My Business On Purpose

"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.

What does generational diversity mean? What challenges exist when multiple generations work closely together? Learn about the solutions that you can implement to build a culture that attracts the right multi-generational team. "Navigating Gen Z & Building a Company That Attracts the Right People" National Association of Home Builders- International Builders' Show Las Vegas, NV Tuesday, January 31, 2023 Presented by: Patrice Miles Business Coach Business On Purpose

Over the course of meeting with hundreds of business owners about their coaching needs, we will be asked this question from time to time — What's the difference between a business coach vs. a business consultant? And do I need to hire one of each? Coaching and consulting are different, and there is value in both. What's the difference between a business coach vs. a business consultant While these phrases are sometimes used interchangeably in everyday conversation, this is actually a misnomer. A business coach's role (much like an athletic coach's role) is to constantly research and study the "game" of business, work to develop playbooks, roadmaps, and techniques that each business owner and key leader (players) can follow, and then show up enthusiastically and repetitiously on a predetermined schedule to create the necessary push and conditioning through accountability and implementation. A coach will push the stagnate, temper the overenthusiastic, motivate the exhausted, learn from defeat, and celebrate growth. A business coach works with the business owner and key leaders, both in season and out of season, and their outcomes are tied directly to the goals set out through long-term vision casting. For a business coach, it is more important that they study and coach the foundation of business than it is that they have specific industry knowledge. Business coaching by definition will be ingrained across all systems of the business. Of course, there are situations where a business coach may drill down into specific niches of the business, for instance, a marketing coach, or a sales coach. Business coaching tends to focus more on the accountability and implementation of long-term systems and processes, and less on short-term strategies that could change quickly. Coaching is a long-term relationship that runs through the broad scope of emotional seasons of a business. The business consultant is typically a current or retired industry-professional with decades of experience within their given field. If you own an ice cream shop, then you would hire an ice cream shop consultant. If you own a steel rigging and erecting business, then you would hire a steel rigging and erecting consultant. The business consultant tends to bring a portfolio of best practices from their industry into a specific area of your business (i.e. accounting, or operational efficiency) and then advises on how to integrate those best practices into your day to day process. Both coaches and consultants analyze existing performance and trends, the consultant compiles findings with suggested solutions, the coach creates a game plan from studying the analytics and then creates a repetitious accountability schedule to push the owner towards results. Business consulting tends to focus more on mapping out a strategy of ideas and advising on those strategies, and less on the accountability of execution. Business consultants tend to work more on a "fly-in, fly-out" contractual agreement where they come in for a defined period of time, say 6 months or 12 months for example, and then their contract is fulfilled. Business coach and a business consultant can work closely together, and both are invaluable to the growth and maturity of a business owner and their key leader(s). We've found consultants to be more prevalent in larger companies (100 employees and above), and coaches to be more prevalent in small businesses (under 100 employees). A third-party voice in your business is an irreplaceable resource that can provide you with clarity, lend you courage, and re-motivate you and your team back to the mission and vision that you once had.

Macroeconomics are complicated. Highly complex minds maneuver highly complex algorithms and data points to determine economic sea changes and tidal flows, the currents of which move entire societal habits. When the news channels report a sweeping new change or movement about this or that in the market, we are immediately programmed to assume the news piece directly affects us. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, John Elderidge released an unknowingly timely book entitled Get Your Life Back. A key concept of his writing was the practice of "benevolent detachment". Elderidge describes it this way on his blog, "Everybody has a junk drawer, that black hole for car keys, pens, paper clips, gum, all the small flotsam and jetsam that accumulates over time. Our souls accumulate stuff, too, pulling it in like a magnet. And so Augustine said we must empty ourselves of all that fills us, so that we may be filled with what we are empty of. Over time I've found no better practice to help clear out my cluttered soul than the practice of benevolent detachment. The ability to let it go, walk away—not so much physically, but emotionally, soulfully." We are presuming that a recession for the global economy, or at least your national economy, means a recession for you. You are wrong to assume that. Some of our greatest small and large businesses were launched in the midst of recession. And because much of a business's exponential growth comes during its first years, it would be silly to blindly buy into the broad narrative that recession equals bad. A recession does not mean no business by and large…instead, a recession equals less business - but not for everyone. We have clients standing on the front step of a new year with realistic projections of already-contracted business for this year that yield growth - in a recession. Following the wisdom of Augustine, "let us empty ourselves of all that fills us so we may be filled with all that we are empty of." The pandemic years lulled many to sleep and turned many salespeople into order-takers (not all of course…but many) bellied up at the bar of new business deciding what they wanted and when they wanted it. We have been emptied of hope and opportunity. We have been emptied of hustle and proactive, forward-leading customer engagement. Instead, we have filled ourselves with the infinite scroll of reactionary firefighting responding to the latest, loudest fear-screamer believing that the end of business is near. Value-added commerce, trade, and transactions have been operating for centuries throughout the litany of cultures and societies. We are microscopic players on a macroscopic world stage and it would do us well to walk outside and pay attention to the even more microscopic bird, Jesus the teacher reminded us it does not plant seeds, it does not harvest its food, it does not store its food and has all it needs. A recession provides the needed jolt to sharpen our focus, to not take for granted the work we have been invited into and built for. A recession is often the push we need to lean forward, take our mission to the right people (marketing), make a mutual commitment to serve those people (sales), and fulfill that service within the values that we have laid out (operations). A recession is also a reminder that home runs are not a winning strategy. Base hits work and base hits require repetition, predictability, and meaning - all products of thoughtful action. Recessions do not favor those bellied up at the bar taking orders at will all the while watching the breaking news merry-go-rounds fretting the what-ifs. Recessions do favor those who are sober, proactive, and willing to hit the streets – those who realize that while the weather in some locations might look cloudy and rainy, the local weather is what really matters. There might be less business overall, that might just mean more opportunity for you. Their news is not your news unless you allow it to be.

If we could boil this entire morning down to one phrase, I think it would be captured in the phrase "intentionally engaging". Intentional - done with purpose… deliberate. Engaging - charming and attractive. Patrice talked about the time, effort, and money spent in recruiting, hiring, and onboarding a new team member. I had the opportunity to work with Pfizer and was told that the onboarding of a new team member cost the company around $200k. Certainly compelling, but that is not the real reason that you don't want to lose team members. The real reason we want a cohesive team that values longevity is for the same reason that we go back to the same restaurants, revisit the same destination, pull for the same sports team, and drive the same route to work. We really do value stability, community, and "being known". Every Tuesday at our house we are humbled and honored to host a group of young men that over time has become known as "Man Up" Back in 2016, I began meeting a group of HS Freshman guys at Wendy's in Pritchardville. We would compete in silly challenges like spitball competitions, squat relays, and light matches in the restaurant. We would have some serious conversations about things they were dealing with and write some thoughts down. Over the last six years, that small group of five has grown into a group of about 10 to 20 each week, and already a group of about 15 or so who graduated a couple of years ago. That group is marked by intentional conversation, prom-dance-floor-destruction, their own vernacular and language, a plunger that serves as a sort of armour, and a flag that is made up of torn underwear from the years of wedgie initiations underneath the Lemon Island bridge in the dark. It's a group that discussed money, relationships, sex, music, career, college, parents, confusions, and life principles that are now a part of their toolbelt. They have their own language, their own grunts, their own body sounds, and their own nuances. They have a culture that is not based on money, status, or how-can-I get-more. That is what we all REALLY want. Stability, community, and "being known". And yet, what are small businesses known for? We can answer that by listening to what those same man-up guys think big businesses are known for = stability. But is that true? Have you looked around to see all of the big business laying off thousands of people at a time? Does that feel stable? Small businesses are known for instability and chaotic community. How do we build a culture that is unleavable? Pal's Sudden Service vs. Taco Bell Elements of a powerful culture… Vision Mission Values Team Meetings (Agenda-Driven, Leader Led) Team Member Check Ins Every-other-monthly Vision Days Annual Team Days Clear Org Chart and Job Roles Clear Process (MPR) Remembering important days Repetition, sincerity All the little you-isms (unique to your biz), so long as they are consistent and thoughtful I want you to use your Culture Calendar as the HUB of this next workshop time. Think of your existing team, AND your new team members. For the first 10 minutes, I want you to create as many intentional, thoughtful, whimsical, and creative ideas as you can about ways to build culture that will require more time than money. For the second 10 minutes, I want you as a team to rank order those ideas from most impactful to least… and then bake them into your culture calendar with dates and frequencies, and the process by which who/how they will be done.

The last 50 years in world history have led to influential inventions, and yet still the top four inventions are the wheel, the nail, the compass, and Gutenberg's printing press. Dutch Philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam lived in chronological proximity to the printing press and was able to expand the influence of his writing. Books were a non-negotiable for Erasmus, saying, "When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." Indeed Erasmus was reported to have little money and so fought through hunger pains for the pleasure of reading. Attributed to Mark Twain is a saying that should serve as an accountability nudge to leaders, "The (person) who does not read good books has no advantage over the (person) who can't read them." Here are three books I have read that I would challenge you to consider reading in 2023 in order to grow in fortitude. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, Will Guidara A friend and client Chris Kornman (Entablature Construction and Entablature Realty, New Orleans, La) recommended this book. Reading during a trip with my family I left a trail of dog-eared and underlined pages of thoughts and ideas. Guidara walks through how he and a team took the famed Eleven Madison Park restaurant from a nice New York City establishment and transformed it into the number one restaurant in the world according to The World's 50 Best Restaurants, along with four stars from the New York Times, and a coveted three Michelin stars. Guidara caps a simple thesis of the book with this statement, "whatever you choose to do, be in the hospitality business." The ultimate quote for busy business owners jumps off of page 116, "you don't want to have 100 keys; you win when you end up with only one - the key to the front door." From Strength To Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose In The Second Half of Life, Arthur C. Brooks If you are in your mid to late thirties or above it is time to begin reading this book. In 1995, Bob Buford published a book entitled Halftime: Moving From Success To Significance. It was good and helpful. Arthur Brooks' manifesto is deep and meaningful. Brooks confronts what he describes as the "striver's curse…a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers." Many successful business owners and key leaders build up capabilities and then feverishly work to avoid a decline in their capabilities. Brooks delivers a needed blow, a thoughtful alarm, in order to wake up the leader who is heading off into their second half of life, "Here is the reality: in practically every high-skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one's late thirties and early fifties. Sorry, I know that stings." This book invites you to prepare for a "second curve" and a reminder that "what got you to this point won't work to get you into the future - that you need to build some new strengths and skills." Brooks then devotes the rest of the book to uncovering those strengths and their rootedness in wisdom, and how those strengths will be diminished in the face of workaholism that keep you tied to the fleetingness of worldly rewards (that rust and evaporate), and your fear of decline. From Strength to Strength is an important shot of interpersonal cold water with the complimentary encouragement of a loving grandfather. A New Kind Of Diversity: Making the Different Generations on Your Team a Competitive Advantage, Dr. Tim Elmore We have culturally assumed diversity as a cross-section of race and skin color and less about the generational differences that illuminate the modern workplace. Elmore writes, "Millennials and Generation Z will make up 70 percent of the workforce by 2025. We'd better get to know them." The older generations say things like, "nobody wants to work anymore" and "the younger generation has a bad work ethic." Elmore brings a teaspoon of humility reminding us "we're the ones who gave birth to them and raised them. If they (truly) were unready for the workforce, we must look in the mirror." Owners and leaders can moan, complain, and gripe about the new workforce, or we can embrace A New Kind of Diversity. Elmore's books are loaded with heaps of helpful and digestible research that he skillfully then summarizes into implementable takeaways. A couple of weeks ago I heard of a new 23-year-old Director of Marketing at a large company. That same company has a 64-year-old Director of Estimating. That is an unprecedented span of four generations working together on one team. It will be imperative that we all put in the work to understand generational tendencies, realities, nuances, and grow multi-lingual in speaking to others the way they wish to be spoken to as we all push towards a unified end. Elmore recommends not just diversity training…but unity training. Of the books mentioned above, Business On Purpose receives no compensati

"If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment," wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky, "all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning." Peter Segars wrote the sequence to one of the great wisdom lyrics in the history of folk rock in the late 1950s that would be recorded by The Byrds in 1965 and popularized as the theme music in Forest Gump, The Simpsons, and The Wonder Years. Some have called Turn, Turn, Turn a number one hit with the oldest lyrics. Segars adapted the majority of the lyrics from the wisdom literature of the Jewish King Solomon's writings in the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes. The Segars rendition ends just shy of Solomon's powerful sequence that helps us understand the motive and the value of work. John Mark Comer in his well-reflected book Garden City says of our modern (primarily Western culture), "The American dream - which started out as this brilliant idea that everybody should have a shot at a happy life - has devolved over the years into a narcissistic desire to make as much money as possible, in as little time as possible, with as little effort as possible, so that we can get off work and go do something else." Kenny Chesney popularized a culturally Brazilian story about the fisherman and the businessman in his song The Life showing the contrast between a simple, humble fisherman's idea of success - catch enough to live that day - and the scale-at-all-costs ambition of a savvy businessman who has the roadmap to create a world-dominating fishing empire, all so we can entice his humble fisherman friend to… do exactly what he is doing today, except with far more effort and stress. We have twisted work as something equivalent to a modern curse on our humanity, something that we can widdle down to maybe 4 hours per week so that we can get on with the true desire of our hearts…leisure. Solomon, regarded as the wisest person to ever live, said this of work, "There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in his labor - this is God's gift to man." (Ecclesiastes 3:13) Have we walked astray from the original design for work? Is work really a gift? Work is a gift. A gift is "a thing given willingly without payment", and also something to be enjoyed. Imagine waking up in a position where you are simply unable to work, to move, to think, to respond, to react. We have some in our society who have not been given the capability to enjoy the gift of work. Their days are spent in a relentless cycle of managing indifference, wondering why they have been stripped of the gift of working, and only dreaming of the contribution they could make through the gift of work. We were created to work. Of the world's major monotheistic religions, there is a collective alignment that points back to an original woman and a man standing in their primitive office - a garden - tending, trimming, sowing, and harvesting…working. The Jewish have a cultural phrase Tikkun Olam, "the repair of the world". Work is an active, productive, skill-leveraging way to be in a constant state of repairing our broken world. Work builds relationships and brings value to ourselves and others. The Anglican theologian John Stott says that work is "the expenditure of energy in the service of others, which brings fulfillment to the worker, benefit to the community, and glory to God." New York City pastor Tim Keller describes work as "rearranging the raw materials of God's creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular thrive and flourish." There is a storied tale that was shared in middle eastern Jewish history of a shrewd manager who had just been sacked by his owner. The manager has one final task of employment; to go settle up any outstanding accounts on behalf of the owner. The shrewd manager begins slashing payments as a way to win favor with the customers, and shoring up relationships…building bridges using discounts and favors. At the end of the story, we are instructed, "use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends." It is a wild story and one I thought would end with a rebuff of the manager. Put more subtly, author Dan Miller says of the benefits of business and money, "I love having the opportunities that business provides, but I want to be a vehicle for being, for deep meaningful relationships, not just doing." For many, the reason we don't feel a sense of success in our work is because our definition of success is elusive. Solomon, a man who had far more than you or I will ever have, said this of confusing money with success, "Don't wear yourself out trying to get rich; restrain yourself! Riches disappear in the blink of an eye; wealth sprouts wings and flies off into the wild blue yonder." We have a success problem because we have allowed the eyes of accumulation to de

Thomas just talked about some amazing recruiting practices and you had time to put ideas on paper of how to recruit great talent. Now What? You have some resumes that look promising and you're excited that all your prayers might be answered with one of these resumes. Now it's time to start interviewing. This is the recruit's first impression of you and your organization. This sets the tone for everything from this point forward. Are you professional? Are you organized? Are you intentional? Are you mission-driven or chaos-driven? If you are professional, well organized, and intentional, then the recruit knows you mean business. They will either get scared and run or they will show up and show off for you because they want the job. Wouldn't you want to scare them off now, instead of 3 months from now when they have cost you over $10,000 to $25,000 in your time and resources, and then you have to do this recruiting, hiring and onboarding all over again? So, How are you giving the first impression to recruits of your business? You should be doing this with your 6-Step Hiring Process. Step 1 Phone Interview Do you have this mapped out with the specific questions you ask at your phone interview? Is this replicable so anyone in your organization can get on the phone and do a phone interview? Step 2 1st Live Sit Down Interview This is the time where you share vision/mission/values/culture to allow the candidate to determine if this is even the type of business they want to be a part of? Do you have this spelled out so you don't have to think when the candidate comes in for the interview. Step 3 Due Diligence (My favorite) This is where we are calling the candidate to tell them we want to move forward and we want to do personality profiling, call their references, and assign homework. Have you decided on a Personality profiling tool to use? How about calling on references? Do you have your questions written down on what questions you will ask when calling references? What homework do you have for the candidate? For a bookkeeper maybe reconcile a mock bank account, for an estimator, estimate an old job, for a marketing specialist design a logo. Step 4 2nd Live Interview preferable with other team members Here you are deep diving into the role and seeing how they act with the other team members. Again, do you have this written out and documented so you cover everything from their ideal weekly schedule to going over your MPR? Step 5 Spousal/Friend Dinner/Lunch, social In his 2011 book "EntreLeadership," Dave Ramsey recommends that companies vet spouses to make sure their hire is not "married to crazy." Dave says, "When hiring someone, you are employing more than just the person. You're taking on the whole family. And when they are married to someone who is domineering, unstable or simply full of drama, you'll end up with a team member who can't be creative, productive or excellent." Go to lunch or dinner with your candidate and their spouse to find out if crazy lives at home. Step 6 Phone call and email with Offer. Some of you are saying "Patrice we got this, we have been interviewing & hiring for years" Great then how can you systemize it and make it better so anyone can take your hiring process and run with it. Alright, your Hiring process is complete and the candidate accepted your offer Yeah!! They start on Monday and all your problems are going to be solved. Let me tell you a story, Becky. Becky sent her resume to XYZ realty as a marketing specialist. She had all the qualifications for the role and was hired. Her first day she was shown her desk, given her laptop, set up on email, and then voila! She started marketing and it was the best marketing ever done for XYZ realty. I wish!! Becky isn't her real name because honestly, I don't remember it. XYC Realtry was the Miles and Smith Real Estate Group which I owned. Becky was my new recruit. She was going to change everything for our real estate group. We would start getting more leads now then ever with a part-time marketing specialist, right! Within two weeks I was wondering what in the world she was doing. I saw a post or two on social media, but besides that….I had no clue what she was doing. I sat down with her to ask and she showed me a couple of things but nothing substantial. I asked where her marketing calendar was, where her content creator checklist was, how was she keeping track of analytics so we knew what was working and what wasn't, what about a newsletter or updating the website, I mean she is a marketing specialist she should know all these things. How many times as business owners have we said "They should know this, they did bookkeeping before, they did project management before….They should know what to do, why do I have to tell them everything? Because what is common to you is not common to them. What is common to you is not common to me. What is common to you is not ever common to your spouse or your best friend who knows you inside and out. You

