Episode 143: Like Clockwork with Mike Michalowicz

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Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. Today's episode, I think we have the first person to come on 3 times on the podcast, and for good reason. He is one of our absolutely most downloaded episodes. Of all time, Mike Michalowicz. He has written so many books that have impacted me on my entrepreneurial journey, and I know many of you. We've had him on in the past to talk about Profit First initially, and then Fix This next, and then he just has recently come out with his updated, revised version of his book Clockwork. You're going to love this episode to pick up so many different things, not only just from the book, but even in this episode, some really great quips and things that you can really implement into your business right away and begin to kind of think of yourself, have an identity shift in your business. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Mike Michalowicz. Mike Michalowicz, welcome back to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Bradley, it's a pleasure to be with you again, sir.

We love all of your books, but for me personally, so Profit First obviously was a game changer for me, but Clockwork is actually my favorite book. So for people that don't know, tell us about like What was the impetus to go back and actually write the revised edition of Clockwork? Because I read the original one and I have, uh, about 80% done with the, the mo— your most recent one, updated version that just came out. What was the impetus behind that?

Yeah, well, thanks for being so kind about the— says kind words about— I love that you love it. I, um, we have a parallel program to the book. It's called Run Like Clockwork. It's a service group. And so some people read a book, want to make sure that they're doing it right, and they go through the training. It's also a form of feedback for us. We just surpassed our 1,000th student, and I was looking at the common threads with the president of our company. Her name is Adrienne. It's like, oh, there's certain areas where people consistently get hung up. There's certain areas where it takes more time than necessary. And there's also other feedback just from readers. I got directly, like one reader sent to me saying, I'm enjoying Clockwork. I, I'm doing this, but I'm afraid to share with my employees because I don't want them thinking it's all about me taking a 4-week vacation. I'm like, no, we need the employees to be empowered. So the book ended up being 60% brand new content. There's, there's stuff for employees in every chapter on what they can do to elevate themselves. Elevate the Company. Um, core concepts like the QBR, this concept of the 4 Ds, all those things have been simplified and revised. Um, and I have the— I have case studies out the wazoo now. So in the original book, we were testing it, we had a dozen case studies. We have hundreds, not in the book, but hundreds of case studies. Uh, and I cherry-picked probably the top 25, uh, that I put in there. So there's, there's these brand new case studies in the book too. But My kind of tagline for it is it's 60% new content, 100% simplified.

Yeah, yeah. I will say to people that have listened to the podcast, know that I love to get the physical book and then listen to the audiobook. And I love the fact that you do the audio on your books and I love your little riffs and Audible. I love that. So keep continuing to do that in your audiobooks.

You're the deal. Thanks for that feedback.

No, it's great. It's great. I can get through books faster. Not that I'm trying to speed through books. I'm not necessarily doing that. I'm actually slowing down in books, but it does allow me to, to comprehend the information faster and deeper whenever I do that, honestly. So if I get a book I really like, usually start on Audible, and I'm like, oh, I really like this book, immediately get it so then I can go through it in tandem with the actual physical book. It really helps me a lot. So my first question is, I think that you have a very good, early in the book, very good description between the difference between growth and scale. And people use those words very interchangeably. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, that came out of, uh, the research or feedback we're getting from our group. So what— I didn't include that in the first book. I was like, oh, there's a fundamental misunderstanding here. Of, of the businesses I've interviewed, uh, which, uh, collectively collectively tens of thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. And maybe this is more subjective. It's not that I'm interviewing each one. I'm just getting surveys or feedback or just raise hands. I ask, you know, what are you trying to do with your business? And the common feedback is I'm looking to scale my business. And there's a misunderstanding what scaling is. Scaling is where you use fewer resources to get greater results. It's, it's an amplitude or an amplification effect. How do I get more done with less? But a growth mentality is how do I get more, same objective, with more? And when a business starts out, actually growth is necessary. You must put more resources into it. You must put more effort in to get results. But if that's sustained, it becomes limiting. And so most businesses are saying they're scaling when they're actually growing, and inherent to growth is stopping. So in summary, growth is do more to get more, scaling is do less to get more, and Clockwork, my goal is to convert businesses to truly scale and stop the growth mentality.

