? FIRST, WHAT IS CULTURE? Culture is not a business term…it is a biology term Culture is a Petri Dish: what goes in the dish is what grows out of the dish Good in…good out (give examples) Bad in…bad out (give examples) The culture of your business is a DIRECT RESULT of the ingredients that you allow to enter the mash bill. Here are 4 ingredients to mix in the cocktail of a healthy business culture that the next generation will be excited to work in… FAM Time: Team Meeting Must have a means of communication (Imagine if the underwater cables were cut between the US and Europe?) STORY: Story written by Capt. George O. Squier in an article for The National Geographic Magazine in Jan, 1901 said, "the submarine (cable) is a powerful instrument of war, more powerful, indeed, than battleships and cruisers, since by its wonderful and instantaneous, communications of thought, it brings distant countries (team members) and colonies (teams) together in sympathy, which is the only true and permanent tie." A culture that is missing the nutrient of human connection When communication is choppy, infrequent, unpredictable, or limited …you have missed opportunities and Low Morale Thought, ideas, implementation, updating process, engagement Clarity, input, teamwork The opportunity for sympathy and empathy…which is the "only true and permanent tie" When communication is repetitious, predictable, and meaningful…you have → The second thing that the next generation needs in order to work and lead? GET "LIT": Line-Item Training Every sports team, every military command has one thing in common…if they aren't playing a game or fighting battle…they are practicing and preparing for one Your vacation policy? How to properly perform an electrical walk? How to post a bid schedule? How to job cost? How to identify an ideal client? How to properly dress? When was the last time you trained your team on… Admit the "L" The hallmark leadership trait of the older generation is defined by… Stuffy Know it all A "Chotch" - someone who is unpleasant to be around Find the Spotify playlist of someone younger than you and commit to listen Eminem - lose yourself in the moment, you own it you never ever let it go Post Malone - I was patient, aye, oh, Now I can scream that we made it, Now everyone, everywhere I go, they say 'gratulations…I pick up the rock and I ball baby, I'm looking for someone to call baby, but right now I've got a situation… Start learning new things Self-deprecation goes a LOOOOOONG way among a younger culture ACTION → ask someone younger than you for their playlist, listen, and share what you heard STAN the culture calendar "Stan" - be obsessed but not in a creepy way The culture calendar is a business playsheet with scripted plays. It is simple to build and will require you to think through a few different categories. First, layout the months and dates by weeks at the top of your culture calendar. Then, on the vertical column on the left hand side you will break this down into different categories. We recommend starting with weekly, monthly, quarterly, twice-annually, and annually. In other words, what are the "business ingredients" you wish to make part of your culture each week, month, quarter, etc. You don't need to waste time and energy grumbling about how "nobody wants to work anymore". They just don't want to work for grumps…they want to give all they've got to a great culture by… FAM T

It was five days since I had called to check in on a contractor owner with no response. Finally, hoping everything was ok, I texted another check in, to his simple reply, "Honestly, when I said I work all the time I wasn't embellishing the truth. I just wrapped up another long day and headed home now." That was on a Sunday night for a business that shouldn't have much to do on the weekend. For too many business owners, the harsh reality is that the business is owning them and it may be time to sell. There are three helpful filters to flush a decision through when timing a potential sale of your business. First, do you have a desire? Desire cedes ground to opportunity that has lured many business owners down the path of "profitable distractions" - where the potential of profit distracts from what the owner desires. Ownership is hard, and owners must have a continued desire to own and lead the business in a way that others desire to follow. Second, are you at a relational impasse? Many owners are leading their business based on the expectation of generations before that this would "always be a family-run business". There is no badge awarded to the longest-running family-owned enterprise; the odds are often stacked strongly against. Each person has their own unique skill set and we should not assume that our children or kin either have the desire or the capability to run the business. It should be their dream and not yours. The third filter to use when thinking about selling is to ask, "would others lead the business better than you?" Life runs in seasons. The Byrd's (quoting the Jewish Proverbs) remind us that there is "a time to plant and a time to pluck up." Just because you have owned your business for 10 years does not mean you need to own it for 40 years. What season of life are you in? What season of life is your business in? Merge those questions with desire and relationship and you will start to focus on the value and timing of selling your business.

"Recruiting And Hiring: The 4 Systems Every Homebuilder And Remodeler Owner Needs To Build The Right People That Builds The Right Business" Thursday, February 2, 2023 Austin Build Expo by Thomas Joyner Director of Coaching Business on Purpose People, people, people! How do we find the right people to hire? How do we find ANY people to hire? The Boomers retired early, and the emerging generations are much more selective in the work they choose. How can you find the right people, recruit them the right way, share the right vision, and then onboard them the right way that aligns with the right mission? This life-changing and engaging 45-minute talk pulls from our work with hundreds of contractor owners that led to our proprietary and proven roadmap. This roadmap will equip you to beat chaos with predictability and to build the team that will build the business to make time for what matters most.

"How Homebuilding and Remodeling Owners Attract The RIGHT People Like a Division 1 College Football Powerhouse" National Association of Home Builders- International Builders' Show 2023- Las Vegas, NV Wednesday, February 1, 2023 by Scott Beebe Founder | Headcoach Business On Purpose As a Division 1 Football player in the powerful Southeastern Conference (SEC), Scott has seen firsthand the behind-the-scenes system that is being constantly updated and refined to ensure that athletically talented 16 and 17 adolescents choose the right team. Remodeler and home builder owners are in a season of work where they have a choice: see the next generation as a hindrance with excuses like "they won't work" or see this new generation as an opportunity to pivot with a renewed mindset like "I'm excited to see how they own the mission!" There is a shortage of workers for the old-school methodologies, but there is no shortage of people willing to work… toward the right mission. However, chaos creeps in, and owners feel they spend their days constantly putting out fires and cleaning up messes left by other people and resigning themselves to exhale in frustration, "It's just easier if I do this myself." This life-changing and engaging 30-minute workshop pulls from our work with hundreds of owners and gets you on the path to building a powerhouse team. You will be equipped to beat chaos with predictability and to build a business that brings stability, life, and time for what matters most.

"The Secret To Getting the Next Generation Excited To Work And Lead" National Association of Home Builders- International Builders' Show 2023- Las Vegas, NV Wednesday, February 1, 2023 by Scott Beebe Founder | Headcoach Business On Purpose We've been led to believe the myth that a good custom home-building company culture is more "luck of the draw" and less "intentional sowing and fertilizing". This eye-opening program will help to uncover what the next generation really wants and what elements lead to business health. Get clarity on the difference within the generations, how to listen and speak to your team with a compelling language, and what elements are needed for each team member to thrive day-to-day. Leave empowered with a tool that you can implement immediately, providing a clear roadmap to multi-generational engagement in the custom home-building workplace.