It's an interesting time to hire right now, right? It's changed in so many ways because the people we are trying to hire have changed! So let's throw out a few fun facts about Gen Z, the group of people entering the workforce. Were born between the late '90s and about 2008 They are shrewd consumers that value their identity and how that is shown to the world. Whether that is through their purchases, social media, or their lifestyle choices (IE, where they work), they are carefully curated in how they present themselves Pragmatic and financially minded This is a generation that has watched their families be affected by the recessions of 08/09 and watched them take those hits. Truly driven by financial pragmatism and security. They are shaped by the financial stresses their families and communities faced during those recessions 3. Value Spectacle over substance They want a show. They want to be entertained and feel the excitement This past year, the university of Louisville got more 4 and 5-star recruits on campus than ever before because of this… They asked their high-income donors to bring sports cars, drive them onto the field and let recruits come take pictures in them and sit in them. They flew in on private jets and let the recruits climb all over them taking pictures. And it worked. They got talent on campus and were able to pitch to them on their football program. But here was the problem, they had the spectacle, but not a ton of substance. It was a flash in a pan with no championship culture to back it up. The University of Georgia spent 3.6 Million dollars on recruiting in 2021. And that's not even including the Name, Image, and Likeness money that was promised. That's just on attracting, recruiting, entertaining, and marketing to high school student-athletes and convincing them to come to play football at Georgia. Let's break that down a bit further, the average recruiting class is around 25 ppl, so you do the math…that comes out to spending $144,000 per student-athlete that signs to play at UGA. That is OUTRAGEOUS. It is an insane spectacle…but for them and schools like Alabama, there's also substance behind it. You walk the halls of their recruiting centers and there are massive pictures of their athletes that have gone on to play in the pros, there are trophy cases full of conference championships and national championships. There are detailed meetings with recruits of how they would be used on offense or defense and the plan for them when they come. Here's what they don't say. Just sign on and we got it. Just trust us, here's what we think we'll have you doing. And yet isn't that what we do? Most of our hiring and prospecting looks like this. We put out a half-hearted ad on Facebook or indeed, that's vague at best. And we cross our fingers and hope! Maybe we have an interview process, but not a recruiting process. There's very little spectacle and if that's what Gen Z is looking for, we are simply missing the boat. And if we're missing the boat, then we're missing the talent that could be added to our teams. Here's where I've seen that recently. With Ward Edwards engineering. They dared to ask, "What is something we could add to a new engineering grad, that no one else is doing?" We sat down and talked it through, even went to some of their staff and asked them what some of their frustrations were upon graduation and they came up with this. There's no plan for an engineer that's hired. It's just come on board and do engineering and we'll eventually get you where you need to be. And here's where Allen and Greg and their team took this. They built out a plan to go from Designer, kind of the entry-level position to Professional engineer in 4 years. To actually getting your certification and being ready to be a project manager in 4 years. Now to some of you that sound like eternity, but to an engineer that is unheard of. To look a grad in the eyes and show them the plan and how you're going to get there, puts substance behind the spectacle. For us, it was knowing that we want to hire 8 new coaches in the next 3 years. So we have to have a training plan in place. SO it was recording almost 50 videos of how to coach and our mindset and practical tips on working through our roadmap and coaching clients and prospecting and selling. All of it! And then beyond that scheduling out a mentor coach to work with them and putting times on the calendar to get them going and offer support. It's not all fluff! There's substance and intentionality every step of the way. So here's what I want you to hear. People no longer show up just to receive a paycheck. The game has changed. How can we start thinking about recruiting like a D1 College football team as they chase after new talent? So here's what we're going to do. We're going to workshop some stuff with your team. If you're one of the younger ones on the team, here's where we will lean on your wisdom…YES your wisdom. Dr. Tim Elmore calls it "reverse-mentoring".

Remember the days where windows showed up like clockwork in 3 days? Chemical arrived the next day? Subcontractors called you back? Schedules held true? Material budgeting was straightforward? Clients had empathy, patience, and treated you as the expert? Remember the days when your biggest headache was, "how do we find new business?" The British playwright Michael McMillan said, "You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one." As you come into this final 12-Week Plan LIVE event of 2022…this final opportunity to think deeply through the new challenges you will confront, the new mountains you will climb, the new opportunities you will pursue… you have a choice. Let me rephrase, you have to make a choice. Will you gripe, moan and mope about those mean clients, those non-committal subs or vendors, those irritating shipping delays, or those increased prices? Or will you cut the strings of excuses, limitations, and barriers, and be free from the sludge and the mud of what Zig Ziglar calls "stinkin' thinkin'". We are in a cesspool of negativity right now. I hate my job, I hate my town, I hate the people I work with, I hate the government, this head coach, that team, this policy, that country and on and on. It reminds me of George Strait's song "I hate everything". We are not called to falter and we are not called to fade…we have been called and built to FLOURISH! To flourish, we must intentionally control our mindset. And in order to flourish in 2023 we are going to have to rid ourselves of stinkin' thinkin' and embrace a new attitude of Fortitude: the ability to display courage in pain, to go into new opportunities with a mindset of strength, believing we CAN do something rather than swimming in the cesspool of "can't". Mrs. Jones is being an email bully? We CAN learn to speak to her with truth and thoughtfulness. Your partner, sub, or vendor is not pulling their weight? We CAN influence and bring value to their operation in a way that serves everyone around. Tough conversation needs to be had with team members? We CAN plan conversation in an appropriate way that brings value to everyone…a Win/Win mindset. Hard-pressed to find new team members? We CAN build a thoughtful, powerful, spectacular recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process that WOW's recruits and supplies them with a substantive opportunity. We CAN do those things…but not with our current attitudes. Never in the history of the American workforce have four separate generations worked so closely and communicated so seamlessly than what is happening right now. You have Boomers who are remaining in the workforce longer, and Gen Z'ers who are entering into higher-level roles earlier. The Boomers, X'ers, Millennials, and Z'ers are interacting everyday. It's like a cocktail of Dockers pleats, meets peglegs, meets skinny pants, and now everyone is confused. You can throw your hands up and protect your generational brand…OR you can make a decision to ignore the stinkin' thinkin' and embrace the generational diversity, and the value that comes with. The values of new generations are in the questions they ask of our institutions, our methods, our systems, our policies, our norms and nuances. The value of older generations are in the standards they hold for their work product. There is exponential value in merging those two schools of thought. Stinkin' Thinkin' creeps in and will corrupt all of it so that very little of the cross-generational value is pulled out and instead we spend our days griping, moaning, and moping. We grumble about the Karen's, and take pot shots at the bro's. There is a better way! A more HUMAN way. We live in a world where some, seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time Acknowledging Mental Health realities AND Leading with Perseverance Flexibility AND Budget LImitations Owners can Listen AND Steward the business Key Leaders can Listen AND Steward the role Grace AND Truth AND Past AND Present AND Future Now AND Later Each of us comes into this room with convictions, norms, and beliefs. I challenge you to question your convictions. If your convictions are too weak to withstand questioning…then your convictions are not foundations by which you have confidence to stand. Let's build and reinforce a new belief, a new conviction…a belief that hard things CAN be done, rocky decisions CAN be navigated, and they will lead to powerful outcomes that will bring the satisfaction we desire. The generational realities in our modern workplace will challenge us and will be a massive growth opportunity for all of us to retire our stinkin' thinkin'. What are some of the ingredients for this needed mindset? Generational Nuance is real…your language must shift The new world wants a show, embrace it…we are no longer analogue and text…we are iconic (Workshop 1) The substance of Process Clarity and Repetition will be the winning currency…write it down and plan for it (Workshop 2) Consume a steady diet of "Implement

We are 6 weeks from the end of the year. What does your team need to hear from you as you finish it out? Well, let's talk about that today. Happy Monday y'all, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. We spent hours last week running what we call Prep Week with every one of our clients. Making sure they were focused on the things that matter heading into 2023! We got all kinds of feedback, from "Yes, we needed that." to "It's so crazy, it's already time for these discussions," to even "Man, I'm really excited for next year!" And all of those statements are true. What we've realized is if we don't plan intentional time in the year for some of these conversations, they sneak up on us and they get rushed or worse, never happen. The same can be said for your Annual letter. Many times, we realize we're two weeks out from the end of the year, so we rush it and lose much of its impact. We write down a few thoughts that have little meaning, print it out, sign our name at the bottom and send it out. But that's such a miss! It falls far, far short of what your Annual letter could be. So, I want to walk you through 3 reasons to write a killer year-end or annual letter to your team and maybe offer a few tips for how to make it have an impact. Your team needs to hear from you It's simple. Your team AND YOU work too hard to not know whether the year was a success or not. They need to hear what you thought of the year and hear it in your voice! Not some quick, thrown together thing, but a well thought out analysis of how much we accomplished this year. It's powerful when you read it aloud to them and can celebrate together. If there's one thing I think we don't do enough of, it's collective celebration. Pausing to focus on the gain we have made and all the hard work that was put in to that. Thanking them for all they did to accomplish it and maybe even acknowledging the major hurdles y'all had to overcome. This helps build a team that craves growth because they know it will be celebrated and not just accepted. Which brings me to my second reason why: 2. Your team needs to know you see the hard work they put in Use this as an excuse to brag on each person individually. Have 17 people on your team? Tough! That's why you're starting this now. Take a sentence or two to acknowledge each of their individual efforts, brag on them a bit, and make sure you are specific. They work hard all year long, now is the time you get to show them that you saw them. That you saw their contribution and are grateful for it. If you have 5 people, spend a paragraph on them! This is such a crucial part of building a culture of recognition and accountability. Because if people are never going to get recognized, I don't care how motivated they start out, they will naturally wane in enthusiasm if it's never recognized. But what better way to encourage your team at the end of the year than to brag on them in front of everyone? And if you have that one employee that this is REALLY tough to find something to brag on them about. Do it anyway. They still deserve it. Take your time and be genuine and show encouragement. I promise it will build loyalty and a positive culture. 3. It becomes an amazing Chronicle of your business journey It's so fun going back and reading annual letters from years past. You can tell where you've been and it's so fun to see the dreams you had, the dreams you accomplished, the battles you were fighting and are no longer fighting, the growth, and the journey. It's amazing to see it and you get to be the one who shares it with your team! Don't skip it. So, if you're one who wants to write a quick email to the team thanking them for the year I would REALLY push back. Spend an hour, shoot or more, writing this thing and making it really impactful for your business. Then let it sit for a week, come back and read it and see if it's missing anything. Then print it out, write a small handwritten piece to each employee and then read it aloud at a team meeting or Christmas party. This is a powerful tool if you will take the time to use it and take the time to put some thought into it. If you need a few examples, please reach out! I'd be happy to send you some examples. And the last thing I'll say is this. If you're a podcast lurker…just listens and knows you need to take action on some of this or begin working with a coach, now is the time. Nothing changed between last Thanksgiving and this one, and unfortunately, you know it! There's no shame! But there is a different way to do it. Maybe start by taking our healthy business owner's assessment to see where you stack up. Go right now to boproadmap.com/healthy and take 5-6 min to take it. And reach out! We wake up every morning to liberate business owners from chaos and we want to work with you. Alright, that's it for today! Have a great Thanksgiving!

You don't have to be a college football fan to understand this story, and yet it would help to understand that college football in the southeastern United States is akin to cricket in India, premier football in England, Formula 1 in Italy, and the carnival in Brazil. We barter, bet, scream, yell, curse, fret, cheer, cry, and hug strangers all in the course of a four-hour window on any given Saturday in the fall. Betting college sports, television rights, and now the newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules have driven revenue in college sports to levels unthinkable just ten years ago. I was able to play football at the University of South Carolina back in the 1990s when assistant coaches barely scratched a living, and graduate assistants took a joyful vow of poverty. All this sacrifice for the privilege of sleeping on cots at the stadium due to the hours required in hopes for a winning season and a chance to continue playing at one of a very few bowl games around the country. It is not the same game. Money has skyrocketed, bowls are ubiquitous. The collective tolerance for losing has an inhumanely short attention span. Our school has compensated its last coach a reported lump sum payout of $12.9 million to not coach. "Who?" was the first question for many South Carolina Gamecock fans when the list of top head coaching contenders emerged in late 2020. Coach Shane Beamer emerged as the victor. A unique, quirky assistant coach at Oklahoma who had never been a coordinator, won the job and the hearts of the South Carolina Gamecock fans. How? Beamer's strategy for leadership can thoughtfully be described in four words that you see and hear around the program and the fan base: love, joy, family, and home. For years, college football was dominated by gruff, macho, bull-headed tough guys who were famous for intentionally making things tougher than they needed to be in order to mentally fire up their players to perform over their skis and bring home a win. During my tenure at South Carolina, we played the Bulldogs of Mississippi State University each year. Jackie Sherrell was their head coach who in 1992, in an effort to "educate and motivate" his team before playing the Texas Longhorns, had a bull castrated live in front of his team. That ship of that leadership style has sailed and a new form, and dare I say a more humane method, of leadership is emerging. The old guard might think this new leadership is "soft" or "weak". Instead, this counter-intuitive leadership is thoughtful, intentional, human, and engaging. Beamer has displayed three themes and manifestations of this leadership style that connects with generation Z and motivates them to play on the biggest stages. Intentionality After each game coach Shane Beamer is ushered to a press conference where, like every other coach in college football, he is questioned and pushed. If you listen carefully, you will hear coach Beamer call many of the reporters by their first name, and share some inside bit of information that clearly communicates, "I have a relationship with you beyond your general questioning here." It is subtle, it is intentional, and it breaks down tension. The most powerful word on the planet to each person is the sound of their own name; not a soundbite, not a zinging one-liner…just Steve, or Hannah, or Clare. Emotional Communication Attend a South Carolina football game at night and you will be treated to a four-hour spectacle of intentionality, targeted communication, and repetition. It is a four-hour sandstorm that is part dance party, community-involved recruiting video, campaign messaging, and football. The communication is emotionally charged, but not unbelievable. It is messaged in a way where "welcome home" means "I see you, I am grateful for you, you matter, and you can be anywhere else, but you came here…so we're going to make you feel special, win or lose." You will not have to look deep in the archives of Gamecock Football media to find a clip of Coach Beamer choking up words in reference to his family, players, fans, or any topic that he is able to find meaning in. Beamer allows himself to show frustration (especially to poorly called penalties), and to display breakdown emotion. When they play poorly he does not hide it. When they play well, even in the midst of playing poorly, he does not hide it. He displays joy and pain, in full measure. Hiding emotion is no longer a sign of strength to a younger generation and instead leads to confusion and higher levels of anxiety. Human vulnerability is a powerful relationship currency. We have mastered the art of hiding wounds, pains, and cuts leading us to massive storage reserves of unreleased anxiety and mental health challenges. College football players and coaches standing on a brightly lit stage are no different. Stardom and money rank among the worst prescriptions for an anxious mind. Repetition For much of the 2022 season, the offensive staff and players have been forced to l

I spent some time last week with a local business that had just finished redoing their core values. They spent a ton of time getting them right and a question came up. How do Core Values start to trickle down and truly affect your business? Well, let's talk about that today! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. What does taking the next step with those look like? How do we incorporate those into everything we do? They should inform every decision we make and every task we complete Does it push us towards Healthy Culture, Excellence in Design, or Healthy relationships? I want to talk for a few minutes about why all of this matters. Like why can't I just come in and work hard and that be good enough. And yet I would argue that following these core values leads 100% of the time to being a great at whatever you do. Can you do it without your values, yes, maybe… but if we lean into a healthy culture, excellence in design, and healthy relationships both internally and externally, it leads to a quality product every time! And…a quality experience, which is just as important. Not sure if you have ever heard of Pal's Sudden Service? Pal's is a local fast food restaurant to Johnson City, TN. 30 locations all across Eastern Tennessee. They keep it as simple as it needs to be. Burgers, hot dogs, fries and milkshakes. And here are their core values: -Delight customers in a way that creates loyalty -Daily excellence in products and service -Exceptional value -Training for ALL employees Here's where that shows itself. They time each customer as they come into the drive-thru and on average a customer spends 18 seconds at the order window and 12 seconds at the pickup window!!! No wonder customers are loyal. You would think they make a lot of mistakes going that fast, nope! With their core value of daily excellence in products and service they just finished a study that they make a mistake on an order 1 out of 3600 orders!!! Unreal So they are fast, they are accurate…nailing the first two core values and it leads to exceptional value for their customers. Lastly,, training for ALL employees. New employees get 120 hours of training…120 hours…before being allowed to work on their own. Grilling burgers, mixing shakes, taking orders…everything. Then, every day, every shift…their computer generates the names of 2-4 employees who take a quick quiz…if they pass, they go right back to work, if they fail…it's back to training and retraining to improve their knowledge. YOu may look at that and say…gah that's overkill. I mean it's fast food, does anyone even notice that? Couldn't you say the same about the technical side of your job…fill in the blank. Will anyone notice if we do that well? Well, they did a study…again and their average customer comes to Pals 4x more than the average McDonalds customer. That's a loyal following. That's the culture and the impact you should hope to create. The CEO was interviewed about all of this training and the way they do things and they asked him…120 hours of training, aren't you nervous that you're going to spend all of that time training and your employee is going to just leave? And his response was as good as gold. He looked back at them and said, "No, not really. I guess the way we look at it is, what if we don't train them and they stay?" That's where Core Values have sunk in so far that they touch every part of the organization. Because they know they must Delight their customers and create loyalty, they must have excellent products and service, they must create exceptional value and they must accomplish all of that through exhaustive training. That ensures that the main thing stays the main thing! So…if you wrote down your Core Values, could you point to practical ways that they are implemented, and do you spend an adequate amount of time on each to make sure they show up with your team every day? I'd wager no. Do…it matters…people notice. Alright y'all, that's all I have today! Take a few moments today to write down each of your values, ask the team if they know them and be honest about whether they are priorities for you or just cute little billboard quotes that have zero impact.

