Episode 189: The Bottom Line - The Bathrobe Theory of Business

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. This podcast is brought to you by Autopilot Recruiting. Join over 1,200 State Farm agents in putting your recruiting on autopilot. Any successful insurance agent will tell you how important team is. Finding those rockstar team members doesn't happen when left to chance. It happens through consistent recruiting. You never know when you're going to lose a team member. And the key to an incredible team is constantly searching for the best talent. Autopilot Recruiting is a continuous recruiting service where you'll be assigned a recruiter that has been trained to recruit on your behalf every business day. This recruiter will take over and revamp your CareerPlug, send out assessments, do pre-screen phone interviews, and schedule your in-office interviews. All you need to do is to show up and give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This ongoing service is extremely affordable and a no-brainer for taking your insurance agency to the next level. Listeners of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, go to autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code Club Capital to get started. Again, autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code Club Capital to get started. Hey everyone, so have you ever gone to a hotel and in the bathroom or in the back of the door when you walk in, especially if it's a nicer hotel, they will have these robes that you can put on. Have you ever noticed they're all the same size? And even some of the slippers, they're all the same size. And so it's kind of one size fits all. You've seen that with maybe some different fitted hats that have an elastic band on it, etc. Well, there's this idea that these bathrobes also apply to business, that one size fits all. And I don't believe that. I don't believe that one size fits all in business. As a matter of fact, I'm going to give you 3 examples of different ideas or concepts that have been just in general in business. And then I'll share with you my thoughts about how to, how to take something that you hear from one person and then you hear, hear the exact same topic concept from someone else. And it feels like it's exact. Opposite of what somebody else shared. So what do you do with that? Here's my thoughts on it. But, but first, let me give you a couple examples. So there's a— in this, by the way, this bathrobe theory of business, that idea, that vernacular is not my own. That is from Keith Cunningham, who has a phenomenal program, incredible entrepreneur himself, and owns several businesses in the Austin, Texas area, written some awesome books. I've really influenced me. But let me give you a couple examples. So EOS and Scaling Up. So Scaling Up is a book primarily for bigger companies, maybe $100 million in top-line revenue and above. If I've read that book several years ago, is a fantastic book. There are definitely some principles in it that can apply to your business no matter the size. But typically that methodology, that operating system methodology is going to be for bigger companies. And there's a whole, you know, coaches out there. I've actually had one of the coaches has come on the podcast several years ago. I listen to their Scaling Up podcast because you can always glean little insights there. Well, that book was written by Verne Harnish, and Verne learned a lot through Jim Collins. And Jim has written some amazing books, Built to Last, Good to Great, etc. Well, somebody who learned under Vern Harnish is Gino Wickman. And Gino wrote the book Traction, which talks about the EOS or Entrepreneurial Operating System. Now, typically, I actually used to be a professional implementer. I coached people through the EOS methodology. I got trained in all of that. I don't do that anymore. And I'll share with you why in just a second because it gets into a little bit around my philosophy of the Bathrobe Theory of Business. Well, Gino learned under Vern. So if you read Scaling Up and then you read EOS, you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap. A specific example would be Scaling Up has the one-page strategic plan and EOS has the VTO, their Vision Traction Organizer. And if you look at those, they're orientated different— one's in portrait mode, one's in landscape mode— but the elements of them are very, very similar. And you could go on through some other tools and say, oh, this kind of looks like this. Yeah, that's true. Well, obviously Gino learned under Vern and the rest is history. So that's one example. A second one would be Dan Sullivan and one of his fantastic tools, which is called the Impact Filter, about how do you decide whether you're gonna move forward on a project, what does it need to look like in the end, et cetera. And then there's one by Michael Hyatt, which is called the Project Vision Caster. If you held those two documents up, they're not plagiarized off one another, but they're very similar. Michael Hyatt has been coached by Dan Sullivan. So he took the elements of Dan's Impact Filter and some other things and come up with his own. I think that that makes a lot of sense. His is a little bit different. But those are very, very similar. And then you have the whole idea of the habits movement. And how do you, you know, maybe at another podcast, we'll talk about leadership habits. But one of the most famous books over the last few years is James Clear, who wrote the book Atomic Habits. But there's a Stanford professor named BJ Fogg who wrote the book Tiny Habits. And then Charles Duhigg wrote The Power of Habits. Well, at a high level, the things that they talk about, about the importance of habits, how do you install good habits, how do you get rid of bad habits? There's a lot of similarities. Do they use slightly different words to be able to describe