Episode 305: The Bottom Line - Your Team Is Not You

You want the freedom. You want the freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, with who you want to do it. And you want the financial freedom to be able to do that. Yet a lot of times what we do is we can begin to lead the team or manage the team day to day in a way that is the way that we would want to be managed.

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 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 going to 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. Are you an agency owner looking to better understand your financials and take charge of your tax bill? Well, Club Capital's here to help. As the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, they are way more than your everyday run-of-the-mill CPA. Club Capital provides financial, CFO, and tax advisory services to help you plan and forecast your financial success. You'll meet every month to review your agency's financial performance, the difference between your profit and actual cash flow, along with helping you better understand your bottom line. Visit club.capital to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Hey everyone. Well, you might be able to tell that the audio on this podcast is a little bit different than usual. I'm actually recording this on my phone. Phone. I just felt inspired to be able to, in the moment, before I got back to my microphone, to be able to send this to you because this came up a couple times this week and I thought that it would be relevant to share with all of you. You are not your team and your team is not you. Let me explain what I mean. So earlier this week, I was doing a business and golf day with one of my clients, and as we were sitting there having lunch before going out onto the golf course, This business owner, very successful business owner, was sharing with me some frustrations with their team and in particular with one of his team members specifically. And as I listened to him and asked a few questions and allowed him honestly just to vent for 5 or 10 minutes, I shared with him, you are not your team and your team is not you. See, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we oftentimes started our business because we did not want to be told what to do. We will push hard against, we will actively resist structure and process and routine, even though we've heard people talk about systems and processes and structure and routine. I asked him, before you started your business, you had multiple offers from many different organizations, any place that you could have gone that would have paid you a nice salary, would have been nice income for you and your family, but you decided to go on a limb and start this business.

Why?

He said, because I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to be in control of my own future. And I said, me too. That's exactly why I decided to do it as well. And for all of you that are business owners and entrepreneurs, or even aspiring business owners, and entrepreneurs. I think you can relate to that.

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You can relate to the fact that you want the freedom. You want the freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, with who you want to do it, and you want the financial freedom to be able to do that. Yet a lot of times what we do is we can begin to lead the team or manage the team day to day in a way that is the way that we would want to be managed. Meaning, well, I wouldn't love that myself, so therefore I'm not going to give my team the consistency and the structure and the processes and the routine and the predictability that they need to be successful in my business. Well, how do I know this? As with pretty much everything that I try to share, hopefully everything that I share, it comes from a place of humility because I can relate to that. I would oftentimes think to myself, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes quite literally think to myself, "Well, I would not want to be led that way, and I want to treat people the way that I would want to be treated. So therefore, I don't want to give them that level of structure," even though maybe I didn't have that language. But I certainly would do it because I would think, "Well, I would not want that, so therefore I would expect that they don't want that. But the reality is the team wants consistency from us. They want predictability from us. They don't want every single time that we come back from a mastermind, from a conference, from a program that we're a part of, that we are just constantly full of ideas. Because we can be addicted to change. And a lot of people may call this the bright shiny object syndrome. And maybe another day that I'll talk about that. I'll talk about something that's been helpful to me, call it the someday shelf.

But our team is not us, and we are not the team.

And so even though we may actively push against structure and process and routine, because that's why we started the businesses in the first place, the team needs that. The team needs the predictability. They need the consistency of when are meetings going to be held. And if we're going to have weekly team meetings, are they going to be held on the same day at the same time? If we're going to do one-to-ones, are they going to be the same length of time? Do they follow a rhythm? Do we have an agenda for how we do weekly team meetings and one-to-ones and even daily huddles and quarterly performance reviews? And do we do those things? And when we set our quarterly targets, do we do that every quarter, or was that just a fad? Was that just an idea? And when we say we're going to plan quarterly and execute monthly, do we do that, or did we do that once because we heard that that was a good idea and we tried it, but yet we, again, we actively push against that. We're not gonna do it. And we've heard that it's important to set weekly commitments. And yes, that's a good idea. And so let's everybody this week set weekly commitments, yet we don't wanna be committed to it ourselves because again, we started the business because we didn't wanna be told what to do. And yet that's the very thing that will give us the freedom that we ultimately want in our businesses. So I just want to share with you, maybe reflect, are there some things that you do or things that we say that possibly do because we don't want to do them? It's not what we want as opposed to what the team actually needs, or even in some cases what the business needs. I hope this served you. I shared it with that client on Wednesday, and then I've shared it since then with a couple other people. and they shared that and said that it was a kind of a light bulb moment. I was saying this to somebody in Voxer and thought, so I thought I would share it with all of you. Heart of one. Till next episode, lead well.

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