The priority of our work is to liberate business owners from chaos, and most of those business owners have between 2 and 50 employees. We get the question often, "are we in a recession?" Our response is usually the same, "does it matter?" Seriously, in your day to day life does it matter? Over the last two years, I have watched some moments of real irony. We obsess over downturns in the market, a decline in business, and recessions or depressions. Just last week, anyone who had money invested in the crypto-currency exchange FTX (some reports put that figure around $1.8 Bn) lost it all. $1.8 billion…poof. Was that a product of a recession, or recession like market movements? No. It was a problem of poor management and leadership. Throughout 2020 and 2021 the market was red-lining at high RPMs and many businesses had converted their business development and outbound sales departments into order takers trying to handle the inbound demand from a flood of cash pumped into the market now being spent on new homes, background kitchens, boats, and cars. Business owners were pulling their hair out as they tried to manage customer expectations, a volatile supply chain, and prices that had the discipline and direction of a squirrel. Now the outcry is, "what if we lose all of this work?" We have switched one cry to another rather than quietly leading through a boom and quietly leading through a bust. We do not individually influence macroeconomics, but we can certainly lead well within the economic climate we've been given, whether cloudy or sunny. Here are 9 elements you can implement to lead well during the boom or the bust so you will stop asking the question, "is a recession coming?" First, write your vision down so those who read it may run. A written vision story compels, clarifies, guides, and motivates. A business without a vision is like a ship without a compass and that is somewhere no one wishes to be. Second, write an annual letter to your business team. Reflect back on the year that has passed, and project on the year to come. What have you seen and what do you see? Write it down to share, and write it down to keep a history of how you and your business handled like-situations in the past. Third, build a calendar exclusive to the culture you wish to create. Culture is not accidental, and good culture does not follow those with luck. Solid culture is built through intentionality, repetition, and predetermined meaning. What do you want your culture to be? The ingredients of that culture will need to be planted intentionally and thoughtfully throughout the year. Fourth, subdivide your cash. Every dollar that comes into your business is not your dollar. Some of that dollar is for your business, or for you, and some of that dollar is intended for other destinations (i.e. taxes, vendors, fixed expenses, etc.). Open up multiple bank accounts that will house the major payouts from your business so you can subdivide every dollar as it comes in right away. The fifth element to help you lead predictably through boom or bust is a simple cash tracking spreadsheet. Every week, go review your actual cash balance and record it sequentially on the same spreadsheet so you can watch your cash. A winning strategy in any market is to always have a bucket of cash to pull from. You won't have cash if you don't watch your cash. This does not give us license to obsess over cash and hoard it. Our financial warehouse should have a receiving department and a shipping department, an in and an out. Sixth, a well-led business has a simple budget. Thoughtfully review the prior year's profit and loss statements with its chart of accounts, and think through where future income should be spent to best align with the mission and vision of the business. Seventh, a well-led business should have basic estate planning to provide clarity to heirs in the event of a surprise. Do you have written operating agreements, employee agreements, wills, powers of attorney, or trusts if needed? Sitting down with a qualified estate planning attorney is a gift to the business and to your family. Eighth, insurance should be reviewed and mapped out as well to insure sound coverage. Finally, a well-run business is being led by an owner who has thoughtfully walked through their own personal finances. What income is needed? What desires and goals do we have? What income is needed for those desires and goals? An owner who has little discipline over her personal finances, is likely to have little discipline over the finances of the business. Booming economies in many ways can actually exacerbate bad financial discipline allowing a business to grow habitually accustomed to overspending and underpaying. Let's stop living within the anxiety of an emerging recession, or not, and instead commit to solid leadership, and build a better boat that can handle both a placid lake, or a raging sea.

Believe it or not, every time a customer does business with you they come in with expectations both spoken and unspoken. So, how do we manage those and shape those to match what we have to offer? Well, let's talk about that today! Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose. Last week, my wife found a deal online. $79 bucks for your first visit. Introductory offer, book here. She ended up calling the office to make an appointment and was so excited to go. She sat down, went through the full experience, and absolutely loved it! About halfway through, the receptionist came over and brought her bill. $240!!! She immediately texted me and was pretty bummed. I told her to just show them the intro web page and ask about it. "Oh, that's an old promotion. Sorry about that." And that was it. No one told her as she was running up a bill more than 3 times what she expected. Nope, just added to it and didn't even flinch. After her having a short conversation with the receptionist, they lowered it to $200 and she left. But here's the frustrating part. The service was amazing. Probably worth every bit of the 200 bucks she paid. The place was clean, the service amazing, the staff friendly…and yet because she walked in with an incredibly different expectation for price, she left with a bad taste in her mouth and unable to recommend the place or really want to go back. It felt like a bait and switch. And to this day, the promotion is still up online… further adding to the belief that it's a bait and switch. Let me flip over to the other side of the equation. The Savannah Bananas minor league baseball team. The first time I went I was a little shocked at how much tickets cost. I'm used to paying 10 bucks or so for minor league night with the Charleston River dogs. I noticed that the price was a good bit higher, starting around 25 bucks, so I was curious if it would be worth it. From the moment we stepped foot at the stadium, we were entertained. High-fived, laughed, high energy, all the food and drink you could want all included, not wanting to miss a minute of the action. We left feeling like we would have paid double the price for what we got and the actual product far exceeded what we knew we were going to pay. See the difference? So, if you were to look at your marketing and sales…where do you fail to live up to the expectations? Maybe you need to start by simply writing down the expectations your customers arrive with. And then one by one walking through them and addressing them. If it's timely service, how can you meet or exceed that? If it's value pricing (if that's your goal), how can you be upfront about that to exceed the customers expectations? Maybe it's being innovative and providing new solutions… how do you stack up? Maybe it's having a team that is friendly and joyful? Send some surveys out to customers to find out how you stack up or call up someone you do business with, take them to lunch, and just ask. They will tell you! Because here's the thing… this goes for relationships, dating, business, everything! Discontentment is a direct result of unmet expectations! But if you learn to manage and understand and exceed expectations, or set them appropriately ahead of time…you will create raving fans in your business with long-term relationships where customers come back time and time again. The opposite, of not knowing what expectations are out there or maybe even manipulating them to get people in the door is shortsighted at best and a horrible business model. There's a word that one of my mentors walked me through years ago. Congruence…it's this thought that what's on the outside matches what's on the inside. I think we spend too much time trying to hide one or the other instead of matching the two up and being who we say we are and showing who we say we are. Once we learn to set appropriate expectations and deliver or exceed those expectations, we can finally be a business that will get referred by everyone we do business with. So sit down today, create a list of expectations our clients have, and see where we stack up! Do it! Put in the time and see where you land. Thanks!

Bob Roberts is a larger-than-life Baptist Preacher turned global engagement pioneer and independent global diplomat whose best friends are with people far outside of his own East Texas tribe. Bob began mentoring me two decades ago with his words, his actions, and his time. I'll never forget the day he drove me to Barnes and Noble in the mid-cities of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and loaded me up with what today are foundational books in my personal library. Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat were two of the books that he bought for me (still two of my top 5 all-time reads). There were a couple of nuanced books that threw me off; a book from Henri Nouwen and another about the now renowned Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh. Perplexed, I dove into the books on global engagement as they spoke to my inner desire for circumnavigate-able adventure. Nouwen and van Gogh would wait. Twenty years later I picked up a book entitled Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent Van Gogh, that then led me to another Nouwen title The Way Of The Heart. We are asked frequently by business owners, "why do I feel like I work day and night and yet get nothing done?" Nouwen makes reference to a "wordy world" that we inhabit and then lobs this thought, "we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say, or do are worth thinking, saying, or doing." Van Gogh is said to have been largely unrecognized while alive except among those who knew him and his tight circle of outcasts. Although, van Gogh had long sense passed when Nouwen was alive, Nouwen wanted to understand van Gogh's relentless pursuit of a compassionate life… a life that compelled him to shed ministerial garb for the poverty-stained garments and conditions of Dutch peasants. Nouwen built a relationship with Dr. Vincent Van Gogh, the artist's nephew who was key in the realization of the museum that bears his last name in Amsterdam. Carol Berry writes in Learning, "Henri asked (Dr. Van Gogh) why so many people flocked daily by the thousands to look at his uncle's paintings. What was it about Vincent that touched a chord that resonated deeply within us? Henri related Dr. Van Gogh's answer: 'Because people feel comforted and consoled. Vincent was able to crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful, something beautiful, something joyful, and something worth seeing. He was able to draw out the inner secret of what he saw.'" Here is the question for us as business owners. How was Bob able to make the time to take me to a bookstore two decades ago and plant powerful seeds of books that would circle back to make influence twenty years later? How was Carol Berry able to share wisdom and insight from two major influencers of human compassion from the academic world and the art world? How was van Gogh able to "crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful?" Each one made a singular decision; ignore the other things they could have done and commit to the important things that require their uniqueness and imagination. Skye Jethani writes in his book The Divine Commodity that van Gogh, "warned other artists, 'Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.'" Put another way, do not become a slave to monotonous distraction. Jethani goes on to say, "we've been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos…and where there is no exterior noise we feverishly work to produce it." When we submit ourselves to constant distraction, to the latest, loudest voice, or worse, when we manufacture our own distraction, we are selling our soul, our creativity, our narrow brilliance for the empty currency of non-caloric entertainment that will need to be refreshed and even more outrageous in an hour. How do we limit distractions? Begin practicing solitude. Isolation is not solitude. Nouwen describes solitude as "the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self…solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born." You will not find solitude, you must make…make time, make place, make opportunity to sit and be confronted with imagination, with thought, with anger, frustration, joy, and excitement. Without seeing those things, we cannot experience those things. For some of you business has become a tired, repetitive cycle moving from frustration to frustration. You have become the slave to your model and the freshness of your dreams and imagination have died. Distraction is not just robbing productivity…it is robbing your soul. Might I suggest you make time to walk into a bookstore and find a book on Van Gogh and just stare at the pictures for a while, and may

If you are comparing your 2022 to 2020 and 2021 you may want to pause. Standing here at the early sunset hours of 2022 we are feeling a very real metaphor. It goes like this. During 2020 and 2021 many of our businesses were barreling down the business highway at 90 mph winding hot at 10,000 RPMs. Today, it already feels like a massive slowdown, and it has been. Let's not lose perspective, though… instead of going from 90 mph to 0…we are now riding down the highway at a more sustainable, more comfortable pace of 70 mph, and the good news is that we are only running at 5,000 RPMs. In other words, it is taking far less effort to go just a little bit slower and start to get some breathing room. The problem is that our human minds have grown accustomed to the speed, breathlessness, chaos, and cash flow of the past two years and we don't know how to mentally or emotionally throttle our expectations, let alone our spending habits. New norms have emerged over the past two years; pricing volatility, material, and logistics inconsistencies, marketing and sales simplicities, and probably the most noticeable internally is that your employees want more money for the same roles and while demanding more flexibility and meaning. Employees want their business life to fuel their personal lives, and not the other way around. Historically, business owners have tried to solve headaches by shooting one particular shiny bullet…sales, sales, sales. If we could just get more work then we would have more cash to pay higher fees, higher premiums, higher wages, higher demands, and higher expectations. That is an infinite and empty treadmill leading to the same destination over and over. I am going to walk you through the four steps you need to take to navigate your business in 2023 in a powerful way. The first step in building your business plan for 2023 is making time to fill out your Vision Story. In 2023, where vision is not written down, people will indeed scatter, and that scattering of people will further scatter your mind and thoughts into a web of frustration. Instead, follow the ancient Jewish wisdom that says, "write the vision down so that those who read it may run." Vision is clarifying and vision is separating. When you cast vision you know who is bought in and who is not. Some will run towards your vision and some away from your vision. You will be tempted to scoot on past writing your vision down and instead make up some silly excuse in your head that either, "I don't need this" or "oh yeah, we've got something like that". We've made crafting your vision simple. Seven categories to begin working through, and you will likely need to make about an hour or so of time for this powerful and important exercise. Notice I said the word exercise… it's work and it's healthy. Term/Time Family/Freedom Financial Product/Service Team Client Culture The second necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the sobering Delegation Roadmap. Andrew Carnegie said, "No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit." John Maxwell said, "If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate." Discovering delegation will make time for what matters most in three ways: It Empowers others to put out the fires It transfers your authority to them It multiplies your effort The moment that you stop delegating, or choose to not delegate and empower is the moment that you have chosen to have a job instead of owning a business. The third necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the non-negotiable Weekly Schedule. You feel busy but not productive because you have little to no boundaries. I recently heard Lance Golinghorst articulate that we all have access to three major scarce resources: time, energy, and attention. Attention is indivisible. It is well-researched that multitasking doesn't work. As I am writing and reading this, I should not be brushing my teeth or checking my bank balance. Energy is renewable (I can generate more energy), and transferable (I can give you energy and you can give me energy). The real wake-up call is in regard to our time. Time is non-renewable (we cannot make more of it), and it is not transferable (you cannot give yours to me). You go into each week with a defined, finite allotment of time. Either you put boundaries throughout your day roping off all of the tasks and responsibilities, or we will do it for you. If you do it, it allows you to maximize your scarce resources of time, energy, and attention. If we do it for you, then we will devour your time, energy, and attention. You can make excuses as to why it won't work in the specific role you are in. We love you, but your role is not a special unicorn or snowflake. Own your role by owning the boundaries for your role and then share those boundaries with us so we can support you. Finally, for a robust 2023 business plan, you

Amidst the chaos of a recession, there are many who see opportunity and possibility tucked away in a larger population that submits blindly to doom and gloom. We have always had a few business owners in the past with a desire to expand into new markets, and yet the drumbeat of expansion is ironically higher now in a tough, recession-bent market. These are trade contractors who are realizing that the purpose, people, process, and profit they have built has positioned their business in a place of strength while other like-businesses are suffering under the weight of volatile cash flow. Growing markets need to have the same care and attention as growing new agricultural fields. When left to grow without curation, a business can look like a garden that has grown past its boundaries. Our town right now is a bazaar example of this. Its population has grown at race car speeds and yet the town services divisions are struggling to keep up. Much of our physical landscape was designed to be beautiful and boundaries. Due to the struggle of keeping up, the vegetation has started spilling out over the borders onto the streets and looking a bit more haggard; it is unkept. That's how a business feels when uncontrolled and undisciplined growth occurs. It is growth, but not all growth is healthy. I once cut back a shrub that had grown far too large and was left with nothing but a brown stem because the growth required larger and larger support until the fruit of that support was gone. What was left was the support structure (management), with no fruit (revenue). Good growth requires thoughtful planning. Thoughtful planning required clarity and boundaries. Here are five steps all business owners can take to filter growth to determine expansion into new markets. First, you must have a sincere desire to grow. Skill or demand without desire is like a vehicle with no fuel…the vehicle is capable, the road is inviting, but there is no gas in the tank to make it move. Growth demands time, effort, energy, and forward motion. Ideas are fun but low on action. Action is long-term and sustained. The good news is that you now have an idea of the effort required to expand due to the time and effort put into the initial growth of the business. As you grow, you will likely require more people. Do you have that desire? Second, you will want to have demonstrated and tracked measurables of your existing business so you have objective numbers to run pro formas and forecasts. Again, since you have already started and grown your existing business, take the numbers that business has already provided and apply those numbers to a new potential market, and then run scenarios from those numbers that are higher and lower. Do not waste the knowledge that you have worked so hard to gain and settle for, "well, we'll just figure it out." That mindset will drain desire quickly. The third step in expansion is to create a replicable roadmap for expansion. Looking in the mirror on the business that you have already launched, what were the non-negotiable steps that you have learned to take that will apply to expansion? What is the ideal location? Who is the ideal client or customer? What makes an ideal team member and how have we trained them successfully? What is the culture we are birthing this new expansion out of, and how will that culture fall in line with what currently exists? Many of the businesses that we have coached through expansion have resulted in a simple spreadsheet checklist of items that each new expansion would need. Next, to expand you must identify persons-of-peace. Who are those connections within the community you wish to expand to who identify with your mission and are connected to your ideal clients? Every location has a minority of the population who will turn out to be raving supporters of your mission. In order to buy in and herald your mission though, you must have abundant clarity of that mission and be ready to share the mission in a succinct way along with a simple value proposition answering who you help, what you do to help, how that help is delivered, and what the result of your help will be. A fifth element to evaluate when expanding into new markets is to find out if there is already someone there that you could acquire that would love to come in line with your mission and your culture. There are thousands in the business owner community who have the technical skill, the demand, and the desire, but they have always struggled to run a business focused on purpose, people, process, and profit. Your expansion could be the very opportunity they are looking for to do their work in a meaningful and fulfilling way, but not have the burden of business ownership. Your running a business on purpose is an attractive hope for many who run a business void of purpose. Expansion is a natural, exciting prospect when methodically and thoughtfully worked through with an open hand and mind, and an eye on the ultimate vision of your business.

It's October! As crazy as that sounds. And I'm curious…when was the last time you looked at the goals you set at the beginning of the year? Have you looked at them yet? Or are they collecting dust somewhere, or worse…did you even write them down? Let's talk a bit about that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. Thanks so much for joining today. I was sitting in a coaching meeting with some clients the other day and they were a bit dejected. Felt like they were stuck. "We're not making any progress!" they said. "We've been trying to move forward on just keep fighting the same battles." "Well, let's look at that." Here's the best part. At BoP we do 12 week goals…small bite sized 12 week plans to keep the business moving forward. Instead of spinning your wheels for a year or more, you can stay on course and refocus every 12 weeks. So, we pulled up their 12 week plan. We had 3 goals written down with a minimum of 10 action steps to accomplish each. As we walked down their list of goals, they realized they had made tons of progress! They were over 50% there for each of their goals! They just had to refocus, realize that they were not, in fact, stuck, and recommit to the action items they had written down. They left the office the other day realizing that they were doing the things that mattered. They were held accountable to a plan and were able to continue checking things off as they moved towards 3 goals that would transform their business by the end of the year. So, back to you. What goals did you write down? Where are they? How do you track them? Have you tracked them this year? If not, why not? Recent research suggests that most goals are abandoned less than 25 days into being set. 25 days!!! I think we have to ask ourselves why. The first reason is we give ourselves too much time to accomplish the goals. I don't know if you remember being in school and being assigned a semester paper. Are you starting that thing week one? Heck no! It's so far off I have plenty of time to get to that. So you put it on the shelf until it's pressing. It collects dust until you realize it becomes urgent! Don't lie and act like you were one of the gold medal students that finished your stuff months ahead, we know the truth! But how about when you were given a big assignment that was due by the end of the week. You get going on it now! It's urgent. To get it finished it can't sit on the shelf, but has to move forward step by step until it's done on time. Goals are no different. We give ourselves too much time to get the work done and either forget about it or put it off until it becomes urgent. That's why we use 12 week plans. It keeps goals constantly in front of us so we never cease to move the ball down the field. The second reason is that some goals need to be broken down into smaller goals. Doubling sales is difficult! And can feel overwhelming, so why not figure out some intermediate goals and metrics to incrementally push towards that. Instead of making one giant leap. Set goals that help you move towards the one big goal. Lastly, I think we don't look at them practically enough. We write these big goals down and don't write out the action steps. We don't give ourselves some easy wins to get momentum. As a result we fail or cease to get moving. Give yourself some action items that can contribute to your goals. Just make a list. What helps me accomplish this. A minimum of ten steps or action items. Set up time to critically think about it and strategize. Then just set some work time to make it happen. Then, set up a time to audit the work. For my clients, we do this every two weeks at our coaching meetings. Intentional time set aside to make sure we're making progress. And here's the secret. It works! It's not a magic wand, but intentional time set aside to work on goals works! Who knew? So, if you're in the group that hasn't checked out your goals since January…no shame! Pull them off the shelf, break them up into bite sized chunks, and make a plan move forward. And if you need help with accountability, reach out! We'd love to help you stay focused and accomplish your mission as a business. Thanks so much! Have a great day.