certain things? Yes, they do. Does one emphasize one thing over another a little bit differently? That, yes, they do. And so really, at the end of the day, which one is right? Well, oftentimes if you speak to someone, they're going to share with you, hey, this is what I'm doing. You should do the exact same thing. Well, over the past year or so, I've mentioned maybe casually on an interview that I had for the first time last March, started tracking my calories. Now, have I done that every single day? No, but it has been helpful to me because I've never been that consistent and disciplined with actually putting my calories of what I eat every day into MyFitnessPal. It's been helpful to me. But if I came on this podcast and I said, you should absolutely— the only way to be able to lose weight is for you to be able to track calories. That's not necessarily the case. Has drinking a gallon of water, has that been helpful to me? Yes. Is it hard to do, by the way? Yes, it is. And so I think there's a slight difference between saying, hey, this has been helpful to me. This is what I'm doing. Hopefully, this serves you. You hear me say that often on the podcast. But really, the point is, is for you to be able to take what has been impactful to you, what resonates with you, and possibly butt it up against something that may be very similar, or it may absolutely be the opposite of what someone just told you to do. And so therein lies this idea of the Bath Road Theory of Business, is that there's just one way to do things, and that's simply not the case. What's working for someone else in their market regarding, say, marketing lead generation, or maybe a sales script that they use, or a tool that someone else is using, a software a compensation tracking tool, as an example. What's good for someone may not exactly be good for you. And so really, it's okay for you to be able to take some of the best from one and maybe get rid of the rest of it. You don't have to adopt everything. There's a tremendous amount that I love in Atomic Habits from James Clear. There's a few things that I actually really like the book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. As a matter of fact, I really like the idea of tiny habits. I have, and I use Notion almost every single day to be able to run. It's kind of the team space across the companies. And so I have a page in there called Tiny Habits. I really like that idea. And so I track calories and I track whether I worked out and did I read 10 pages and I track my, the cash in one of my bank accounts, etc. So that's been helpful to me. Well, that has a lot of influence from the book Atomic Habits from James Clear, but it also has some ideas and some elements from BJ Fogg's book Tiny Habits. Similarly, that's why I moved away from just coaching on EOS methodology. I loved so much about EOS, but the more that I dove into it, I was like, well, I don't really like that. I don't necessarily know if I agree with that completely. And to their credit, they wanted you, if you're an EOS implementer, to coach it pure. Why? They don't want a million different people trying to coach, maybe not a million, but, you know, thousands of different coaches out there coaching EOS slightly differently. So from their perspective, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. But for where I typically live, businesses doing less than $2 million in top-line revenue, there are some of the elements of EOS that just don't make sense. When you start talking about your leadership team as an example, Well, a lot of businesses, they don't have an entire leadership executive team. They may aspire to want to get to that place, and maybe times they have a 2SE or a second in command, an office manager, etc., but they don't have this full executive team. And so hence that, and some other reasons, I decided to go a different way. But there's still very much elements of EOS in what I believe in and how I like to run and share with other business owners. And so feel free that whenever you're learning from someone, if you're going to a road show, if you're going to a conference, if you're reading a book, even if you're listening to this podcast, maybe there's one thing that someone says, they say, hmm, okay, that makes sense. I actually agree with that. But maybe you don't have to take everything. It doesn't have to be the entire enchilada. You can take bits and pieces of it and to be able to make it your own. Because your experiences and how things have applied into your business and for your team, none of it's absolute. There is no this perfect way. I certainly believe that there are some principles that have made the most sense and have resonated with me the most. But if I shared those as the gospel, so to speak, with all of you, you may say, well, I'm not so sure about that, Bradley. I don't know, but because I've had the exact opposite experience with something else, either in my current business or a business in the past. And so if it's this podcast, if it's a book, if it's a conversation that you're having with a friend, and they share something, don't feel like you have to adopt everything. Maybe there's some elements you say, you know, actually, I think I'm gonna pick that up, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pick up the rest. And so this idea of the bathrobe theory of business, one size one-size-fits-all is simply not true. So I hope that that has been a good, maybe, permission for you to be able to pick up some of the things that you like whenever you go to, you know, hear someone speak, conference, podcast, book that you read, etc., and then not feel like that you have to take everything that someone shares. All right, everyone, till next episode. Be 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 and advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation? Check them out at club.capital.