Yeah, whenever I think about in your definition of that, I had never heard that distinction between the two, and admittedly I would use those interchangeably myself. Yeah, but I think about growth whenever in, in that frame of, well, growth, I can just give more of my time, I can give more of my, uh, energy to it as the business owner versus scaling is like, no, no, you will run out of hours in the day to, uh, you won't be able to scale your business by you just giving more and pushing the gas pedal down.

That's ex— exactly right. So the funny thing is in the beginning of a business, if you are the founder of your business in particular, or one of the co-founders, that's the beginning. Like you, you have to hustle and grind. You have to work like crazy, but that is not a scalable mentality. And I even mentioned this in the book. There's, there's pundits out there, there's people say, oh, hustle, grind, work your ass off, sacrifice your family, you know, do everything for this business. And that's, That's a really dangerous and sick approach. Necessary in the beginning. And when I say beginning, just to get the seedling of the business sprouting. Once it starts sprouting, we have to convert to how do we get more out of this business with less resources, less effort? And, and often for the business owner, starts with ourselves. How do we start extracting ourselves from doing work in the business and instead being strategic, designing the outcomes?

Absolutely. Yeah. You also talk about just a quick definition of organizational efficiency. It's a little bit of tag on that, but what do you mean by organizational efficiency?

Yeah, organizational efficiency is where we choreograph the resources in organization, and resources is technology, employees, staff, vendors, even the clients themselves, where we organize them in a way that we get the most results. So, you know, organizing, organizing clients sounds absurd, but when you, when you look at it historically, businesses that become the most efficient actually give instruction to their clients. There was a time, I remember in the '80s and the '70s, if you wanted to buy something, you'd pick up the phone, call a call center, say what you wanna buy, and then tell the operator on the other line or on the other end what you want. Give them the address, they'd repeat it back to you. They'd mess up the street address. You have to repeat it again, respell it. Now they've taken that person out and they've given me the responsibility to input that data. They were typing in on their side. Now I'm typing in on my side. I'm typing in the data and I feel good about it. I'm like, oh, this is perfectly accurate. I'm happy typing my address for the 1 millionth time. That is organizational efficiency. It's looking at all the friction points, slowdown points, and saying, what can we adjust in this business to not modify the quantity of resources, but leverage them in a way that's most complementary to get the output we want?

Oh, that's so good. Yeah. You know, as an author, I know you have an affection with words, but sometimes you use words that I think, man, that's so good. When you said choreograph, choreograph the resources, that is really good. That stands out to me. I hope somebody is not writing it down if you're driving, but I mean, certainly capture that. You talk also about that Thinking deep, deep thinking about the business is really the hardest work that we do, which is why we don't do it. Can you just talk about— because I agree, I think the most important job that you can do for your business is the deep thinking about the business.

And it doesn't look productive. It's like a double-edged sword. It's the hardest thing to do. So there's a natural tendency to avoid it. There's aversion. Secondly is, what are people going to think of me if I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs? I'm not productive. But here, here's an example. Watch a chess match, you know, or whatever. I'm sure you can Google a chess match. You will see these two competitors moving pieces, and that piece— that move in the piece is, we all know, irrelevant. What was relevant is the two minutes they thought, pondering what are all the strategic moves they could make. Them doing nothing, we know is the most important work they're doing. The movement of the piece is finally the execution of the best plan.

Yeah.

Well, that's what, that's what business is. And we're saying, oh, I'm just gonna keep moving pieces around. I'm gonna win this chess game. No, you, you by default, you are losing cuz you're not strategically planning the idle time where there's no motion. Then our brain's kicking in and you're strategically thinking. Then when you make that one move, It's the best move you can make. I can't remember who said this, some famous CEO said, the reason I get paid X millions of dollars a year is because I make 4 to 5 critical decisions every single year. And that's the role we need to get into. Now, this is a transition. It's not like you're doing the business, you're scrubbing the floors and doing all the work necessary to keep that business going. It's not like tomorrow, you're gonna stop that and you're just gonna sit back and have 5 great ideas each year. But we do need to start transitioning that way. So I invite all entrepreneurs start blocking out at least an hour a week starting immediately to have design time, thinking time, get away from a computer, get away from anything that can distract you. Just have a notepad and a pen and just write down your biggest problem. Biggest challenge you have, and just start ideating around it. That time is gonna be so valuable. That is the sharpening of the axe.

