Episode 126: The Bottom Line - Is Your Business a Machine or a Garden?

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are gonna be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

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Hey everyone, I hope you're having a great day, whatever day you are listening to this. And I was talking to some business owners the other day about, uh, just some of our favorite books. And I think for many of you like myself, maybe one of your favorite business books is The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. I think I read it maybe back in 2016, 2015, something like that. And it really is the seminal book that a lot of people reference, and, um, around really introducing the idea of systems and processes in your business. And if you go back and listen to an episode that I did, and hopefully one day we get Michael to come on the podcast, You go back and listen to the podcast that I did with Chris Ronzio, the founder and CEO of Trainual. He actually credits that book with a lot of his learnings. As a matter of fact, Michael actually wrote the foreword to his book that came out, which is called The Business Playbook. And in that, he, uh, Chris talks about profile and people and processes and policies and how those four things really are the things that you do. You take the idea from E-Meth, and then he shows you how to do it, do it using his 4 Ps. So I say all that to say that my own journey was one that I was not taught systems and processes. I would hear it, I remember hearing it really early on, but I had no idea what that really meant, and I really didn't know where to start. I know I can remember back when I was in college and I had to write a paper, and I just remember looking at word and it would be empty and I just didn't know where to begin. And that's kind of how I feel whenever I would begin to think about building a policy or a process or a system. And oftentimes it really is making that very first step to get started. So as we move forward, and my, my general disposition is not one to be structured and as organized, and I am working really hard on that myself. And have been for a long time to even architect my own businesses so that there is more structure and continuity and consistency within them. But sometimes I think the pendulum can swing a little too far and we go from no systems, a kind of a free-for-all, and we certainly all know intellectually that's not the right way to operate. But then sometimes the business, the systems and processes, you can almost strip the humanity out of it a little bit and you can over-systematize the business. And let me share with you a little bit of my thoughts about kind of the, the balancing, managing of the tension between the two. I think that the connotation with systems and processes is people will begin to almost use maybe automotive type references or machines, and they'll say, you know, make your business like a machine, build the machine of the business. And I get that. I think we all logically get what they're saying there. You know, if you can just build the systems one time and everything is so tight that everything just kind of lines up and it's like a factory. And, um, and, and I get that, but at the end of the day, a business does not exist without people, and people are not machines. People are people. And if a part of a machine goes bad on an airplane, on a car, and they go in and they, you know, take that part out and replace it if something broke. Um, had a friend of ours broke a piece of their propeller, uh, on their, on their boat a few years ago. What would they do? They take the old propeller off, they order a new one, and they put the, put the new one on, right? Good as new. And I think that the idea is that you can do that in business, but it's a lot harder to do that. In fact, I don't know if you can, because at the end of the day if you lose somebody and you really have hired A players, you're not just going to replace them. Yes, you're going to go and find somebody that's going to do their role, but you're not going to ever find an exact replacement for that person. And so where that journey for myself was is that as I was going through and systematizing the business, that I thought so much about systematizing that I kind of lost the humanity aspect of it and that if somebody left, it's fine, I'll just replace you with someone else and throw somebody else in there. And I think at the end of the day, that was a wrong approach, but it certainly wasn't the right approach for me to have kind of a free-for-all, no processes, no systems in place, no structure. And so I think that probably the better way to think about it is maybe business is more like a garden. You know, I was watching Wimbledon the other day and If you look at the gardens and the landscaping around Wimbledon— I've never been there, but I've seen it on TV— there's structure and there's organization. But if they just left those plants and those shrubs there to go on their own without watering them and tending to them, I mean, eventually it would be filled with weeds. I know many of you have gone by a neighborhood— there's one south of where I am right now— and they had a beautiful new sign for a new brand new neighborhood. But, you know, now you go by and look at it, it is just so overgrown you can't even see the sign, the entrance to the name of the neighborhood, because it's so overgrown with weeds. And I think that's probably a better depiction of what business really is, is business is probably— is more like a garden than it is a machine. You still want structure, we still need organization, But we don't want to, we don't want to strip the humanity. We don't want to strip the, the creativity. I think the systems and processes are in place in order for, to allow our teams to be able to find moments to surprise and delight our customers and our clients. Because if there are systems in there, and there's process, and there's a way of doing things, it will cut down on time. It will, it will make things more efficient. Ultimately, that drives more productivity, which in the end makes it to your profit and loss statement, to more income. You're able to do more with less, so you get a, a higher ROI on the assets of business, which is your team. But more importantly, it helps you to be able to, uh, or helps your team to be able to find moments that they can be human, they can connect with a customer, they can send that person thank you notes, etc., because of all the other systems that are in place. And so hopefully that has been really helpful for me in my own journey to see that sometimes the pendulum would swing too far. We go from, you know, one aspect to the other. We go from no systems to over-structuring, over-engineering the business. And I think it's possible. And so that balance between architecting the business, engineering the business the right way, but also seeing it more as a garden has been helpful for me. So business is probably more like a garden than it is a machine. Hope that's helpful. Have a great day. See you next week. Lead well. If you're listening to this podcast, I know you're someone who has a growth mindset and you probably want to be able to grow your book of business as well. What DirectClick specializes in helping insurance agencies leverage Google Ads and SEO to drive inbound phone calls. Leads, online visibility, and even organic traffic. You can be confident in knowing exactly how well your ads are working and getting support in what really matters in your business. Get exclusive online marketing support today when you visit directclicksinc.com. You know how important it is to develop yourself and to develop your team. Well, if you're going to do that, you want to do it with the best. 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