Greedy Boomers are feeling frustrated and overrun by entitled Millennials, while skeptical Gen Xers are interviewing unaware Gen Zers who are scrolling TikTok in a job interview; and for the first time we are all working together in the same businesses. College sports is awash in generational misunderstanding. The newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness rules are in place and for the first time in our lifetime you are seeing college athletes representing the hometown HVAC company, or in some cases, an international brand like Alabama's Quarterback Bryce Young who is already being featured in Nissan commercials. En masse the younger generations are all for this loosening of regulations, the older generations are on the spectrum between skeptical and opposed. In his new book A New Kind Of Diversity, Author Dr. Tim Elmore highlights these generational challenges saying, "the generation gap is more distinct because new technology creates subcultures. Hence, generations often don't have to connect to survive." When you look around your business you are beginning to see a Boomer (55 and older) working side by side with a Gen Xer, a Millennial, and a Gen Zer, all staring cross-eyed at the other trying to figure out why they are so peculiar and strange…and wrong. Generational diversity in the workplace is an unavoidable reality and a massive opportunity. Our response to this reality makes waves; waves of optimism and hope, or waves of pessimism and doubt. First, to provide the greatest amount of optimism for working within the healthy diversity of the generations we must be aware that rightness and wrongness is being replaced with angle and perspective. The commonly agreed upon straight edges of society are becoming less and less agreed upon and in their place are the self-published perceptions of the generations. We used to believe that only a few key players had their fingers on the submit buttons of our societal publishing houses, and now everyone can and does publish something. The voices of angle and perspective are rising and it is leaving little space for a declaration of rightness or wrongness. You have a couple of different responses to this reality; we can either dig in our heels and fight for limited options, or we can open your ears and our minds to listen. Listening is not agreeing. Listening is not acquiescing. Listening is not giving permission. Listening is simply listening. To be generationally aware is to make time to listen to the different angles, and then to make further time to digest and process what you have sincerely heard. We will do well to inform our own current angles and perspectives with the angles and perspectives of others as we make time to listen. The second action we can take to bring hope to the generations is to believe that each person and each generation brings a value layer that was otherwise missing. Recently we did some renovation work at our home. The project was 99% complete barring a few pieces of artwork. The rooms looked fantastic! The new floors, paint, trim, and tile were all a pop of design that we had been missing. There was 1% missing though…the artwork. Most of us went through school moaning about art class. The addition of that 1% that was missing completely brought wholeness to the room. In a Wikipedia entry, resolve is what the music world refers to as "the move of a note or chord from dissonance (an unstable sound) to a consonance (a more final or stable sounding one)". In our renovation, something was missing. The 1% of artwork brought resolve; brought a more final visual to the renovations we had completed. Multiple generations working in concert help to bring resolve to a workplace; a more final or stable sounding environment by which all roles can contribute to the overall mission of the organization. By collectively and repetitively pressing towards that agreed-upon mission, culture is built, and the flavor of that culture is enhanced by the diversity of its generational ingredients. Generational awareness is to learn the intentionality of great listening, and to set the stage for each generational player to bring the ingredients and notes that provide a full resolve and satisfaction for the culture that is headed towards its mission.

Our family feels like it's been stuck inside for so much of the last month. Some sick kids, tons and tons of rain, brutally hot weather that we thought was finally behind us, you name it! And yet with the cooler temps yesterday we took advantage of it and took a long family walk. Something we used to do nightly that just had been pushed aside as life got in the way. The simple, little things! We were reminded of how much life this gives us as we played "I spy" the entire walk and had some sweet moments racing each other to the next mailbox. I came home and immediately thought, why do we forget to do the little things? Because we know, deep down, the little things make the biggest difference for small businesses. Good morning everyone! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. I was sitting in with a client a few weeks ago who had not been coaching with me for very long and I was asking them about what separates them from some of the bigger companies doing what they do? "Well, not that much anymore!" As I leaned in a bit and asked them to elaborate, they proved my point. "Well, when we first opened it was this thought of superior customer service meets the highest quality. We returned every phone call. We wrote handwritten thank yous to clients after big jobs. We spent extra time on the details. We spent time as a team making sure everything was lined up. And as we've grown, it feels like there is less and less time for all of that! We've kind of lost our way a bit." Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it should. That's the secret sauce of most small businesses. It's the knowing the name of a client. Or remembering a team members birthday and that they are gluten-free! It's the random handwritten note that shows up in your mailbox instead of some whitewashed thank you email with your name inserted. It's someone actually answering your call and getting a human on the line instead of a "press 0 to talk to a customer representative." Or having a weekly check-in with your team to hear their thoughts and get feedback from the boots on the ground. But what happens? Business picks up. The fires grow bigger. The team grows. The daily and weekly checklists get thrown out for the almighty sales funnel, because sales solves all. And yet you look up 5, 8, 10 years from your start and barely recognize who you've become as a business! So, this is my simple reminder to you to ask you…what little things used to set you a part that have now kind of fallen by the wayside. This is a simple reminder to dive back in on those things that may have been neglected because of "insert excuse here!" I know I'm guilty of it. Dive back in on BIG Wins and team check-ins. Dive back in on an effective team meeting and reestablishing your core values. Pull up a Job role and refresh it. Look back at your weekly schedule and time block your week out. Delegate one thing today. Build out a new process to make something more efficient. Shoot maybe it's just calling a customer to thank them for their business out of the blue! Whatever you've set aside in favor of more important things, bring it up and set aside the time for a bit. I'd imagine that you, like me, would find it refreshing and completely worthwhile! So, here's what I'm going to ask you to do. Write down 10 things that you did when you started out your business that truly set you apart. Now, take one step further. How many of those things do you still do? Have you lost your secret sauce? And be honest, if you've only done it once this year and you used to do it weekly, that does NOT count. Now pick 2 that are seriously important. How can you reimplement these into your routine? How can you recapture a bit of that magic that you had? Maybe remember a bit of why you got into this in the first place. Maybe it's getting your team together and showing them the list and delegating one to each of them. We can't lose the soul of our business as sales increase. It's what got us the sales in the first place! So gather your team up this week. Put an appointment on the calendar to think this stuff through. Recapture the things that truly separate you from everyone else and watch the joy come back into what you do! It takes intentionality and leadership, but you've got that! Now you just have to do it. Thanks so much y'all get after it!

Thomas and I were doing our weekly check-in when we got to the last statement after I had asked him the Check In questions (Thomas walks you through the Check In questions here), "what I see and what I need from you." At this stage of our business, my role is requiring more and more visioneering and more accountability to macro-level task items. If my head gets caught up in too much day to day strategy, then we are not maximizing where I am most valuable to the business as an owner. Note: for context, at the time of this writing/recording we are a team of eight with five full-time coaches and three focused roles to share clients connections, marketing, and administration/accounting. Thomas heard what I am seeing in him and the growth that he is heading towards in leading our coach team, I then shared a thought I had not spoken, but it made sense. "Thomas, I need you to run defense on questions, thoughts, and ideas that I could easily run with and get lost in." Ownership is lonely, and ownership can be misunderstood. Leading the business from 60,000 feet requires a challenging juggling act of realizing the impact of each decision on the business as a whole, and the impact of each decision on each individual and their professional and personal life. At times those disparities can seem to be in conflict and the urge is for the owner to abandon the skies and crash back to the ground to make sure everything is ok and in the midst unintentionally show distrust to the wildly capable team that is managing the ground game. At that moment I was asking Thomas to recognize when I feel the urge to rush back down to earth in moments where it is clear that I need to remain in the sky to test and evaluate the atmosphere for the future vision of the business. Each of us has blind spots, areas that no matter how hard we look, we are simply unable to see and we need other team members to "have our back" and to say something when they see something. I've asked many of our team members to have my back at different times and in different ways, this is simply one example. Who do you have that can ensure you are able to stay in the clouds for a bit and do the important work ON the business? If there is no one right now, do not be discouraged, instead, be on the lookout. There is a high likelihood that the person already exists in your business but simply has not been trained, groomed, and invested in, to the point of being able to have those open conversations. By developing these conversations, the have-your-back mindset begins to work both ways. I'm reminded of a scene in The Gladiator where the new Gladiators were being attacked from all sides and Maximus (Russell Crowe) led his men into a 360 circle which each man facing outward (backs to each other)...THAT's the image! Here are three ways to develop a have-your-back culture: First, begin hosting weekly or every-other-weekly Check In's in your business. Watch Thomas' instructional and informational video to record and deliver each of the questions and that important final statement. Second, you can build a simple culture calendar on a spreadsheet. Write out dates along the top row of a spreadsheet (week by week). Then on the left hand column (usually Column "A") write out all of the cultural elements you wish were installed in your business; team meetings, birthdays, check ins, team training days, etc. During each weekly team meeting review your culture calendar and watch the connection, communication, and relationships begin to develop in a powerful way. Finally, share BIG Wins at every team meeting and make some of those BIG Wins the actions of your team members who really pulled their weight on certain items. Don't be "too cool" for this step. Your team will buy in and appreciate it over time. Who can help you run defense on your time so you can MAKE time for the things that really matter…at work and at home.

Every year, each one of our heroic business owner clients has an opportunity to commit to PREP WEEK... it's the one week of the year (in November) where we walk business owners step-by-step through the priority items they need to spend time on prior to the upcoming year to ensure that their time and energy is locked and focused on their WRITTEN vision. Here is how PREP WEEK works...

We have been misled about the idea of culture. After poorly thought out ideas of free-Friday-lunches, bean bag chairs in the break rooms, ping pong tables, open office concepts, and incentive compensation plans, team members are still disengaged and frustrated. We are trying to solve a pervasive, soul level challenge, with the oscillating fan of surface level ideas, rather than dousing the underlying flames of cultural disconnection with the quenching water of cultural satisfaction and engagement. Often we hear business owners complaining about the pending generational work ethic, or lack of, followed by a throwing up of hands and a resignation that "my generation is the only generation that knows how to work." When speaking to groups of small business owners, this is a typical refrain, "nobody wants to show up and work." My response, in a kind and forceful way, "no, they just don't want to show and work for you… because you have already given up on them." The great challenge of a sporting coach is to recruit, develop, and game plan in a way that maximizes talent and outcomes. The same is true of a business owner. Too many business owners are resigning to the cancerous idea that "if I want it to get done right, then I must do it myself." NO! We must allow that mindset to die in the graveyard of pride and hubris, and instead, embrace a growth mindset… a mindset that believes that each generation and each person has a unique brilliance to bring to a well-defined and clear mission. All businesses, generally, want great culture and yet great culture is not the default. Culture is not a business term, but has been borrowed for business from science. Culture is a biology term. Go back to middle school science when you saw your first petri dish. That little glass dish would hold some biological element, and then over time when subjected to heat, moisture, and any other environmental elements would grow the fruit of whatever elements were inside. Business culture is no different, install the elements of bad culture and bad culture will grow. Install the elements of good culture and good culture will grow. If your business plants the seeds of unpredictability, lack of communication, no team meetings, little documented process, and scattered vision…then don't be surprised at the fruit. If your business (ahem, you) plant seeds of predictability, repetitions, agendas, written and tracked goals, shared vision, mission, and values… then don't be surprised at the fruit. Here are three elements to a great culture that engages people and makes time for the things that matter. First, write down your vision, mission, and values and commit them to repetition and memory. Vision unites, a vacuum of vision scatters. It's a natural law. If you write down a vision of what you see and share that vision, your team will either run towards it, or run away from it, but either way, it will be clear. If you write down and memorize a less-than-ten-word mission statement and five or less unique core values, then your team will have great clarity on why they are heading in that direction, and the boundaries to remain in. You must commit to writing it down and sharing it regularly if you want the seeds of great culture. Second, you will need to maintain a written calendar to repeat those agreed upon elements of great culture. How often do you read back through your vision, host team meetings, host personal check ins, celebrate birthdays, family anniversaries, and team member work anniversaries? When do you write annual letters, host annual team discussions, and get feedback from your team on progress? Create one simple spreadsheet with a line of weekly dates across the top, and then line out all of the elements you want to see in great culture along the side; team days, team lunches, individual gatherings…all of it. Finally, if you want a great culture… don't be a jerk. Be kind, be visionary, be appropriately confrontational, be helpful, be humble, be inquisitive, be aggressive… but don't be a jerk. The livelihood of each of your full time team members is tied to your leadership, and much of that person's discussion when they go home is around their work. Don't be a jerk. The bad news is that you as a business owner directly impact culture. The good news is that you as a business owner directly impact culture. Plant the seeds for good culture… rinse and repeat.

If I were to walk into your office this week, pick an employee at random and ask them where you're headed as a business over the next year or so, would they be able to answer correctly? I'd wager they may be able to nail a few small things, but would probably fall short of where you'd like them to be. So how do we communicate those things and effectively put the bullseye on the wall for the whole team to chase after? Well, it starts with a team vision day. Let's talk about it! Thanks so much for listening in today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. About a year ago we sent out an employee survey to all of our clients. Just told them to forward it on to their employees, because we were curious how many of them could answer this question. "What's the goal of our business?" And many similar questions like that. Just give them a chance to answer and see what came up. Now, it was fascinating to read the responses. Things like, to make the most profit we can, or to build perfect houses or even to make sure our customers are happy. And yet, there was something missing in most of the responses. Well, a lot of things missing, actually. Things like how big do we want to be and who our ideal client is. Things like what we want the culture to feel like and how much business we want to take on. The size of the team. The gross revenue. The ways we want our clients to feel when they do business with us. All of that. And so how do we take those things, write them down and communicate it to the team effectively so that they hear it and take notice? Hear me say this… don't overcomplicate it! Have a Vision day, or in our opinion, multiple Vision days throughout the year. We have 6, yep that's right, 6 Vision days over the course of the year. Hour-long meetings where we do nothing but read through the vision of where we're headed and who we want to be while headed there. The other day I sat down with a client and he brought up prepping for their quarterly team meeting where they read through their vision story. I was so proud and he went on and on about how much it's changed their business. They commit to reading through it once a quarter so that their team is never confused about what's important. They see the core values and how it connects with end goals. They can recite the mission and know their why. It's such a powerful way to engage their team and connect the dots so that no one every has to guess at where the endzone is. They know it because it's constantly in front of them multiple times a year. So, how do you start? Well, the vision needs to be written down. One of our favorite quotes comes from the book of Habbakuk in the bible. "Write the vision down so that those who read it may run!" That's what you want your team to do, see the vision, and have it read over them so that they can run full speed after it! What a powerful picture! Then schedule a date to start it. Don't overcomplicate it. Just read through it and let your team ask questions along the way. Then, after the first time reading through it ask this simple question…"So, after hearing our vision, are there any questions about where we're headed?" If yes, answer them! They are super important. If the answer is no, ask this. "After the first time reading through our vision, what would you say is important to us?" This is crucial in them retelling you where you are headed and how you want to do business moving forward. You have to know what they heard you say and make sure it sunk in! And if they missed the mark, rework your vision until it communicates what you want it to towards your team. That's vision that moves people forward! Schedule a few more times throughout the year. You want your team knowing what you are going to say before you say it. That's when you know the vision has truly sunk in. Alright, what are you waiting for…put pen to paper and write it down so your team can run after it. Then put it on the calendar and get the entire team there and engaged! Then let us know how it went. Thanks for joining today I can't wait to hear about your Vision day!

A few months back I was driving the most beautiful stretch of interstate on God's green earth, I-26 between Orangeburg and Columbia…and I'm on one of those long stretches where it's 40-ft tall pine trees as far as the eye can see and I start to notice some clouds stacking up in the distance. Cars just disappearing into it a mile or so out and here I am driving 70+ mph right at it. Kind of an eerie gray about it and I can't even remotely see through it, what's on the other side, what's inside… none of it! And the closer I got the more questions popped into my head. And it was fine, it was a bad storm that we had to slow down for, but we made it through to the sunshine on the other side. And as I think about the state of business right now, that's the collective feeling we get. We can see a long way out. A lot of us are booked months, maybe a year or more into the future. And yet there's this big cloud out there and this buzz word we keep hearing, "RECESSION". That for some reason no one can really identify what it's going to look like once we arrive at this thing. How bad is it going to be? Will we be able to drive our business through it normally? Are we going to have to slow down? Should we be nervous or just push through as quickly as possible to the other side? Here's what we do know…none of us know how bad it will be. We do know there are some changes and we're going to have to deal with those changes in our exhausted state of just getting through the past 2+ years of a post covid reality. We also know that we can prepare for whatever that storm looks like. We can get our business ready so we can do more than just white knuckle it all the way through. 4 questions you need to answer today to prepare for whatever is around the corner… 1. "What are the rhythms to equip our team with so that they are free to run full speed towards the vision?" I coached high school lacrosse at Hilton Head High for 6 years. Every year we would have a parent meeting and outline the full year of what we needed to do to ultimately win a state championship. -Fall weightlifting and conditioning…here's the times and places. Commit to it. -Tutoring Tuesdays/Thursdays after school so your grades are in line If we can plan a year of high school lacrosse with that kind of intentionality, why can't we do the same with our business? What rhythms do we need to equip our team with so they are free to run full speed towards the vision? 2. "Knowing our Mission…What would we do in response to our primary lead source drying up?" We've been talking about this cloud that's out there, right? This storm that may be short, long, intense, not so bad…who knows? How do we pivot in the midst of that. And what would happen if your primary lead source, your primary faucet of business shut off or rapidly slowed down? I'm not saying it will, but how do we diversify your business and allow for change in the future? 3. "What would need to happen if something happened to me?" This is something we spend a ton of time on. Hopefully, nothing ever does…but the business needs to be ready! What processes do you need to record? What systems need to be built? What happens if someone gets promoted within and you need to train their replacement? This stuff happens all the time and businesses are set back because they aren't ready. Things aren't written down. So ask everyone in your business that question and let the answer push you to get things written down. 4. "How does my role directly affect the financial health of the business?" This one is huge. Have a simple conversation with your team around what makes you profitable. Helping them understand that they play a key role in profitability. Show them what happens when a dollar enters the business and what is left over at the end. (Insider information…you don't make 100% profit, but that's what they think!) Show them your COGS and your insurance expenses and payroll taxes. It's helpful for them to see it all written out. Listen, we don't know what is around the bend, but we do know we can prepare in these 4 key areas. With our people, with our Purpose, with our Process and with our Profit. Once you touch on all 4 of those, you will be well on your way to being prepared for whatever this recession looks like! Have a great day.