Absolutely. Yeah. The part you mentioned right there about also really getting very clear on the problem that is in the business, the obstacle that's standing in the way, versus we begin to work on the problems that are not actually there, right? We're not really looking at the real obstacle that that's there. I've heard it said the problem that is versus the problem that isn't. I want to ask you, I don't know what your thoughts are, but one of the biggest main takeaways that I've taken from the book Clockwork is this idea of adopting the label of the shareholder of your business. I think that that is like, it permeates this overarching message. Can you speak to that about why it's so important to adopt this label? What does that even mean to be the shareholder of our business?

Yeah, it's fine. I included that. I did not have it in the first version of Clockwork. I included that because what I found is, is human nature for myself, yourself, all of us to comply with our identity. What we, who we believe we are is who we'll behave as, and therefore we are what we think. So pondering that, my own design time, I sat back and said, well, what, what are we calling ourselves? Well, entrepreneur. I, I'm the business owner. I'm the entrepreneur of the business. And those terms, sadly, I believe, have become bastardized. Entrepreneur is hustle and grind. How bad do you want it? How, how many hours you gonna work? What's the sacrifice you're willing to make? And so I love the word entrepreneur. I love it. I love what it used to stand for. But now I feel this compulsion for myself and others to comply with the entrepreneurial spirit, as they call it, of work my ass off and ignore and sacrifice everything else in my life. But I saw the term shareholder. Now, I'm a shareholder in public stock. I own 100 shares in Ford, so nothing big. But what's interesting is every quarter they send me a profit distribution for taking the risk of investing because the value could go up or down. Additionally, they allow me to vote, and I just got a stock I got a voting certificate just recently somewhere on my desk, I think, to vote for the board of directors, or they're making a strategic acquisition, or they're considering moving a plant. The shareholders collectively render their opinion on what they want to generate that return. Well, as a small business owner, you and I are shareholders in our own small business. We may own 100%, we may be the majority shareholder, By far, we have the same responsibility. You started the business, uh, you sweated into it or you invested in it or both, but you've established it. So you've taken on extraordinary risks to start something that didn't exist. You deserve a quarterly profit as a thank you for contributing to our economy, to supporting our economy. Additionally, we should serve the shareholder role of giving strategic opinion and direction. Now, one thing we may vote for is to also serve the business in a way that gives us joy. I still work in the business that I'm a shareholder of, but I like to do two things. I like writing books and I like being the spokesperson. So we're doing it right now. That's my gig. And so I voted myself back in, in that capacity, but I constantly call myself a shareholder and I behave consistently with it. The shareholder— I don't own stock in Ford and run down to the factory and see, hey, what do I need to do to earn this profit? The number one job of an entrepreneur is to be a creator of jobs, not to do the job. Yeah, that's what a shareholder is. Create jobs, create opportunity, manifest a vision, and share in rewards for doing that. Now, the last thing is— this is the caveat— you gotta start saying it. To have the identity shift, you can't say, okay, that's who I'm going to be. You gotta start publicly saying it. And it is weird. It's taken me a year of fumbling and bumbling and I'm still not perfect at it. But when I meet with someone and they say, what do you do? I say, oh, I'm a shareholder in small business.

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Like, what does that mean? And I have to redefine really for myself what that means. Yeah.

Whenever in the Audible I was listening to it and you actually riffed on a story about that and I stopped the book and I was thinking to myself, how would I actually set that? Okay, if I went to a chamber event myself, I probably bump into somebody. I was actually playing around and at first it is a little awkward.

It's weird.