There's a new generation of kids hitting the workforce. So, with thousands of options, how do we attract them to our business? And how do we make sure we have enough runway in front of them so they don't just jump at the next available job that pays a little bit more? Well, let's talk about that today! Good morning friends, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. We met last week with about 125 business owners and key leaders to plan out the 4th quarter. One of the resounding issues that kept coming up was attracting talent in the trade industries. Now, about 70% of the businesses we work with are in the trade industries, so we asked them to go a bit deeper into the problem. Well, there's this huge push for high school kids to go to college. Which is great! But, when they get a random business degree or marketing or some other generic degree in communications that they have spent good money and 4 years of their life on, they fully expect to be compensated at a higher rate and to find a job in their field. There's tons and tons of trade work to be had that does not require a 4-year degree, but those kids aren't attracted to some of what we have to offer, and seem to not be celebrated as much for working with their hands. And they're not wrong. Generation Z is coming out of high school or college with an inflated idea of the return on investment from education. They often think, oh I'll get a degree in X and should make a good living right out of school! Even though that's not close to how it works. Meanwhile, there are jobs paying 18/20/22 bucks an hour that you could start tomorrow…WITH A SOLID CAREER TRAJECTORY. Now, don't hear me say college is not important. It absolutely is and higher education should be applauded. But, it should not be some hoop that kids are forced to jump through with no direction. That's a waste of money. But back to the issue at hand. Plumbers, electricians, contractors, roofers…you name it. All of them are struggling to attract talent. People that want to work in those trades. Gen Z looks around and sees people making Tik Toks, podcasts, food blogging, gaming, anything BUT working with your hands and making a stupid amount of money to do so. But I think the question we should ask is not how do we compete with that pay. Good luck with that one. The question we should ask is what is attractive to Gen Z about all of those jobs? Well, it's notoriety. It's having a voice. It's influencing people and being heard. It's also the freedom to be creative and self expressive. Well, you say, that's tough to give kids all of that as a beginning plumber. Yep, I agree…but can we get closer to that? So many of us are stuck in the ways that the trades have worked for the past 50 years and not willing to innovate or change at all. So no wonder kids don't want to work with a bunch of grouchy 50-year old men who are "stuck in the old days!" It sounds miserable. So how can we get them excited about being heard, using their creativity, innovating, serving people…etc. I think the question we need to start asking is…"What are the employees I'm looking for, looking for?" It's a simple question, but until we learn how to answer it, we will be stuck waving our fist at the waves upon waves of Gen Z employees who chose to work elsewhere. We can stick our heads in the sand and say, "man they just don't make 'em like they used to!" Or we can be proactive, recognize the change in the market and get excited about the strengths this new generation brings. Here's the last thing I'll point to. This Gen z group of kids does not have the tangible skills that previous generations had. So we have to double down on 3 things… On the job training and support. We can't just write them off, but have to find unique ways to get them the certifications needed and the hands on experience to survive on their own in the trades. Check-ins and onboarding. This generation wants to be heard more than any generation previously. They want to be listened to and learned from. Give them a voice and genuinely listen. They may surprise you with their perspective. And here's the extreme…if you don't, they will find someone else to listen and somewhere else to work. A "Why" behind their work. This generation is more community focused and cause focused than any prior to it. They want to work for something beyond just clocking in/clocking out and having dignity in their work. So find a cause to support…a reason to come to work beyond the technical stuff you do and let them rally behind it. It's worth it for all employees, not just Gen Z, but without it, they will always be looking for a "Why" to attach themselves to and get behind. Alright! I hope this is encouraging and is a conversation started with your team. What are the employees we're looking for looking for. And how can we become that. Not until we answer that in a real way and communicate it to the oncoming work force can we hope to have our hiring holes filled by the incoming work f

Marketing and I have a love-hate relationship. The results are powerful when the results exist, yet too often, the results are more aligned with vanity than they are with actual growth. Marketers are like business coaches (of which I am one) and gypsies, each profession has a low bar of entry and the results are often quantified and masked by generalities. I can't speak for gypsies, but marketers and business coaches have real opportunity to move the needles for businesses IF the needle is well defined and well tracked. Our business coaching firm has been growing over the years as we work with business owners (75% of those are contractors or contractor-related industries) between 2 and 50 employees to help build systems, process, and purpose using our Business On Purpose Roadmap in an effort to liberate business owners from chaos so they can make time for what matters most. The majority of our business has grown through intentional word of mouth and direct referrals. Growth has not been haphazard, but also not opened to the masses. We realized that our mission could serve a wider audience if only we had a scalable way to share our value proposition with that audience. Enter the need for a marketer. We define marketing as that activity within a business that tells the world, "we're here and this is the impact we could have on your life…here, try a sample." Before I lay out the solution, let's define the challenge…the elephant in the room. Marketers have a reputation for obsessing over minor vanity metrics, and foregoing the more important numbers. We have spent hundreds (at least) of hours and tens of thousands of dollars working with marketers in the past and the primary return has been a volume of likes, views, and impressions. That is all fine and good, but the primary return on your marketing investment should be the right leads that convert to a sales opportunity. Be wary of the "branding strategy", especially when you are a small business. Early on branding comes through the excellence of your work to clients and customers, not the proficiency of your message to non-stakeholders. Of course, you need a succinct and targeted message. You need clarity and consistency. Early on you can be the one to ensure your message is constant with a clear mission statement, a simple branding guide (standardized colors, fonts, and logos), and as many testimonials as you can get. As those tools are built you begin building marketing assets that a marketer is able to leverage when the time is right. The time to invest in a marketing manager is the time that you need to scale your growth in a way that requires more than word-of-mouth marketing. There are three things that you should have in place prior to recruiting a marketing manager. First, you should understand the marketing gap that exists in your business. What is it that the marketing manager will do that you, or someone already on your team cannot do? That leads to the second thing…a written job role with clear and written key results. Resist the urge to search for a marketing role online to copy and paste. Pause, ask yourself, "if this marketer was successful for our business, what would she need to produce regularly?" When thinking through compensation, every dollar that you invest in a marketer, and the budget for their role, should return three to four dollars in revenue. You will need to do some calculation, and then have an honest conversation with the marketer about why the compensation is structured as it is. You will want this role to cash flow quickly. Finally, to prepare yourself for recruitment ensure that you have thought through your existing assets, metrics, and marketing efforts. These are invaluable experiences that will give momentum and runway to your new marketing manager. As you go on the search for a marketing manager, sharpen your eye towards a few key elements. First, obsess over the key results areas. Make sure your marketing candidates understand that vanity metrics are just that; vanity. Your business is making this investment for one reason, to generate leads that convert to sales opportunities. Everything else, for now, is a distraction. Second, ask your marketing candidates for past results in other marketing roles. What channels have they used? What strategies have worked in different environments? Third, let your marketing candidates know that they will be required and 100% responsible to create and implement the marketing plan. Your marketing role is not a social-media-manager role, although managing social media will play a part. All appropriate channels of marketing will be expected to be either leveraged or dissolved based on the marketing plan they draft and hold to account. Finally, ask for a written marketing plan prior to hiring them. Be very clear, you are hiring them to create the plan and implement it, you will be an advisor and asset to leverage, but you will not be the marketer and ultimately the buck stops with them to

Every day you are waking up and chaos seems to reign. Material delays. Pricing volatility. Subcontractors and vendors not pulling their weight. The labor pool seems to be vanishing, and recession is on our doorstep. Those aren't the greatest challenges, though. We know what the greatest challenge is. All of these elements are leading you to question whether or not you are even in the right business because as much as you try to be present at your daughter's softball game, or your son's soccer match, or simply focusing around the dinner table… you aren't present because the chaos is consuming you. You wonder, "how can I keep going if all I am doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul?" "How can I have plenty of work, but not plenty of cash?" "Why do those other contractors seem like they're crushing it while I'm wasting away, just trying to keep up." Some of you, like TJ, have asked, "what happens to my business if something happens to me?" The professional chaos is taking a toll on your personal life. That stops today. Most business owners are convinced they are not generating enough revenue. In reality, that is usually not true… the cause of their cause stems not from the volume of revenue generated, but instead from the amount of that revenue that is retained and kept… the proverbial back door of profit is WIDE OPEN! Most career contractors do not have a revenue problem, although growth in revenue can be valuable. Most career contractors have a numbers problem… in other words, you don't know your numbers day to day so your expenses creep up and up while revenue fluctuates up and down… and profit drips out. We live from big receivable to big receivable, living life like a real-life roller coaster complete all the while feeling sick and green. There are at least 3 techniques you can deploy to improve profits and margins. The first technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to subdivide your bank accounts. When we first met Steve, he was running an $7mm custom homebuilding company in a prestigious market in California. In the first week of 2020, he had $64,889.85…$65k to run $7mm worth of projects during a year where his local municipality would eventually shut down construction for 6 weeks due to COVID protocol. That same year, his volume contracted from $8mm to $7mm. In other words, he would LOSE revenue in 2020, would LOSE six weeks worth of billing in 2020, and to make matters worse, of the $65k he had in his accounts… he only really had access to $32,720.14… the rest of it was already scheduled to be spent on subs, materials, and other payables. Steve was going into an already uphill year of 2020 armed with a water pistol and a kit kat bar for nourishment. Needless to say, Steve was freaked. But one thing Steve now knew, that many of you don't, and it's leading to the chaos you feel. Steve KNEW how much he had available to pay his taxes, to pay his subs, to pay his team, and to pay himself. Most of you are looking at the money…and you are missing the true story…STEVE KNEW because Steve had a system. Steve made one decision, and this decision is spelled out beautifully in Mike Michalowicz's important book Profit First For Contractors. In short, when a dollar comes into your business, immediately subdivide it so you know exactly where that dollar has to go…starting with yourself. There are four barriers you must overcome before you make this shift, and yet the shift will be SO worth it. The barriers are… Your own mindset Your bank who wants to charge you for multiple accounts Your bookkeeper who is scrunching their nose saying, "this is too many transactions!!" Your CPA who is constantly lecturing you as to you how you can just do this and track it on a spreadsheet Ok… let's for a moment suspend our disbelief, and instead embrace the idea of subdividing bank accounts. Remember, not knowing your numbers is causing frustration and distance with those you love…so let's do something different. The second technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to create a simple dashboard that tracks your cash each week. Steve said, "but my online bank statement tells me how much money I have in each account, and Quickbooks tells me how much I'm owed." Yes, technically you are correct Steve…BUT… In order to understand your profit and your margins we need a means of tracking those numbers looooooong term. It's nice to know your cash, or receivables, or payables, or Cost Of Goods on any given week…but it's even BETTER to know those each week over months and years where you can watch trends. We feel the same about the weather, that is why forecasters constantly tell us where today's weather compares with weather from the previous week, month, year, decade, and century…it gives context and helps us make decisions. The Level Two Dashboard is a tool we have built and installed in hundreds of businesses around the world from Architects to Remodelers, to Plumbers, to Lawyers. The truth is, a doll

Every day you are waking up and chaos seems to reign. Material delays. Pricing volatility. Subcontractors and vendors not pulling their weight. The labor pool seems to be vanishing, and recession is on our doorstep. Those aren't the greatest challenges though. We know what the greatest challenge is. All of these elements are leading you to question whether or not you are even in the right business because as much as you try to be present at your daughters softball game, or your son's soccer match, or simply focusing around the dinner table…you aren't present because the chaos is consuming you. You wonder, "how can I keep going if all I am doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul?" "How can I have plenty of work, but not plenty of cash?" "Why do those other contractors seem like they're crushing it while I'm wasting away, just trying to keep up." Some of you, like TJ, have asked, "what happens to my business if something happens to me?" The professional chaos is taking a toll on your personal life. That stops today. Most business owners are convinced they are not generating enough revenue. In reality, that is usually not true…the cause of their cause stems not from the volume of revenue generated, but instead from the amount of that revenue that is retained and kept…the proverbial back door of profit is WIDE OPEN! Most career contractors do not have a revenue problem, although growth in revenue can be valuable. Most career contractors have a numbers problem…in other words, you don't know your numbers day to day so your expenses creep up and up while revenue fluctuates up and down…and profit drips out. We live from big receivable to big receivable, living life like a real life roller coaster complete all the while feeling sick and green. There are at least 3 techniques you can deploy to improve profits and margins. The first technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to subdivide your bank accounts. When we first met Steve, he was running an $7mm custom homebuilding company in a prestigious market in California. The first week of 2020, he had $64,889.85…$65k to run $7mm worth of projects during a year where his local municipality would eventually shut down construction for 6 weeks due to COVID protocol. That same year, his volume contracted from $8mm to $7mm. In other words, he would LOSE revenue in 2020, would LOSE six weeks worth of billing in 2020, and to make matters worse, of the $65k he had in his accounts…he only really had access to $32,720.14…the rest of it was already scheduled to be spent on subs, materials, and other payables. Steve was going into an already uphill year of 2020 armed with a water pistol and a kit kat bar for nourishment. Needless to say, Steve was freaked. But one thing Steve now knew, that many of you don't, and it's leading to the chaos you feel. Steve KNEW how much he had available to pay his taxes, to pay his subs, to pay his team, and to pay himself. Most of you are looking at the money…and you are missing the true story…STEVE KNEW because Steve had a system. Steve made one decision, and this decision is spelled out beautifully in Mike Michalowicz's important book Profit First For Contractors. In short, when a dollar comes into your business, immediately subdivide it so you know exactly where that dollar has to go…starting with yourself. There are four barriers you must overcome before you make this shift, and yet the shift will be SO worth it. The barriers are… Your own mindset Your bank who wants to charge you for multiple accounts Your bookkeeper who is scrunching their nose saying, "this is too many transactions!!" Your CPA who is constantly lecturing you as to you how you can just do this and track it on a spreadsheet Ok…let's for a moment suspend our disbelief, and instead embrace the idea of subdividing bank accounts. Remember, not knowing your numbers is causing frustration and distance with those you love…so let's do something different. The second technique to controlling your costs and knowing your numbers is to create a simple dashboard that tracks your cash each week. Steve said, "but my online bank statement tells me how much money I have in each account, and Quickbooks tells me how much I'm owed." Yes, technically you are correct Steve…BUT… In order to understand your profit and your margins we need a means of tracking those numbers looooooong term. It's nice to know your cash, or receivables, or payables, or Cost Of Goods on any given week…but it's even BETTER to know those each week over months and years where you can watch trends. We feel the same about the weather, that is why forecasters constantly tell us where today's weather compares with weather from the previous week, month, year, decade, and century…it gives context and helps us make decisions. The Level Two Dashboard is a tool we have built and installed in hundreds of businesses around the world from Architects to Remodelers, to Plumbers, to Lawyers. The truth is, a dollar is not a d

Contractors are notorious for leveraging tomorrow's money to pay yesterday's bills…" robbing Peter to pay Paul." We can look around and justify the practice, and yet we know deep down that it is a dangerous line to walk; a bit like an expensive game of musical chairs. Eventually, the music does stop… or at least pauses. The most dynamic way to prepare for any event moving forward, whether it be growth, recession, boom, or bust, is to know your numbers. As you know your numbers, you also know there are two primary ways to affect cash availability in your contracting business; increase revenue and/or decrease expenses. Actually, I like to think it a better practice to increase revenue and manage expenses. If you want to grow, you will likely have to spend more for that growth in the form of hiring, or increased investment in tools or resources to generate and deliver on that growth. Here are a few methods for controlling costs in your Construction business. First, stop spending on things that don't align with your mission. Construction businesses will usually have access to large sums of receivables at any given time and if not carefully and subdivided at the time that receivable comes in the door, you will start paying Peter what should be Paul's. Many times what Peter wants are just that…wants. Using the cash as downpayment to leverage debt onto a new big shiny truck, the fancy office, or perks that make us seem just a little bigger than we actually are. That leads to what is a better decision; to watch your dollars closely. Every single construction client we have, subdivides their bank accounts into at least six accounts following closely the model set forth by Mike Michalowicz in his important book Profit First. When that dollar is subdivided by pre-defined percentage (not by hunch), it naturally resists being used for anything other than what it was intended. If that dollar is not subdivided, it is easier for that dollar to hide and slip out as payment for something that does not align with the mission or values of the business. A third way to control costs in a construction business is to be mindful of tax opportunities. There are elements in any tax code that promote the movement and utility of money towards certain activities that stimulate economic growth. Many times, elements of the tax code are value-adds to business owners if they are intentional and thoughtful in their planning. Request more from your CPA. They are smart people who are worth far more to your business than just an annual tax return. A thoughtful CPA will lay out some basic opportunities for you to conduct legitimate transactions and deductions with your resources in order to gain tax benefits. For advanced planning, it may not be a bad investment to hire a Tax Strategist as well for higher-level tax planning. Finally, pay attention to your compensation models and structures. The common method we have found for construction owners to compensate employees is to make it up as they go. For an additional 30 minutes of thoughtful work and modeling on a simple spreadsheet, you can create a compensation model that is mindful of your cash flow, your growth, and the opportunities that lie ahead. Too often we bow to the market around us, or to hostage demands in compensation instead of first asking our business what it can afford and what it needs. The easy choice is to read this article, close it out and keep doing what you are doing. The hard choice is to read this article and begin taking action working ON your construction company by being mindful of your costs…and your revenue. You can do this…if you make the time!