Would I actually say that? But most importantly, you mentioned right there the identity shift and behaving consistently with the label. Oh, is it Chris Voss in his book How We Never Split the Difference about labeling things and adopting certain labels?

Correct.

Labels we don't want to adopt, but that is one we do.

Yeah, totally do it. And I find in other elements of my life, when I say something enough times, I have to comply with it. Positive or negative. So I can say I suck at accounting and I'll prove it right by never logging into the accounting system and ever looking at it because that's an identity. Um, so we need to shift our identity and we'll then shift our behavior.

Okay. Give people— in the, the book is started off and it starts off in an opening, but then has really 3 different phases, has the align phase, the integrate phase, and accelerate, and then chapters underneath that. Just Talk about the overall structure of the book and what is, you know, briefly, we'll, in our remaining time, we'll unpack a couple little things about the queen bee role I want to specifically ask you about, et cetera. But just go over the overview of the structure of the book.

Yeah, I mean, the core essence is, and this was a big part of the reframing the work, is we need to get the front matter done, the front work done that will align us up for a business that runs efficiently. So one thing I prioritize here is Who are the right clients you want to serve that not just is pivoting to their needs, which I think is half the formula. You got to sell something that people want, but also aligns with your heart's desire. What brings you joy? I could— maybe I have customers who would love to have one-on-one coaching services, and I could yield that, or I can provide that. And there's demand for it, but that is not my core of joy. And therefore I'll actually not be a superior provider. I love writing books. So a big part of that first phase is aligning the customer need with your own need. And there's, there's, there's also some identifying matter like what is the promise you're making to your customer base? What is the mission you're on for your business, which is separate than promise. Mission's important to me. And maybe my teammates' purpose. That's the purpose. The promise is what's important to my customers, what I stake my reputation on. That's all in that first phase. The integration phase now is the deployment and rollout. One concept I talk about extensively is the 40 vacation. We did— I've done this. A great thing about being an author is you have to comply with what you write. So when I wrote Profit First, like, if I'm not profitable, holy crap. So I gotta live by— with Clockwork, I go on a 4-week vacation every year. Actually, last year was 9 weeks. And, um, I found that removing yourself from the business is like a fire drill back in grade school. If a fire ever does happen, you know where to stand up and how to get outta the room safely. Mm-hmm. You practice and rehearse it. Everyone's gonna exit from their business at some point, hopefully intentionally, but maybe health or something like that. So the business is very prepared for it. So start today. But the president of our company, Kelsey, said, this is working, Mike, for you, and we're being empowered. But I'm afraid now, well, for when our employee leaves. So we started doing, taking a fortification for everybody here, started about 2 years ago. We're in our 3rd year now, and it's been this massive form of strengthening the business because we have redundancy and backups for every role, every capacity. So, um, That's part of the integration phase. The accelerate component is once we have established momentum, how do we scale this? So I start leaning into the scaling components of how to get our team to amplify the results we're seeing at such a fat— a great level. I think the biggest impedance toward a business's growth is that growth mentality. But when we get into that scaling mentality, we, we need to lean into it by narrowing down variability. And, and I, I talk about that in the acceleration phase. I, I took this from manufacturing and I believe your business, my business, ultimately we're all manufacturers. We may not manufacture a product, but we manufacture an experience the client has or an emotional state that they're shifted to. We do something that, that brings a new end result And the key lesson for manufacturers is reduce variability.

Yep.

You want more efficiency, if you want to go scale, you want to accelerate, reduce variability.

Yeah, it, it's, it's also, for some reason I was just thinking about just being a, an inch wide and a mile deep. Yeah. Uh, versus just a mile wide and an inch deep on so many different things. Um, you, you talk about QBRs and specifically The Queen Bee Role. And I think that last word is really the most powerful. Yeah, it is. Really differentiate between it's not you being the queen bee and you take a lot of time in the book to make sure that people really understand you're referring to the role that the queen bee is, of course, talking about bees. But how does that apply to us in our business?

Yeah, it's funny. When I wrote that, I was really pondering if I should change that label QBR to R of the QB. Meaning the role of the Queen Bee, because it leads off with Queen Bee. I hear regularly, oh, I— reader says, I am the Queen Bee. I'm the most important person. And it's not about person, it's about role. Role is a function within the organization that is most important for the business to thrive. And historically, how I wrote about in the first book was it's through deductive logic. What are all the things you do in your business? Let's narrow it down to the one thing that's most important. And the lesson is, once you identify that most important function, must go on unabated, no disruption. I did translate this from my study of beehives. It's a biomimicry technique. Mother Nature figures something out, translate it to a business or, or some other method, but in this case, business. So I noticed in beehives, the most important function or activity that's happening is the production of eggs. The survivability of the hive depends on it. They do a lot of other things, collecting nectar and so forth, but if those things wobble or aren't working out, the hive will still continue on. Maybe not as well, but it'll continue on. But the second egg production stops, the entire hive starts collapsing at an exponential rate. Well, in business, we have to ask ourselves, what's that one thing that if it goes, if it becomes disrupted, were compromised. The story I shared in there, just because it's such a global example, is FedEx. Everyone knows FedEx.

Yep.

FedEx has a promise. They tell our customers we're gonna deliver your packages on time. And in this new book, that's where I tell us the readers where the starting point is. What do you want to be known for? Or what do you promise your customers? Not all the things, the one thing. And it's gotta be one thing. Some people say, well, I wanna be known for the best price. Fastest service and so forth. Like, that's wonderful, but of all those, which one's the one most important? You gotta get to one thing. We deliver packages on time. Then we ask of all the activities, which one most ensures it? So FedEx, they have print shops, they have a customer service department, they have logistics. Now those three things, for example, logistics is the one thing that most assures on-time package delivery. Now here's an example with FedEx. FedEx tomorrow could say, screw logistics, everyone's all in on customer service. We wanna take care of our customers. Fast forward one week from now, the headline is FedEx not, FedEx not delivering packages on time, but they're super kind about it. Like, FedEx will be going out of business.

Absolutely.

Flip the model. FedEx says screw customer service, we're going all in on logistics. Now the headline says FedEx not answering the phones, comma, but every package delivered on time. In scenario one, a multibillion-dollar business out of business within weeks. And serial number 2, they're hurt. There's no question about it, but they will continue on.

Yeah.

Us small businesses, we have to know the number 1 priority activity. It must never be jeopardized. Sadly, most small business doesn't know what it is. So as a result, we usually touch on it. We move somewhere else. We're trying to balance everything. And that's why most businesses have a plight of mediocrity. Hmm. Hmm.

That's good. I love your stories and your analogies. Obviously, you tell a lot of actual factual stories and then also give analogies like that in the book. I think it helps us to get out of our own brain of our own business and into— go, okay, that makes sense. Now how do I actually apply that story back to my business? My last question— I could ask so many about the book, but my last question is there's this, and you touched on a little bit around taking a vacation. So everybody says, I just, I need a vacation. I need a vacation from the business. But you actually say, you know what, the, the business needs a vacation from you.

Yeah, I was, I didn't put this in the book. I didn't even riff on it. I'm friends with one of the original partners in Burt's Bees. His name is Rob and he helped grow the organization into a billion-dollar company. They sold it to Clorox ultimately. And I was talking with him just about, again, recently, I talk to him every, every couple of weeks, but talking to him right when he's writing the book, and he's running a new business. It's doing very well. And I told him that line, and he just— there was this pause. He goes, holy cow, that's it. Here's the thing. Most business owners, as we are growing our business, act as a superhero. We swoop in, we save the day. We have everything in our heads. We can fix everything. But until the business doesn't have us around, we can't tell if the business will ever operate without us. Most of us, I think, I thought one day this magical switch would happen. As long as I hustle and grind long enough, as long as I save the business yet one more time, one day it's gonna save and serve me. But that'll never happen. I found in these 4-week cycles for almost every single business, every element of the business is touched. We close out every month. We, we attract new prospects and clients. We hire, or maybe we have to fire someone. So every element of the business is being touched on. Therefore, my hypothesis was if we remove an owner from the business for 4 consecutive weeks and the business can run on unabated, likely can run on into perpetuity unabated. So let's get the owner out for 4 weeks. What's interesting is by doing that for myself, all of our, the readers have gone through and reported back to us. Is that it doesn't run perfectly in her absence, but it reveals what needs to be fixed next when they're gone. That's the next thing that we need to spend design time on. The other piece of feedback was what my employees— they think I'm going on vacation and gonna drink Mai Tais on the beach, and I'm now making money off of their sweat. Well, I hope you do enjoy your time off, but this is the empowerment opportunity. It's an opportunity to say, I'm leaving because I trust my team because I believe you can elevate this. It's an opportunity for you to really express yourself fully within this organization. Here's the keys. So the 4-week vacation is necessary. And if it gives you the heebie-jeebies saying, ah, I can't, I can't do that, that is the first indicator that there's fundamental efficiency problems in your business.