Recession chatter is at a continuous buzz due to the identification of predictive recession markers in the same way that hurricane preparation chatter would be abuzz if weather forecasters identified the predictive markers of a hurricane. Where I live in the lowcountry of South Carolina, we went through a four year stretch where we were either brushed or directly hit by severe hurricanes. The storms were no fun, and in some cases deadly. In advance of those storms weather forecasters and government officials worked overtime to ensure readiness. They were not able to influence or avoid the storm, but they were able to provide a helpful forecast based on predictive and principles markers that allowed for thoughtful preparation; the ability to make ready prior to the storm. Oxford Dictionary defines a recession this way, "a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters." The markers of a recession seem to be swirling out off the coast and the winds of economic dis-ease have picked up substantially. The barometric changes of interest rates, pricing volatility, fuel increases, supply chain disruption, and a historic personnel shift have all been mixed into an economic cocktail that certainly has our attention. We can be naive and try to stop the storm, or we can diligently prepare for a potential storm strike and greatly increase the likelihood that we navigate tough conditions that will set us up for what I recently heard Dr. Tim Elmore describes Post-Traumatic-Growth; the hopeful idea that for the majority of people, trauma leads to growth. How do you make your business and your team ready for the storm strike of a recession? Here are four categories that you can invest in giving you a better opportunity to endure. First, to weather any storm, your team must be aligned around written and re-visited purpose. The three primary elements of purpose are a vision story, a succinct and memorizable mission statement, and 3 to 5 unique core values. Your vision story is a detailed snapshot of the future of your business…a long description of what is "out there". Your mission statement is a less-than-ten-word, power packed punch explaining to someone why you are doing what you are doing. Your unique core values are curbs along the side of the highway towards your vision story. Stay away from cliche values like excellence, integrity, respect, etc. Those should be values that are standard. What are the decision-filtering-values that are unique to you? Next, your people must have access to culture they believe in and will compel them to remain locked into the mission. Culture is not a native business term, it is on loan from biology. It is literally "to maintain the conditions for growth". Most business owners want to grow whether it be the top line, bottom line, product development, etc. Just in biology, the conditions must align with the growth you are hoping for. To ready your business for the threat of a recession is to take the written purpose you have committed to publishing and sharing above, and ensure there is a recurring mechanism tilling that purpose into the soil, the people of your business. For us, we read through our 5 page vision story together as an entire team once every two months. We review our mission and values at minimum during our weekly team meeting, and during our weekly 1 on 1 check-ins with team members. We are obsessive about them and constantly revision so we are ensuring the soil of our business is properly hydrated, fertilized, and tilled. Third, a pending storm demands that each process can continue in the case of a disruption setting in. If prices continue to remain volatile, schedules continue to be thrown off, people continue down the great resignation road…do you have your processes documented, communicated, trained and deployed so that the business can continue to deliver on your mission? Or is it "all in your head?" Finally, cash profit and retained cash earnings (actual EXTRA cash available in your bank account…we're not talk about money you can borrow) are crucial during a storm in the same way provisions, fuel, and a means of generating energy are must-haves. In short, being cash-heavy gives you options and opportunities. If you do not have cash, you will struggle. If you do not know how much cash you have, you will struggle. Know your numbers by knowing your cash runway. The true measure of profit is not the number that sits on the bottom of your profit and loss statement…that is just ink on a page. The true measure of your profit is the actual cash you have sitting in a separate, designated account that is being continually filled up where you can see it on your online bank portal…and where you could withdraw it if you had to. Purpose, people, process, and profit. You intentionally build a store of those four elements and you will be able to look back from the other side

Every time we dive into our delegation roadmap with a heroic business owner, we get a bit of pushback when we tell them they only get 3-4 items that are off limits as far as delegation goes. So how do you delegate the impossible? Well, let's dive on in… Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner with BoP here. It never fails, the excuses go on and on and on! That's impossible to delegate. You don't understand! I can't let go of that, I can't train someone to do all of that! We've heard it all. And yet think for a moment, about some of the biggest businesses you know of. The big boys. Did they start out as multi-billion dollar businesses? Heck no! Most of them were mom and pop 1 location businesses that figured out the magic to scaling their business, delegation, and training. That's it! They created and implemented new job roles and equipped their team to do the jobs they were asking them to do. So, if you were to write down all the things you do on a weekly basis. What's that one thing that came up in your mind that you would love to delegate, but you're thinking…"There's just no way!" Just last week, examples from our clients… one business owner letting go of estimating, for the first time in 6 years of running the business. Another, letting go of the entire back end and hiring a virtual bookkeeper and CPA for the first time. Life changing! Still, another, offloaded a huge piece of their operations and scheduling to another team member for the first time in almost 5 years. Time after time, day after day, business owners are doing the unthinkable and offloading serious weight in their business and making time for what only they can do in the business. So how are they doing it? Well, we call it the systems mindset. The next time you do an undelegatable task, record the process. Newsflash, this will take time. Record it with a screen capture technology or grab an admin, your spouse, a kid, whoever, and dictate to them as you do every single step. And I mean every single step. As if you were going to grab John Smith off the side of the road and hand this over to him. From there, communicate to an employee that they are going to begin to own this task. All of it, by whatever date you decide. Now, this may mean they have to delegate something from their task list. No problem, the same steps apply. After you've communicated this, schedule a time to train them on the process. Walk them through every detail and figure out where they may lack clarity or may struggle. Then push them to have a first attempt. Do it alongside them and help them through it. After you do a couple attempts, it's time for them to try it on their own. Resist the urge to jump in and save it. Let them struggle through it. Just like in exercising or lifting weights, if someone helps you lift the bar, you never get stronger. It's the exact same with job roles. The struggle helps in the long run. Set up a series of follow-up meetings to check-in and answer any more questions and support them after the initial training meeting. This may be the most important step. They should own 80% of it at this point and just lean on you for the nuanced points. Lastly, let them own it and then hold them accountable to the standard. Periodically check on progress and continue to support them, but don't micromanage. Expect them to own it and expect them to be proactive in accomplishing whatever it is. This is another level of business owner. One who realizes what only their role needs to be and spends hours preparing and delegating the seemingly undelegatable, to free you up for what only they can do. So, go back to that one thing you hesitated on. Start putting a process together…make it bulletproof. Train, hold accountable and offload it so you business can keep moving forward. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be or drink the excuse Kool-aid! Imagine if Wal-Mart or Amazon or apple just one day, years ago just decided things couldn't be delegated… they wouldn't be who they are today. Take the time and believe it can be done. Thanks for listening today… go ahead and send us what you are in process of delegating and send us the success stories! It's what gets us out of bed in the morning. Take care!

We spend a lot of time here at BoP figuring out who our ideal client is. We think through what their frustrations are and how they spend their day. We look at what motivates them and how that meshes with what we offer. Is it a fit? No? How can we make it a fit? Because here's what we know…for every person we spend an hour with who is NOT our ideal client, equals an hour that we're not spending with someone we need to be working with. It's that simple. So…who is your ideal client? How do we figure that out? Well, let's talk about that today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. We really are serious about our ideal client. For a series of reasons, but 3 quick ones. Because we know we have the tools to solve our ideal clients' problems. An ice skater that needs help with her choreography? Nope, that's not the scope of work we need to be involved in. We don't have the tools to truly change their life, so why spend our most valuable resource, our non-renewable time, on that. But a business owner with 2-50 employees? Swimming in chaos? Frustrated over more money leaking out the back door than they realized and unsure how to lead their team towards a clear vision? Bingo! That's us. We can nail that! And so every sales call we have we can know with 100% certainty that we have what they need. It makes it very simple for us. The quicker we identify if a person is our ideal client, the quicker we can lock in on them and try to build a relationship. It helps us narrow our focus and not have to cast as wide of a net. It also helps us focus in on a niche and not spend time figuring out if someone is a fit or not. If we spend a ton of time on the front end identifying the characteristics of businesses we have success with, then that helps us care for business owners well and not waste their time and also be able to point them another direction to get help with whatever they need. Because it helps us deliver our best value. When we work with our ideal client, we know we can deliver at or above the perceived value for our services. If it's not a great fit from the beginning, it's going to be a waste of time and resources for the business owner to try to make it work. It's that simple. We deliver the greatest value to our ideal client. So, if I asked you who your ideal client is, would you even know where to start? What do they look like? Dress like? How do they spend their time? Where do they congregate for business meetings and how do you get in front of them? What phrases come out of their mouth and what do you hope to hear come out of their mouth so you know…YES, we can solve that problem! Many of us go, "Oh we can work with anyone!" While that may be true if you're selling bottled water, I would push back and say, yes, you CAN work with anyone, but why not put your energy towards an ideal demographic? Your ideal client! Your marketing and sales has to be focused. Because those will become your raving fans and the ones to help grow your business organically. Not the ones you just, "Made it work" for. So…spend some time today diving in on this. Get incredibly detailed. We have a 2-page document simply outlining our ideal client. That way when we go to a former client or current client and ask for referrals we can tell them exactly who we're looking for and know that we will be able to deliver on our promises. It's worth spending the time to do this now…right before everyone jumps back in this fall. Figure it out, look for them and watch your business do what it is designed to do! Thanks so much for joining, have a great day!

You just completed the relentless and methodical work of recruiting and hiring a new team member, and you are still left with that big, expensive question, "is this new person even going to work out?" Hiring new roles and new team members always seems to be an obvious and easy solution to everyone except the person whose time, attention, and bottom line is most on the line. It's day one for that new hire…how does the mission get the most out of that new person, and how does that new person get the most out of the mission of the business? American style football is a very set-play-specific sport. All eleven players on the offensive side of the ball must be in lock step technique choreographed in unison. Each position targets a specific direction and technique because the other positions are depending on it. The right guard trusts that the center has the other guy. The running back trusts the right guard to block that huge human being coming straight for him. The quarterback trusts that the running back made the right decision to run right instead of left. We are under the misconception that the game of business is simply a collection of random events that all seem to work out in the creating, buying, and selling of products and services. And in some rare cases, people can get by on that mantra…but for most that is not the case. For most, haphazard play leads to haphazard results. For most, a lack of preparation, of making ready before hand, has led to a life of chaos, frustration, and regret. Most American football teams are known to have a written, published, playbook. That playbook is expected to be studied, reviewed, and re-reviewed. A Bleacher Report article reveals an example playcall from future Hall Of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, "East Right Flop, V Right all the way outside, Y Left, Fake 396 Bag, V Hinge, Z Puck." Huh? In order to understand the various formations, routes, and directions, each player must spend a lot of time in the playbook. The moving parts in your business can be as complex as the moving parts of an 11 person football team, and yet many business owners do not make the time to create a playbook. For most, the idea is too intimidating, for the rest we hide behind the excuse of a lack of time. Imagine a football coach interviewed for a job and had no playbook to show and instead boasted, "I make it up as I go!" Let's not follow suit. Instead, let's make time to build a playbook for all new employees. Here are a few elements you can use to build a great, thoughtful, intentional employee initial training book. First, start with a welcome letter. Make time to sit down and ask yourself, "If I were being hired by a business, what would I want to hear from them on day one?" Whatever comes to mind…write that down no matter how long or how short. Second, give a broad overview of your business. We encourage all of our clients to build a Master Process Roadmap…this is your entire business on one sheet of paper. A great roadmap is made up of at least four columns representing the four systems found in every business: Administration/Accounting, Operations, Marketing, and Sales. Underneath each column are a list of every known process that is required to make that system run effectively and towards the mission of the business. The third element of a great initial training book for your team, is a technical overview of the elements they will need for their role. Your team member needs to know who to ask and where to go find direction and answers to help them fulfill the role they are committing to. Who does what within the organization (Org Chart)? How do I get access to the important elements of that role (Checklists)? How do I learn the nuances of each process (docs or video training)? If you don't know where to begin, just begin. Sit down in a quiet space for a dedicated time (start with 30 mins) and just begin to jot down bullet points of everything you believe this person will need to know. Creating the outline is actually the HARD part…once you know what they need, it is easy to fill in the gaps because you (or someone else) have done those little tasks thousands of times up till now. Make time to outline…the content will follow. Finally, your initial training book should come with a simple scorecard, or expectations sheet. This answers the question for the new employee, "how do I know if I am doing this right?" Whether your initial training book is five pages or five hundred pages, your new employee, and you, will feel a sense of clarity knowing that they have a place to start when they have big questions. Don't be the coach without a playbook…an initial training manual will help your team flourish!

Could you leave your business for 30 days and not check-in at all? Why or maybe why not? Let's talk about that today. Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. The litmus test for our coaching roadmap is always what we call the 30 day test. Could you leave your business for 30 days and not answer email, voicemails…whatever. What would happen to the business? Would it be able to survive? Would it limp along with quality control issues and employees aimlessly getting through each day? Would people even know what to do and would they get it done? If you're anything like most of our clients when we talk to them…the answer is always, no way. That's impossible! But it's not. I was sitting with one of our former clients last week and he was saying how freeing it was for him to actually try it. He had finished recording all of his systems and processes. He had delegated all of his responsibilities and the day to day operations of his business…and he took off. Loaded up the family for an RV trip out west for 31 days…because why not go a day longer just to prove the system works! No email, no phone calls…just let the team figure it out. And they crushed it! Years of preparation for that 30 day trip and yet the business seemed to thrive as it leaned into each system that had been built along the way. So, if you were to answer no way to the question…what holds you back? Are you the main source of revenue generation? Ok, no problem, how can you begin to share that with someone and delegate? Are you the key person who puts out all of the fires? Great! Start training someone and bringing them into these decisions to get that responsibility off of your shoulders. But seriously, if you had to hone in on what was holding you back, what's keeping you from starting to offload that? Think the business can never get there? Well change your thinking, work on an ORG chart and a Vision that would allow you to offload it and then go to work achieving it. Because here's the thing. If the answer to this question is no, if you can't take off 30 days and the business survives…it actually means you have a job not a business. That's a harsh truth, but you really just have a job that you have to show up to versus an active business that you are running to work without you. That's a BIG DIFFERENCE!!! Now, hear me clearly…if 30 days off isn't what you want, that is fine. But what is the target? It's a business that COULD work without you if you needed it to. I have had incident after incident of clients telling me they don't need to work towards that in their business and yet we push them to get it there. And the unthinkable happens. Father comes down with cancer and they need to go home to spend time with him and help through treatment. Daughter gets in a car accident and has to have surgery at a hospital an hour away. Kid does better in a baseball tournament during the summer and gets invited to play in a tournament 4 states away to showcase their talent in front of college coaches and asks you to be there. These are real situations, where had they just thrown up their hands and said, no we don't need to build systems and processes, they would have missed all of them or at best been rushed and distracted instead of present where they needed to be. That's why we always say it's not just about being liberated from chaos, but it's so that you can make time for what matters most. That's the end goal! And for any one of our clients who have had something that truly matters staring them in the face and had the freedom to go with no questions asked, knowing their business would be fine without them, gah that is what we want. That's why we push and ask the question. So, today, go back to that question and ask what needs to change so I could take 30 days off in my business. Do it today! You'll be glad you did. Thanks so much for joining today, hope you have a great week!

It is the first day for your new employee. Yet most new employees for small businesses walk into their first day staring at what feels more like a rusty, duct taped operation instead of a well-oiled machine. The very first impression that a business makes on a new employee takes place during the hiring process when the business team is simply telling the then-candidate about the wonders of their business. Day one is usually the day where the new employee walks in and comes face to face with reality, "what I see feels different from what I was told." This story has played out too many times in our coaching calls where an owner will tell us they just hired a new employee and when that person walked in on day one, not only did the owner forget they were to start that day, they also began scrambling to find busy-work that would occupy the new employees time. The owner then justified that haphazard training by saying "it's just better if we throw you to the wolves". No. It is not better to simply be thrown to the wolves without initial training on how to handle wolves. Imagine any professional sports coach simply throwing a new star player to the wolves without training and practice…it's silly. Yet in business that tends to be the strategy of choice. We hide behind excuses like, "we just hire smart people and they can figure it out", or "if she can't handle the heat then we don't need her". There is a better way, a more human way to onboard that massively valuable new team member. One element of that better way is to have a new employee kit or packet ready to physically hand them on day one. That packet can consist of five elements to give your new employee a much higher chance of success. First, each new employee starter pack should include an opening letter from the owner. This is a letter that is standardized for the new employee starter pack and allows the new employee to hear directly from the visionary of the business. The letter should start out with a simple welcome followed by the mission of the business letting the new employee know that the primary reason they were hired is to help achieve the already-defined mission. After the mission, the letter should include a simple outline of the unique core values of the business letting them know, "these are the filters we use to make decisions every day." The letter can be rounded out with an overview of the rest of the new employee starter pack. Second, each new employee starter pack should include the outline of their initial training. What technical skills will you be teaching them? How? When? What will the timeline of that training look like? What professional soft skills will you be having them commit to? What is the scorecard for a successful startup in this role? Third, each new employee starter pack should include a printed guide with training notes or slides they will be learning from so they have a note-taking mechanism. Actively having your new employee physically write down notes, thoughts, and questions will help them to engage and retain the information that must be shared. In her helpful book The Power Of Writing It Down, Allison Fallon reminds us that "writing gives us space to work through our biggest questions." Fallon goes on to remind us that "writing helps us gain confidence in ourselves, our ideas, and how we move through the world" while giving us a chance to know the sound of (our) own voice." Giving your new employee space to write gives you the space to answer their biggest questions, thus new content for updating your training as you hire future employees. Your greatest opportunity for feedback on your business are the fresh, new eyes of a new employee. Fourth, each new employee starter pack should include startup swag and quick start support tools for the role they are assuming. If you are hiring a salesperson, what are the selling tools they will need to stack away in preparation for that first sales call? If you are hiring a field operations person, what are the "cheat sheets" or checklists that would be helpful in the startup phase? Think of these tools as the "Quick Start" guide you see when you open the box to a new appliance or power tool. Identify the five things (or four, or seven) that will get this person "started" in this new role knowing that a more advanced understanding of the job will come with further time and intentional training that you have mapped out above. Finally, every new employee start kit should include some sort of engaging handbook that employees can refer to answering the most basic questions like contact lists, and overall employee related questions (payroll cycles, vacation, dress, conduct, etc.) Regardless of the specific elements in your new employee starter kit, just having something built and delivered that shows forethought and intentionality in line with the mission of the business takes you miles down the road towards a successful startup with your new team member.

This summer, we have had multiple business owner clients physically leave the location of their business for an extended period of time (anywhere from two to four weeks). Most of these are physical location businesses, and no, this is not a fantasy…it is real life. For the most part, these owners are not spending the time away from their business simply sipping bubbly and eating bon bons. Most are staying active through the duration of their time away, and in many cases working on their own business, or learning about the inner workings of another business they are visiting. One owner traveled north for five hours and worked three days a week at another business that is in the same industry. He simply called the owner up and asked to come work as an employee so he could watch and learn. The perspectives and takeaways were endless. He would spend a few minutes each evening creating audio notes from his time each day. No conference could equip him in the same way he was able to see it for himself. How did he create the margin to physically leave his business? You can read and listen to the majority of our content to learn that. The bigger question is, why? Why did he leave his business and not spend every second of the time away just resting and relaxing? Most business owners are drivers, and most drivers rarely find replenishment from "doing nothing"... their mind never stops. Instead, owners are now making a decision to leave their physical location for extended periods of time, and making a plan beforehand with how they will allocate their time in a rhythm of rest, intentionality, learning, and work. While away, many of these business owners would still check in on elements of their business, but only during pre-determined times. But why? First, when you are physically taking a break from the all-in, day-to-day grind of your business, then you are forcing yourself to see things from a different perspective. I have also been physically away from the central location of our business for three weeks. Two of those weeks were committed to working both in (some) and on (some) of the business, and one of those weeks was committed to absolutely zero communication around our business. While hiking trails in the morning, or biking town streets in the evenings that are unfamiliar to me, it is forcing my mind to bend differently around many of the same issues that I was only able to see from one angle. The second reason you should make time to take a break from the day-in-day-out grind of your business is what it does for your small team. You have team members that are silently looking for an opportunity to grow, to lead, and to develop. Contrary to the bitter generational sentiment, there are many young professionals, leaders, and line workers who are waiting to be asked… to be invited into greater responsibility. They cannot (err will not) step up if they believe they will be stepping on your toes. No matter how non-intimidating you think you are; your team will usually have great internal respect for your role, and you will not see them "step up" until you are willing to step out for a small period of time. Finally, you should plan to take a break from your business for a defined period of time because it will force you to prepare for that time away. In order for your team to assume responsibility in your distance, they will need to embrace the vision, mission, and values of the business. They will need to be equipped w/ the systems, processes, and methods to bake that cake, stack that crate, pack that bait, or quote that rate. When others are working IN the business, it allows you to leverage your narrow brilliance, that part of the business you truly enjoy while the team runs the day to day. You will never fully know if your team is ready to own the day-to-day, if you are unwilling to leave the day-to-day… if only for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. Start preparing now, set a date, communicate, prepare… and go see your world from a different trail.