Yes, yes. Love that. Mike, your purpose of helping entrepreneurs rid themselves of entrepreneurial poverty has been a true impact on my life, and I know to all of our listeners. I'm so grateful for you and the books and the impact that you're able to make. Hey, people, you have some great resources with all your books, and Clockwork is no different. What are a couple of the resources, sites that you would like to point people to so they could get— obviously pick up the book, but also some of the resources that complement it?

Yeah, so if you want to explore Clockwork, you can go to clockwork.life. And the reason, reason I chose.life is I believe it's a lifestyle, it's an identity shift. So Clockwork.life, all the book resources are there for free. You don't even need to have the book to get started. And then my website, the author website, yes, it's MikeMikalowicz.com. No one can spell Mikalowicz. So the shortcut is Mike Motorbike. That's a nickname. I think I told you this before. It's a nickname I got in grade school. It's the only G-rated nickname I ever had. So the other ones are too profane to be shared. I bought the domains anyway, but The domain MikeMotorbike has all my books. You can get free chapter downloads so you can experience and start deploying it. It has the formulas there without buying the books. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal. You can get that content. And I also have my own podcast at MikeMotorbike.com.

Awesome. I love it. You should get Mike, Mike's Kayaks too. You love to kayak.

So I do love to kayak. Yeah, it just doesn't have that rhyme to it. I don't know if it's memorable, but it's not a bad idea.

Yeah, Mike, appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. Hope to have you back on in the future.

Appreciate you, brother. Thank you.

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Man, I really do. I said this before, but I really do enjoy Mike's books. I love his humor that he puts in business books, but most importantly, he really gives me things that fundamentally shift the way that I think about business moving forward in my own journey to growing in my leadership and, and growing and scaling my business. And that actually leads me to my very first kind of key point takeaway from this episode with Mike. Number one is where he details out the difference between growth and scale. Even just right then, I use that as an example about using growth and scale almost interchangeably, or sometimes using them at the same time. And whenever he talks about, you know, growth is just really about doing more. And he says, look, you— many of you may have just started your business, may have been starting on your entrepreneurial journey. So it's reasonable for you to be wanting, needing to do more initially to get the business off the ground. But if you actually really want to scale, you got to be able to do more with less. And then the line that I really did like, choreographing the resources. I'm thinking about time. Money and energy. Point number 2 is really, if you go back and listen to the one of the Bottom Line episodes where I talk about the most important thing you do for your business is to spend time thinking about the business. Well, at the time I didn't even know that we were going to have Mike on, and I had not read, uh, Clockwork, so I did not know that he had also adopted the importance of that. But obviously it doesn't surprise me because it really is so important. So hopefully that if you listen to that episode and then listen to Mike and hear him say it, you know, he really talks about design time. You know, one of the things that I love to say is that you've, as the Rainmaker, you've got to go from the Rainmaker to the architect of your business. And that kind of goes along with that alliteration of spending time designing your business. I think number 3 is the idea of adopting the label, having the identity shift of becoming the shareholder of your business. And then lastly, and I usually do 3 points, but I think this one's so important, is the 4-week vacation. And if that scares you and say, there's no way I could take 4 weeks away from my business, that's an opportunity right there for you to begin to design it. And in the book, he says, look, if you can't take 4 weeks, then take a weekend, take a long weekend, and then take a week, and then begin to build towards that. And then also you're never going to be fully ready. Uh, I've got a friend that's taking a mini retirement, as he's saying, and he's taking 10 days. And I did a small sabbatical, uh, myself. He's adopting it, uh, calling it a mini retirement. And he's got some anxiety going into it next week, but at the end of the day, he'll come back. And as much as he's trying to design that time while he's gone, he'll learn a lot about himself. He'll learn about a lot about his business. Whenever he comes back, just because he actually took the time to do it. Now, that doesn't mean if you take the, the 7 days, 10 days, 4 weeks eventually, as Mike obviously recommends, that you are bringing your laptop and you're doing work. Otherwise, it's not really a 4-week vacation.

Appreciate it, Mike.

Make sure you go to mikemakalewicz.com, or you can visit him on his other website, mikemotorbike.com as well. And then go to clockwork.life. It's a great website. It can really help you along your journey to begin to clockwork your business. And it is truly a lifestyle. Hey, big thanks to all of our podcast sponsors, Coach B Consulting, Club Capital, Rock Solid Assistance, and of course, DirectClicks. And you know, if you're thinking about, uh, listening to that podcast with Mike, it really is about whenever you're allocating or choreographing some of the resources, you need to start thinking about trying to take a 4-week vacation. Having an executive assistant really would be able to help you along those ways. As a matter of fact, I mean, I was just— have, uh, I say this often, but I really did have had many conversations with some of you that reached out to you, to me, to say, hey, I've heard you talk about some of your EAs and tell me what they do, and you know, what's the advantage of having a virtual assistant versus having you know, someone in the office. And the reality is, is there are pros and cons to both. But reaching out to the team at Rockstar, they can really help you. Of course, they're going to be privy to having a virtual assistant, but they can share with you in depth how that person can really be able to help you to gain back some of your time. Ultimately, we can make more money, um, we can throw money at a problem, um, Uh, but the best use of our money is to be able to buy back our time. We can't get more of our time back. And if you even kind of tie that back to what Mike was saying there about the queen bee role, most importantly, whenever you get really clear on that, I think that you'll realize that everything else kind of begins to support that. And there's a lot of things, more things than I would have even realized. And I feel like it is continuing to help me to go deeper on this. That there's a lot of things that my team, if I design it or architect it the right way, architect my business in a certain way, they'll be able to take and do a heck of a lot better than what I do. There's only a handful of things that ultimately I can do. Doing this podcast, I mean, ultimately, if you knew the, the, the team behind the podcast, there's so many people that just honestly, if it wasn't for them, this podcast would not get produced. Every single week. I'm so grateful for them. They are so skilled and talented to be able to kind of keep everything organized and keep everything moving along so we can, you know, ultimately serve you and help you continue to grow in your leadership. So go to rocksolidassistance.com. You know, somewhat along those lines, many of you know that maybe the most important thing you need to be doing, or one of the most important things you can do for your team, is not just to give them your energy, but they've got to be trained. I mean, if you listen to whenever I've talked about a simple managerial framework, is number one, do they know what's— what they need, what you ask of them? Do they know what you want them to do? Number two, are they trained to do it? And some people are just gifted with the skill of teaching. They can take really complex systems or ideas and be able to break it down for our teams to be able to understand. And some of you, it struggles, you know, you struggle with that, or you struggle with You know, I know I need to be training my team, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that. Well, if you're an agency owner, there is none better to be able to help invest in not only your development, but also in your team's development than David Peterson. Go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com. He— you wouldn't believe how many people are on his calls every week, learning from him, investing in their own and their teams. Development on a regular basis. And people stay and they stay because they're getting value. It's one thing to get a customer. It's another thing to continue to get a customer. And so many of you that are listeners to the podcast invest in Coach P's coaching every month with your team. So go to coachpconsulting.com. Hey, make sure you tell David that you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast and he will give you an entire month off your first month off, 8 coaching calls plus an agent-only call, uh, just for saying that. You can give him a test drive and see for yourself why so many people are using him. Go to coachpconsulting.com. We're getting close to businesses beginning to, to do fall planning.