I've sat down with a few businesses recently for introductions and after chatting for 30 min or so, they have each said something along the lines of, "man this sounds awesome! I'd love to get through this busy summer and start up with y'all in the fall." That's great, so what's going to be different in the fall? If you can't make the time right now, what happens in the fall where things magically slow down? So, this raises the question…"When is the right time to work on your business?" That conversation has probably happened 25 times. And I'm being more direct than I probably would be with them, but the truth is right there. Nothing changes in the future. Life doesn't magically slow down and give you this green light to finally work on your business. At least not with any of the businesses we work with. It's fought for and scheduled and followed religiously until it becomes ingrained into the fabric of your business. You know, just like I do, that your business doesn't care if you have a vacation planned or were hoping for a date night with your spouse. Nope…it slings chaos at you just as frequently as the sun rises in the east every morning. So…how do we find the time to make all this work? Because what we ask Business on Purpose clients to work through is DEFINITELY work! In fact, we ask for 2-3 hours a week of "work on your business time" every single week. There are ones that limp along for a bit, and then there's one where it looks like they are in the fast and the furious movies as they just fly through our roadmap and see change in just a few short months. So what's the difference between the two? Well, we asked our clients that question. And here were their top 3 answers. 1. Schedule time every week and don't allow anything to invade that time. I know it seems overly simple, but putting it on your schedule every week, letting your team know that you're diving into work that ONLY you, the business owner, can do, is a game changer. Then shutting out email, texts, calls, interruptions of any kind so that you protect that time and can do valuable deep work! That's what moves the needle. 2. Stop making excuses for why you can't find the time. This may come across as harsh and it's not meant to. I'm guilty of this, too, as we all love excuses! I'm too tired, we were gone all weekend, my kids are too young, my kids are about to leave the nest and we don't have much time left with them, I have too much work right now, I don't have enough work right now, we have the wrong employees, we just aren't ready yet…trust me we've heard them all! What we heard from our clients is that the day we stop making excuses is the first step towards freedom from the chaos. Because you take charge of owning your business and start moving the right direction. There's no way to get rid of legitimate excuses, but you can stop them from preventing you from moving forward. 3. Follow the plan. Early on in coaching, most people fight certain things we tell them. Whether it's team meetings that they've tried and failed at before, or opening up multiple bank accounts, or delegating responsibility for things to employees that you don't know quite how it will turn out. And yet we have taken hundreds of businesses through our Roadmap and everyone that has committed to all of it. Not a la carte pieces of it, but the system as a whole has come out the other side free from the chaos. But it takes trust and commitment. Each of them, looking back, wished they had stopped fighting it and gone with it, trusting the plan. Now, hindsight is 20/20. We all look back and wish we had done things differently, but once people commit to the plan and gain momentum there's no looking back. So…what changes for you this fall, or in 2023? What's holding you back from working on your business this week, today…shoot right now!?! If you ever expect anything to change you have to schedule the time, stop making excuses, and follow the plan. And as always, we're here to help! It's what we do best…liberating business owner's from chaos. A plan to walk alongside you the whole way! If you'd like to see how your business stacks up on the things that we value, take a few minutes to take our healthy business owner assessment at boproadmap.com/healthy. Hope we can touch base soon!

Today I want to talk about something that holds businesses back more than anything else. Continual learning and implementation. Thanks so much for listening in today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. One of our core values here at BOP is learn and implement. We want every conversation with business owners, every coaching meeting, and shoot every time we show up to work to be a learning experience. Relentless and never-ending. We never just want to step back and look at our content, our roadmap, and think…man it's perfect! Because the business world is always changing. It morphs and moves and the climate it operates in changes. We have to be willing to learn and adapt and change with it. Now, we don't want to change the core of who we are, but operationally and strategically we can be out in front as we respond to all of that change. But here's the thing, we don't just want to learn. We want to adapt and implement that learning into our every day. It's next step that so many businesses fail to do today. And that, specifically, is what I want to talk about today. When we see businesses stall, or plateau…9 times out of 10 it's because this thought has entered their mind and not been kicked out like a kid acting out in class. They will think… well, that's just the way it is and I don't ever see it changing. They have waved the white flag on whatever their problem with and growth cannot happen in that vacuum. You see it's that fixed mindset, we seem to have talked about that a million times, that holds business owners and their teams back. I was working with someone the other day and here's what they said…that schedule has always been chaos. And we don't see that changing anytime soon. We've done this for 30+ years and it's always chaos. So here's where I pushed back. If you believe it's going to be chaos, then you've already given your consent to your team that it SHOULD be chaotic…and that's a problem. What part of the process do we have control over? Well, a lot of it. The business owner said. Great! Let's start there and work backwards. So we built out a 12-week plan to get better at the things they control. We wrote out every step of their process with dates that corresponded. Even invited several of their team members into the process to make sure that the next time they walk through this…it may still have some components of chaos, but at least they will own the parts they can control. That's game-changing business ownership. Understanding what you control, and even if 100 times over you fail, taking what you've learned, growing from it, and implementing it into a new process that can lead your team to a more efficient and enjoyable experience. It's why we get out of bed every morning at BoP…to liberate you from that chaos! So…where have you thrown your hands up in your business and just said, it will never change? Where have you just gotten so frustrated and stopped learning, have made the choice to crack the door and make chaos normal. You cannot tolerate it or it will spread every which way in your business and hold you back from growth. So today, take the time to think through it. Then, do something about it! Put a plan in place. Figure out who needs to be in the room, discuss what you can control in the process, and become experts at the things you control. Shoot, maybe it's inviting other businesses who are a part of it too, and ironing out a process together. Because newsflash, eliminating chaos helps them too!!! I can promise you if you can take a step back to provide yourself with some margin, it is never the wrong thing to do. It will help in all areas of your business! And here's the last thing…if we can help, please reach out. It's our specialty! Walking along business owner's to figure this stuff out. Because it helps you make time for what matters most in your life. Not just putting out fires, but family and building your team and not having a heart attack! And maybe finally running your business instead of your business running you. Hope that makes sense today! Have a great one.

It's mid-July…back to school is beginning to rumble in the not too distant future, employees are restless and it's time to begin preparing for another season of structure as the fall rapidly approaches. Hey everyone, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. So, what do you need to be doing to get ready for that? How can you truly kick it off with a bang and get your team operating at full capacity again? Well, I've got 3 things you can do TODAY to prepare for the fall. I don't want to waste any time, so let's dive straight in. 1. Take an inventory of where your team is at? When was the last time you scheduled a meeting with yourself to do a self-audit? Are you struggling with motivation? With lack of training? Do you have the right people in the wrong seats on the bus or the wrong people on the bus entirely? Are there glaring holes or areas where your process is severely lacking? I wouldn't blame you no matter what the answer. But you can't figure out a plan to get where you want to go without having a sobering conversation of the state of your business. Here's what I'll tell you. Be brutally honest. Not negative and debby downer, but honest. Those are two very different things. Negativity keeps you from seeing hope and solutions, while honesty shows your flaws and leaves room for solutions! Lean in on honesty Walk through your Vision, your mission, your job roles and org chart, your core values. Look at your schedule to see if any changes need to be made. Look at vendor relations and any headaches with team members that have been consistent…hopefully, you've kept good notes in your employee check-ins! Take a quick pulse check on your culture…what are you known for internally and externally? Once you have a great idea of the things that need fixing it's time for step 2. 2. Build out a team day for early fall and get it on the calendar What problems came back time and time again. Do you need to walk through processes by department and retrain on all of them? Does your team need more structure and accountability? Do they just need to laugh and play together and enjoy some good food together after a long summer of grinding it out? Do you need to redraw job roles and share lines of responsibility? Are there new people on the team that need to hear you read through your vision story and your mission statement to explain where you're going and why you're going there? Do you need to remind them of your core values and what truly separates you and the standard the team will be held to? Maybe it's just a time to thank them and celebrate and truly build a culture of gratitude…I don't know. But so often we try to address all of this stuff in an hour meeting when the phone is ringing and to-do lists are out of control. But everyone's attention is on their job and not on the meeting…so get your team away. It doesn't have to be at a resort. It can be at a bowling alley, at a putt-putt course, one of your homes, anywhere! But create a time to refresh your team and address anything that came up in your self-audit. It all starts with building it out and putting it on the calendar! That brings us to our last thing to do today… 3. Build in structure of accountability So often this stuff fades quickly because we never revisit it. We have to build new systems to support these areas that need help. If it's something like Core Values, start talking about it every week at team meetings. Where did we see someone live out our core values? And have a small prize like a gift card or silly award. If it's new processes, set up a follow-up meeting once a month to talk through any hiccups or areas to improve it. If it's moving job roles around, have check-ins once a week to offer support and make sure the team is living in the new roles effectively and not drowning! We want to take the easy way out and just act like by us leaving work for a few hours, playing together, and discussing things that matter is really going to create lasting change, but it's only the starting point. If we don't revisit and create repetition and a predictable system to live within, our team just goes back to their same old habits and nothing changes. Address it, coach it, provide the system to live within, and then watch it come to action. So, if you're like almost every business we work with, your team is tired and dragging trying to finish the summer. It's time for a reset. Schedule some time for a self-audit today, build a team day around the things that are found out in your self-audit and then build in structure and accountability to keep things moving the right direction. You can't solve every problem today, but you can start building the framework to fix a handful of them this fall. Hope that makes sense and hope you truly will schedule the time for this work this week. Have a great day!

A dear friend of mine sent me a book recently simply titled Success: The Glenn Bland Method…How To Set Goals and Make Plans That Actually Work! The book was written in the 1970s and quite frankly carried and implied genre that I don't spend much time reading (but should probably spend more time). On page 42, I was stopped when Glenn Bland wrote this about goal setting, "only 3 percent of all people have goals and plans and write them down. Ten percent more have goals and plans, but keep them in their heads. The rest - 87 percent - drift through life without definite goals or plans." Then Bland follows that shock statistic with this, "the 3 percent who have goals and plans that are written down accomplish from fifty to one hundred times more during their lives than the 10 percent who have goals and plans and merely keep them in their heads." Fifty to 100 times more during their lives than the 10 percent. Brian Moran wrote a great book some years ago, The 12 Week Year. It is a must-read, and a must-implement. Here is the jist… Renew and update your goals every 12 weeks instead of every 12 months. Only choose 3 goals…only 3. Any more than 3 and you are at risk of not accomplishing anything. Too many goals is similar to having no goals at all. Within each goal, write out as many tactics you will need to accomplish the specific goal. That's it…pretty straightforward. Moran gives us a simple framework to follow and one that has worked well, albeit adapted to a variety of contexts, in it's most basic form. Many of our clients have seen success and have positioned themselves as one of the 3 percenters, and thus accomplishing more value-added things in their lifetimes than they could have imagined to this point both at work, and more importantly, at home. That's a big takeaway…don't just make goals for work, prioritize goals for your personal life as well and follow up on them with the same rigor. How have they set goals and achieved them? Three things. First, set 3 goals. Each goal can be intentionally broad and should be a direct solution to a challenge you see right now, or the next mountain that you wish to climb. Do not overthink your goals, and at this stage, they do not need to be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Just create a title for a goal like, "better culture and employee engagement". Second, take 1 of those goals you created and then create as many steps as needed that it will take for you to look up in 12 weeks and say, "because we accomplished each one of these steps, we can confidently know that we have a better culture and employee engagement." For instance, you may have some of these items as tactics, Take 30 mins to write out a description of our existing culture and engagement Set meetings with each direct report to ask them their feedback on our existing culture, and what their vision is for our culture Write out a vision for our culture Create a list of important culture and engagement elements Share the list with the team during a team meeting Add a line item in our team meeting to review the list weekly If you do not map out the details of your goals, then you will rarely achieve them. Finally, the missing element to most goal setting is repetition. Having one place, usually the weekly team meeting, where the entire team can hold themselves accountable to the goals and tactics. Goal-setting workshops are notorious for writing things down, and then never circling back to implement, review, or hold account to those goals. Do this exercise with your team four times per year and watch your culture become a collection of 3 percenters! Remember, if you don't write it down, you don't own it. If you don't write it don't you can't understand it. If you don't write it down…it doesn't exist.

After spending two days speaking to a groups of builders and contractors, there is an unspoken question that most have and is revealed when we begin to talk about the chaos they are feeling. What most builders and contractors want to ask, but struggle to open up about is simply, "how do I manage my small business successfully". They know what features the clients' desire. They know how good structures are built, and yet they quietly live with an inadequacy of building a structure of their business with the same integrity, the same stability by which they build their projects. In the volatile market environment we are in now, material delays, pricing increases, and employee challenges, how is a business owner to manage the business so that the business doesn't end up managing them? A journey back into the annals of history can help us gain perspective on our current reality. Where there is no vision, people become detached, scattered, and alone. It's proverbial…it's a natural law. If you have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have clarity, you have direction, you have aim = clarity and purpose. If you DO NOT have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have confusion, chaos, and aimlessness = frustration. You cannot manage what you do not see. You cannot see what is not laid out plainly in front of you or your team. The first element every business owner must have written and installed in their business to have a business they manage instead of a business that manages them is a written, detailed snapshot of the future of their business. In short, this is a written vision story. A business without a written, communicated vision, is simply an idea in an entrepreneur's head that people are forced to gamble to be true. Lacking a vision is like a transit bus with a full load of passengers driving particularly nowhere. Where there is no vision, we run out of gas at the worst possible times and places. In order to have a compelling vision, you must have the 3 RPMs of great leadership: repetition, predictability, and meaning. Repetition is the mother of all learning as made evidence by Aristotle's oft visited quote, "we are what we repeatedly do." Predictability seems mundane, uninteresting, and boring…but predictability is the lifeblood of scale and delegation. Meaning is the communication of significance. Money is not meaning. The best predictor of engaged team members has more to do with highly communicated meaning (vision, mission, and values) than it does with the accumulation of more and more money. The second awareness to managing a business that does not manage you is committing to hiring humans, and not playing chess with "human resources". There is a word that is being suggested in the public discussion of psychology right now that is worth taking a look at…the word LANGUISH. To languish is to "lose or lack vitality… being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation" Author and Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant says it's not burnout, because we still have physical fuel, and it's not depression because we still have hope. What is causing us to feel weak and withered, to feel LANGUISHED? DISTRACTION Translation of distraction? We are willfully allowing ourselves to be pulled apart… pulled away. William Danforth, former Chairman of Purina, wrote in 1953 of the power of a good, distraction-free walk… "(Walking) is the best medicine! This is not only the best but cheap and pleasant to take. It suits all ages and constitutions. It is patented by infinite wisdom, sealed with a signet divine. It cures cold feet, hot heads, pale faces, feeble lungs, and bad tempers. If two or three take it together, it has still more striking effects. It has often been known to reconcile enemies, settle matrimonial quarrels, and bring reluctant parties to a state of double blessedness. This medicine never fails...and you have it in perfection as prepared in the great laboratory of Nature." When was the last time you went on a walk, with no distractions? Give it a try and see if you don't begin to gain a clarity that you are finding it hard to discover of late. Human resources is the discipline of managing distracted people so that the company comes out on top. Hiring humans in contrast means understanding the thing that most hinders us from living out our skillsets, and providing the best possible environment, the best "stage" by which each person can thrive, leading to the thriving of the organization. When hiring humans, in a humane way, we invite them into a collective that breeds culture. Culture is a biology term! Culture is not lunch on Fridays, soda fountains in the break room, bean bag chairs, and unicorn rides for the kids The ingredients you put into your culture are the ingredients you grow out for all to enjoy… or not. The culture you have is a DIRECT result of the ingredients you have planted. If you like it, keep planting. If you don't like it, plant something different. Eithe

You are not your business. I own The On Purpose Group, the entity that holds Business On Purpose, but that is not who I am. I heard a late-middle-aged woman recently say something that made me sad, "I wouldn't know what to do if I didn't own this business… this has been my identity for so long." It is ironic that amount of time and focus that we spend trying to protect our digital identity (identification, credit cards, passwords, etc.) and yet spend very little time trying to maintain a distance between ourselves and the identity that is created from our work. You are not your work. Today you can serve ice cream, tomorrow lead a class on pottery, and the next day lead a congressional hearing. Of course acumen in any trade or profession is, in part, gained through right repetition over long periods of time. So if you wish to have impact through your work, then it will likely require longevity and focus. Where we must be careful is when longevity and focus begin turning into obsession and idolatry along with a healthy dose of "what else would I do if I didn't do this." Anything valuable thing taken to an extreme is at risk of becoming a liability. Hence the woman who has allowed her business to become her identity. Her community might look at her and say, "Wow, what an impact". While her family and friends might look at the same person and think, "Wow, what a missed opportunity." How do you ensure that you and your business remain two separate organisms working in tandem for the health of your surroundings and avoiding becoming one in the same? Build your business with an opened hand realizing that you not owning the business is always an option on the table. Although I own The On Purpose Group, I want to operate with a mindset that I manage the business as a General Manager or Steward who is always looking out for the best interest of all stakeholders, and to build the backend of the business in such a way that someone else could come in and manage if and when that time were to come. Recently, Gerrick Taylor, owner of Taylor's Landscape Supply and Nursery left his five location business for two weeks to go serve as an employee at similar business about five hours away. He wanted to go see how a similar business is managed day to day. While Gerrick is gone Taylor's will continue to operate because it has been built in such a way where multiple team members can operate or steward the business in the owner's absence. Derrick is not Taylor's, Taylor's is an organism running, operating, and growing even while he is away because the team is empowered to grow the business. It is always better to have a sellable business, even if you choose not to sell. How do you build a sellable business that can run without you and free you from the prison of being tied to your business…whether you wish to sell or not? First, you must decide that you will not be synonymous with your business. It is more of a mindset than a checklist of tasks to be accomplished. Ask yourself right now, do people know me for anything other than my business? If you have a hard time answering that, you must take action. What are the things that makes your sense light up? What are the things you dream about doing if you didn't "have to work all of the time"? Brennan Manning once asked, "what makes you cry?" What is it? What makes you tear up at the mere sight of a thing? A child jumping into a father's arms? A homeless woman on the street begging for money at the stoplight? A legislative policy? Ensuring that couples are well equipped before getting married? For some, we must begin radically separating your identity from your business. Imagine this, we are all standing at your funeral, and on your headstone it reads, "He owned a great company". Of course, that great company can do great things for people like providing great jobs, great products that serve needs, and the rest. But I would dare say that your life is of more value than the jobs you created or the products you served. Even without the company, you are important. Wouldn't you rather have your headstone read, "He loved well", or "His family was crazy about him"? Second, you must commit to building purpose and systems that build people that build the business. One of the reasons that you are synonymous with your business is because most of the systems of the business are in your head. What happens to the business if something happens to you? That was the question TJ Anderson asked driving down a four-lane road in 2015. TJ owns Atlantic Spray Foam and had that sobering thought when thinking about his future. He began radically committing to building systems, process, and purpose into his business. He went from being the dominant business developer in his business, to rarely selling, servicing, or scheduling any jobs and instead investing in a team that invests in the customer. Finally, you need to surround yourself with third-party wisdom mentors who are not going to blindly cheerlead. You

Our family's mission is to be a light through wisdom, adventure, and time around the table. Our family mission ties directly into the mission we have here at Business On Purpose which is to liberate heroic business owners, just like you, from the chaos of working IN your business. So that you can ENJOY your business, maximize the impact that it can have on your family and your community, and make time for what matters most! For a ground rule...IGNORE THE NOISE and distraction… "It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise, and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work." We are about to SHOW you our work. It's up to YOU to implement Surveying hundreds of heroic business owners just like you over the past few years we have heard loud and clear one of the biggest challenges that you face in your business...the feeling that you will never be able to step away from your business b/c you are SO busy working IN your business. Imagine the day, a lady named Josephine comes walking in your workspace, opens up a combo-locked suitcase and says simply… "I am ready to buy your business at a 4 times multiple of your annual earnings IN CASH right here on the spot...with two conditions… ...First, we have to be able to run your business the same EXACT way that you run your business right now, from the sales calls, to the payroll schedule, to the lead generation, to the production and everything in between. I will not require you stay on an earn out...but we need the entire business map so your valued customers will never feel the switch… Second, you have 30 minutes to make your decision and we will expect the roadmap to be in our hands and training to begin immediately using ONLY that roadmap as our training (you will not be allowed to "wing" any of it from your head!" Could you do it? You might say, "No one would ever do that." Ummm, we've seen crazier. Then you will say, "that is totally unreasonable to expect that a business owner would have her entire business mapped out SO THAT THE TEAM COULD RUN IT." Or is it? We can say with definition that your business is certainly more "sellable" with a comprehensive systems roadmap in place because your team can run it! Of course, this entire example may be totally lost you on because you would never have the intention of selling your business anyway. No problem. But wouldn't you like your business to depend LESS on you, and more on the RIGHT TEAM? That is a business that compensates you with intentional time, meaningful freedom, and the money to pay for it all? Don't you want your business to help facilitate your passions and convictions? To serve others without killing yourself? Wouldn't you love to do what Eric Burton did, and leave your business for 31 days and it would continue to hum along? We have determined through our own experience that about 8 out of 10 Small Business Owners are being OWNED by their business which means that even if they wanted to sell, no one would ever pay to OWN a business THAT OWNS THEM! How do we break out of the prison of our own business? How do we finally get off the treadmill? How do we stop constantly putting out fires and feeling pulled in 17 different directions? How do we stop the habit of throwing Hail Mary's in our business everyday? One way to try is to simply continue doing things the way you have been doing them. Of course, we know where that leads...INSANITY! The other way is to replicate the delivery of every part of our small business and make it so predictable others can run it the EXACT SAME WAY WE WOULD. And, it also gives those team members the FREEDOM to use their skill set instead of being slowed by confusion. We are so obsessed about trying to find the right people…when in reality the more predictable strategy is to build a great SYSTEM where a variety of people can come join in. Remember the old Jewish phrase? In Jewish lore, there is a powerful statement that we have found to hold true since the centuries it was first written, "Write the Vision down so that those who read it may run!" The same is true for the processes that make up the Vision. In fact, we may even make our own statement to say, "Write the processes down so that those who read AND IMPLEMENT THEM, may run...the business!" Truth is...if you don't write it down...you don't OWN it…and neither can your team Did you know that your business doesn't have to own you? Did you know that you DON'T have to feel like you are on a treadmill? Did you know that owning a small business doesn't have to feel like a daily cliff dive with no visibility and no parachute? Owning a business can be the ultimate opportunity to set others free to live in their skill set, to serve customers, employees family's, vendors, your local community, and your global community...all at the same time!!! That's right. Your business can be a MASSIVE force for living out your convictions and serving others. BUT, it will never get there by doing the things that got you to this po

The U of SC football program had just won the first Bowl Game in the 100-year-plus history of the school. After joining the rugged and tough SEC in 1992, the Gamecocks were still struggling to be the elite SEC teams like Florida and Tennessee. Tennessee had a young QB with a head-turning last name…Manning. We had a pony-tailed enthusiast named Taneyhill, along with two offensive lineman, two running backs all headed eventually to the NFL. We were desperate for a signature win in the SEC. JAMES DEXTER STORY at Tennessee turning the table over, driving down to the five yard line 2nd and 1 (5 yard penalty): (7:40) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jPj3LKGMhc Blocked FG Returned 95 yards for a TD (9:51): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jPj3LKGMhc 56 - 21 Final Score… Often, in life, sports, and business, we do desperate things in desperate times in order to solve desperate problems. The last 2 years have created a desperate longing. Let's articulate the challenge that you are up against today. PAIN - Skyrocketing material and sub Pricing, Uncertainty, Subcontractor frustrations, Schedule delays, unrealistic clients, and PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE! Let's think through some of the desperate things you (or someone you know) may have tried in the midst of a desperate situation in your business… Go more intensely after deposits, draws, or receivables Maybe you're in a habit of using tomorrow's deposits, to pay yesterday's payables Hiring Marketing companies to get more leads/sales b/c "Sales solves everything right????"…even though we don't have measure in place to manage the money even if it did come in Tried to buy bulk material and it's dropped your cash flow Build Bonus structures and increased base comp, b/c "more money means people will stay longer" Just putting your head down and doing it yourself…"it's just easier" Tried to fix your schedule, or job costing, or projections schedule…but it just takes too much time Hired new PM's and Supers, Fired old PM's and Super's Hired your brother or your cousin, or your son Take on more work even though you are way behind on receivables and never properly job-costed previous job to understand profitability We are running around, spinning in circles, a slave to an over-heated market, the client, to the employee, to the sub, to the vendor. And we just want it to STOP. Just for a second so we can catch our breathe. Talked to a custom builder in Kentucky two weeks ago who said, "I'm actually looking forward to a market slow down." I was waiting for lightning to strike. You had a grueling week, and then you have a Saturday where you are fired up about a late breakfast where you are going to eat donuts, cinnamon roles, pancakes, bacon, cheese grits… then after you're done, you turn on a game on tv watching world-class athletes and think, "I need to work out!" Chaos can often translate to unhealthy habits because we are vulnerable. In the chaos of the pricing increases or material delays, we tend to rest in the false comfort of cash flow, while KNOWING that we are neglecting the discipline of purpose, process, and systems that will create a long term FIT-ness for us, our team, and the mission we are on in our business. I've seen it reported recently that both Quarterback Russel Wilson and basketball mega-star Lebron James each spend over $1 million on the health and fitness of their mind and body. Here is a hard reality…trying to control pricing and material logistics is like trying to control the weather…you can't control the weather, BUT you can forecast and adjust plans based on the latest information…and PRE-PARE. I love the world prepare…it's actually two words in Latin Prae (Pre) = before Parare (pare) = make ready How do we make ourselves and our business ready BEFORE the next step? A friend of mine, Chad Jeffers is the lead Dobro player for Carrie Underwood. He was passing through Columbia, SC a couple of years ago as we were in town and we had coffee in the lobby of the downtown hotel he and the other band members were staying at. I asked Chad a simple question that I had never asked, "what is it like to play in front of all of those people?" His response was sobering. He mentioned that most nights he forgets where he is at, and that the "repetition of the event" can get quite boring. In order to be great and find joy in touring, you've got to go back to THE FITNESS of your repetition and training. In preparation for Carrie Underwood's Las Vegas residency shows, Chad said… "Typically for tours (including Vegas) we will rehearse for a month and half to 2 months (7 days a week) prior to the first show. Personally, i prepare for the rehearsals about a month prior to that (especially if we are learning new music). " Kobe Bryant was 41 when he and his daughter died tragically in a helicopter crash in January of 2020. He was notorious for his relentless work ethic. Writers Scott Davis and Connor Perrett chronicle some of Bryant's more remarkable disciplines. Practice from 5a to 7

After months of spending time with and getting to know a construction contractor partnership we got to the point where they thought, "We really need help." After a few days, they came back and said, "I think we'll really be ready in about six months… what do you think?" This is a multi-million dollar, 40-employee business where each partner is having to stay at the office till 10 pm many evenings just to ensure that all of the moving parts of their business and life is being held up. They are spinning plates, juggling balls, throwing hail mary's, and hoping that when all is tallied up at the end of each year that they have more money than when they began. I asked simply, "what will be different in six months?" They looked at each other at a loss for thought, "probably nothing" they replied. In that moment I had a decision to make, give in to their excuses, or tell them the truth. The truth is that they have the bones of a great, legacy business and yet they are at risk of losing their friendship and their family if they continue down the hair-on-fire path they were currently on. I decided to respond with the mind of a coach instead of the mind of a placater, "you need to make time to begin right now…you have no time to waste, and if you do kick the can down the road, you will never get that time back…and time is ticking fast." They did not hesitate and we began a powerful coaching relationship. Not everyone is ready for coaching. In fact, we have a 26-point checklist that each of our coaches use to determine the fit of an ideal client. There are three questions we ask in particular that tell us if an entrepreneur and business owner are ready for a coaching relationship. First, are they willing to make time for coaching and implementation? We are told by many business owners, I can't find the time. You will never magically find time… there is no more time to be found. We are all allotted the same quantity distributed at the exact same frequency. There is no more time to find. Instead, will you manufacture your schedule in such a way that you prioritize the content of your coaching to learn, install, and implement? You must take the time you have and make it conform to your vision. Coaching is not primarily counseling where you layout a problem and then discuss psychological mechanisms to leverage in the future when those situations arise (although there is plenty of psychology in coaching). Coaching is game-planning, forethought, scouting, play-calling, no-nonsense communication, enforcing repetition, accountability, and motivation. Coaching is not cheerleading and empty flattery. You are being coached for one reason... to be liberated from business chaos, so you can make time for what matters most. Second question we ask is, "Is the business owner or entrepreneur willing to do everything we ask them to do based on the roadmap?" A sports coach is not taking implementation cues from the player…a sports coach is leading the player into the direction they wish to go. Want to win a championship? It is the coach's job to help you get there. Want to build a team legacy? It is the coach's job to help you get there. I've seen it before when the coach loses her zeal for accountability, repetition, and implementation, rarely does the player take that responsibility on themselves. The coach creates a roadmap for the player. Is the player willing to follow the roadmap even when it seems incongruent? A final question we ask is, "does the business owner or entrepreneur have more money coming in the front door than is going out the back door?" We have become too comfortable with what I'll call day-to-day debt. Assuming that it is normal and customary for us to credit-card and line-of-credit ourselves into and out of situations. We can brag on our profit and loss statements all day, but we all know inherently those are usually numbers on a page instead of cash in accounts. In every business we have ever worked with, there are leaks, holes in the financial hull of the business. It is normal, but we should never be lulled into being ok with the holes long-term. Instead, we want to plug the holes and shutter the back door where appropriate payables get shipped out, but everything else is retained for reinvestment or just fun profit! If the business is in a tailspin habit of spending tomorrow's deposits on yesterday's payables, it is hard for anyone to help that situation without major intervention. We're not looking for perfectly healthy businesses, we are looking for business owners and entrepreneurs who have real desire to grow, to do things differently, leading them to a place where they are liberated from chaos. In short, it is time to hire a coach when you are ready to do things different, to make time for the things that really matter, and follow principled leadership and wisdom in the mapped-out repetition of great discipline that leads to freedom.

Delegation… handing off things to your team to allow you to do what ONLY you need to be doing in your business. It's powerful and necessary, but how do you take a task from delegation to done the right way? Well, let's talk about that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. So last week I sat in on an interview and we were discussing how the candidate had implemented change in places he has worked before. And he introduced to us his process for delegating and training tasks. I just started smiling as he basically explained to us what we ask our business owners to do when they let go of certain tasks and hand it off to the rest of the team. He explained it in simple terms in a 4 step process that I'll walk you through today. First, there's a directive. A verbal communication of what is being asked to do. If you want someone to take over-invoicing all new clients and getting their payment set up, they have to be told it's their responsibility now. It never fails, we hear business owners complain all the time that things aren't getting done. When we drill down a bit, they have taught them how to do the task, they have even let them do it from time to time, but they have never communicated that this is now on their job role and 100% (or however much you desire) of the responsibility and execution of the task is handed over. There has to be a directive that tells them what the expectation now is. From there, comes coaching. A fully built-out process that explains step by step how to you would like it done. Leaving absolutely nothing out. Don't say, oh well they should know how to do that part… I promise you, it is worth your time to write every step out with pictures or a video teaching them how to do it. Doing it alongside them and coaching them to do it EXACTLY the way you want it done. Equipping them and encouraging them as you reinforce your directive. Third, comes support and accountability. What happens if they have questions? Here are resources for them. Here's when you will check back on them. Asking them at team meetings if it's done and how it's going. Asking if there is anything missing from the process and supporting them as they take it over. Even understanding how long they will need before it is time for them to take it all over. That's the support they need and that will ensure they are ready for the last step. Simply Do it. Take it over. It's their responsibility that has been communicated, coached on, supported, and then ultimately owned by them. Now, let's pause for a second. Typically, we jump from step one to four. Directive/Delegation and then you take it and own it. But what does that lead to? Frustration decreased performance and you thinking your employee is less capable than they actually are. If you skip the coaching step, there is accountability and support, but no clear tangible process for them to use. If you skip the accountability and support, there is not feedback loop to understand if they actually understand the task at hand. All four steps seamlessly go together. They must all be completed. And I can hear it now, Thomas this is going to take forever. And my answer? It's worth it, if it helps you get something off your plate and done effectively day after day after day. Because you're not delegating something so that you can own it again in 30 days. No, you want this off your plate to free you up for something else. Business development or a new role that only you can filL! So make sure it's done the right way. Don't skip steps. Direct and communicate, coach them up, offer support and accountability, then free them up to do it and own it. That's it. That's how you delegate. That's how you liberate yourself and your business from chaos. That's what it's all about!

Ok, we're finally sitting down to meet 1 on 1 with our employees. So what do we ask? Well, let's talk about that today. Good afternoon, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. The thing we have been pushing our clients to do more than anything is to sit down and meet with your employees. Spend time listening and learning. Good employees have become a currency in and of themselves, and the businesses that are thriving right now are, typically, ones with solid employees. So, we have been pushing our clients to meet with all key leaders once a week or every other week at a minimum, and then meet with everyone else once a quarter. It's incredibly valuable and communicates that you desire to hear what they have to say and invest in them individually. In a world where people are looking around for new jobs in record numbers, every meeting counts and every meeting communicates you want them to stick around for a long time. But the thing we hear more than anything is this…" what do I ask them about?" Or…" what do we check-in on?" Well, we built a check-in process to guide you through that. The first thing we want to ask is a general question to open up communication. We typically ask, "Ok, what are you seeing right now?" Super general and allows you to capture their eyes for a period of time. It's incredibly valuable as they are operating at a ground level in a way you are not. Listen, write down what they say, and decide if it's something you need to dive in on or something that needs to be tabled. Then, repeat it back to them. Let them know you heard. Next, we ask, "How are you seeing us live out our mission and values?" This is reinforcement of what truly matters. You will find out quickly if they even know what they are! But will also help you see some truly awesome things that are going on around your business. Third, we ask, "Do you have any questions about your job role?" Clarifying questions to make sure they know what they're being asked to do. Then, if there's ever tough conversations down the road, you can point to these check-ins where you intentionally asked them if they were confused on their job role. It's valuable and will keep them feeling supported. Next, "Anything you need from me?" Again, support and shows you want them to succeed and are willing to help. More often than not, you will hear, "I'm good." Especially if you're doing these meetings regularly, but when something comes up here, it's dynamite and helps y'all feel like you're pulling in the same direction and on the same team. Keep listening. Here's where I typically stop and ask any clarifying questions you want to hear more about. Don't go too long and try to answer everything at this one meeting. Some things are fine to hold off on, but feel the freedom to dig if need be. The last question is actually your chance to share. And it starts with… here's what I see. It's your chance to offer feedback both positive and negative. That way you're not waiting until your yearly review with an employee for them to hear something that frustrated you back in March. Dive in and tell them what you're seeing. It keeps short accounts. Its holding your team accountable and allowing you to course-correct along the way instead of trying to right the ship way on down the road. So that's it. Take notes, start a file for each employee and consistently ask the same questions…again, and again, and again. Use the answers to build content to go through at your team meetings. To build training…as if one employee has a question, there's a good chance that multiple are wondering the same thing and just haven't had the guts to ask yet. This is a game-changer. Your employees need to be listened to and need to hear from you! It is team building…It's accountability, it's getting a little bit better every week. Try it, write it down and let us know how it goes. I think you will be shocked at the progress you can make over a course of time by just committing to checking in with your team. Thanks!

Hey, y'all Brent Perry with Business on Purpose. Legally and hypothetically speaking, of course, but the question to ask yourself today is this, would I bet on my business to be profitable this year? Hopefully, your answer is yes, but the more business owners I have the privilege to talk with the more I realize there is uncertainty in that answer. Now I am not asking if you want your business to be profitable. Or if you are hoping to be profitable this year. I am not even asking if you have been profitable in the past. Again, this is a legal/hypothetical question, if you actually had to bet real, hard-earned cash out of your pocket, would you bet on your business to be profitable this year? This past weekend was the KY Derby, and wow, what a race it was. I will be the first to admit that I am not a huge horse race kind of guy. I do love riding, and I love sports, I just don't follow the world of horse racing that closely. Luckily I have some friends who do. And as we gathered on Saturday to celebrate the Derby, they were telling me about the field of racers this year. Apparently, it was a fairly stacked field, with 5-6 horses with similar odds to outright win the race. These horses would be considered the favorites, if you will, to bet on. The horses thought to have the best shot to win the race…aka the ones most people were betting on. These horses were the thoroughbreds, the ones with incredible pedigrees, the horses who have actually won some races in the past, and were being picked to take home 1st place. Now, let me tell you about the horse, Rich Strike. Rich Strike had an 80–1 odds to win the race, making it the second-longest shot to win in Derby history, per the NBC broadcast. Rich Strike started in the worst possible position out of the gate. And Rick Strike won the Kentucky Derby. This horse pulled off the win against some of the other favorites like Epicenter (one of the horses I mentioned earlier), who entered the race with the best odds and finished second on Saturday. Not only were his odds incredibly low, and his starting position the worst, Rich Strike wasn't even slated to be running the race until the Friday before the derby and he was signed up 30 seconds before the deadline. This is not the horse most people take a bet on. But this is the horse that won. One of my favorite quotes from the Horse's owner, Eric Reed stated, "This horse is just getting good … getting better every race." That's enough about horses, let's get back to your business. I don't know how you are feeling this year about your business. Again, the question I am asking today is about profitability. Are you one of the favorites that before this year began you would have bet on? Only to be slowing down and watch others around you pass you by. Are you one of the 80-1 odds that nobody gave a chance, but now you are seeing business grow and profit come easy? Or are you simply somewhere in the middle of the pack? The good news is, that it is not too late to change your race! And 2 quick tips, it starts with Vision Your bank accounts! If you want your business to be profitable you have to know where you are heading, and why you want to get there. Your vision has to be detailed and has to be shared with others. You also need to have diversified bank accounts and a system to track your money (both incoming and outgoing). We recommend 5 and one of those accounts, you guessed it a profit account! If you want some more information and thoughts about your vision or your banking strategy, please feel free to reach out to us at Business on Purpose. We absolutely love these kinds of conversations. And we love seeing your businesses profitable. Thanks for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe to our Podcast, and/or our YouTube channel. Also, check out our website here, and if you haven't done so already, take the Healthy Owners Assessment located on the home page.