Love fall.

College football is on the horizon. I don't know how much, how great of a year it's going to be for me, but many of you are wanting to finish this year out strong, or you're starting to look into 2023 already. To begin to think about, hey, I want this, I want to double down. I want to— I had a good year this year, maybe even a great year, and you want to continue to have that success. Maybe you're expanding your team and you know that your team needs to have really solid, uh, leads that they can be able to convert to ultimately make some sales and to grow your business. And, uh, maybe you've dabbled in the online space a little bit and, and been able to get thought about doing Google pay-per-click, but you're not sure exactly where that fits with an internet lead strategy, as an example, go to DirectClicks, go to directclicksinc.com, talk to the team, and they can walk you through step by step, not only showing you how they're going to be— they really care about your account and getting the results, but also, also, it really matters to them that, that they get results for you and your business, not only just taking care of you treating you like family, uh, and making sure that ultimately you're getting a return on your investment, but they want you to get results. Go to directclicksinc.com. So I was, uh, on a call the other day with Micah and the team, and we were discussing CFO services. And, you know, whenever you hear that, I don't know what the conjecture in your mind is around, like, what do I mean by CFO services? Am I big enough to actually have a CFO in my business? Well, Obviously, for many of you, no, you would never hire an MBA-level person to be the CFO of your business, but you want the information to be able to not just look backwards. Okay. It's one thing to have a budget, look backwards and see, okay, well, did I make a profit? You know, the P&L tells me, did revenue exceed expenses? And if so, by how much? And that— look, that's valuable. But what is more valuable is, is context. Okay, is context. And the, I'll probably do an episode about this at some, at some point. In fact, maybe I'll do a Bottom Line episode about this. But I think that context really does matter around the numbers, not just the numbers. And so if you think about this regarding your business, how do you actually look forward and begin to forecast numbers and to begin to actually put things in place where you say, this is what I believe our revenue was going to be, and if we hit these sales numbers, that's going to impact our commissions this way, or I'm going to bring this person on in the future.

I'm—

uh, Michael was telling me about somebody that was going to, you know, bring on 3 different salespeople at one time. Well, do they have the financials to do that? By looking at that, putting it into the model, they were going to be negative several thousand dollars. And if you look at the cash that they had on hand, they would run out of money in just a matter of a few months unless they had another injection of cash. And the oxygen of business is cash. And so from that, they were able to say, okay, well, you can make that call. Ultimately, you as the business owner can make that call. It's your business. But just understanding what's going to happen just a few months down the road, are you willing to live with the downside risk? And if you are, then fine. But, uh, there's a— maybe I'll do another episode, uh, from a book called Hot from Howard Marks talking about risk. But if you're willing to be able to live with the downside of the risk, then, you know, that's fine, no, no problem. But it's not, uh, oftentimes we make decisions without actually having the data that we need. So go to club.capital if you want that level of information in your business to be able to make really solid business decisions. And if you want to begin to adopt the label of being the shareholder in your business, then it's a— it's just a non-negotiable. These are skills you can learn. If you're not a numbers person, we're not trying to turn you into an accountant. You don't need to be an accountant. At all. But you do need to be the shareholder of your business. You need to be able to go from being the operator to being the owner of your business, to be able to architect the business in a way that you can take a 4-week vacation and continue to remain profitable. All right, everyone, go to club.capital, book a no-obligation demo. Awesome having Mike on. I'm sure we'll have him on in the future. I hope we are able to have him on in the future. Such a good dude, and enjoy his books and his investment into entrepreneurs like all of us. All right, everyone, hope this has been a great, uh, return on your investment of time. It means a lot to me. We have had record download numbers the last few months, and that is a big thanks to all of you who have been sharing the podcast with some of your fellow business owners. I am internally grateful. I hope this has been a good use of your time. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.

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. Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation? Check them out at club.capital.