Episode 363: Rhythm - How to Achieve Breakthrough Execution and Accelerate Growth with Patrick Thean

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Patrick Tian. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of a book that I know that you're going to want to pick up. It's called Rhythm: How to Achieve Breakthrough Execution and Accelerate Growth. I mean, let's be real, who— if you're a business owner, entrepreneur, who doesn't want to be able to do that? At the end, you'll see where we talk through the number of circles. I haven't actually shared this on the podcast very much, but I do, depending on the guest, I will circle something that I personally want to be able to take away from the episode. And I had 4 different major circles, things that are going to go on my log of lessons learned that I use. So with that, I think that you're going to have a lot of takeaways that you can both implement into your business right away, frameworks and concepts and tools and mental models that you can use to be able to help you to have breakthrough growth and execution in your business. Without further ado, let's get into it. Patrick Tan, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Hey Bradley, thanks for having me, man. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Super excited to have you. Well, we start with background and origin story. Love hearing how people got to where they are in their journeys. So why don't you take our listeners, uh, kind of back and bring us to present day?

Sure. Well, you know, I'm what I would call an accidental entrepreneur. I started my career I finished up my engineering degree at Cornell University, Upstate New York, and then I went to work for Oracle Corporation. This is back in 1988. And after being there for about 2 years and 9 months, I've had a number of different bosses. Most of them were great, but my last boss wasn't really good. So I, I, I left and I started my own company and I, I grew Medisys, which was a supply chain transportation software company from '91 to '98, 7 years, pretty grew it to about $25 million in sales and number 151 on the Inc. 500 in those days. And then I sold the company. Now, along the way there, from the outside looking in, Medisys looked really successful, won lots of awards, all kinds of wonderful stuff. But from the inside looking out, I felt like we were running from one crisis to another crisis, solving one fire from another fire. We survived, we survived, we survived, and then suddenly We were successful. We sold the company. And after that experience, a lot of entrepreneurs came out. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. So a lot of entrepreneurs came out and asked me for help. And I realized at that time that I wasn't as dumb as I thought I was because, you know, I thought life was very stressful and I didn't understand how we could go from one crisis to another and keep surviving. And so from that experience, I put together a handful of techniques and rhythms and processes and practices to help business owners succeed. I've been doing this now for 20-some years and I did it, I guess, you know, I've been very fortunate because I would say that I really enjoyed my first business. This is my third and this is my true calling. So I think anytime, so here's a tip for everyone who's doing work and business. I mean, if you can work on a business that is truly your calling, what you love to do, uh, that'd be totally, totally, totally awesome. So I'm very thankful that today that's what I do. I help entrepreneurs figure out how to think, plan, and do, and how to achieve success in their businesses.

Well, I'm going to pick apart the think, plan, and do part of it. You know, I mentioned to you before we hit record that we want to be able to kind of have people to walk away with both some high-level strategies, ways to think and approach the business, which is obviously around your model of Think Plan Do. But then also, like, there's got to be down in the weeds, like, I've got to execute on some things. I think that there's a never-ending amount of good ideas. You read a book, you listen to a podcast, you go to a Mastermind conference, there literally is too many good ideas. Which leads me to a question. How do you— how did you, when you had your, uh, that company, that first company, and then now, how do you think about it now to help an entrepreneur to actually wade through the overwhelming amount of choices at times that they have, um, with especially with so much content? And admittedly, this is coming from a podcast too, of how to wade through you know, the different choices that they have. And then I'll add one other caveat. Oftentimes you can hear, you could listen to back-to-back podcasts and they could give you conflicting answers on certain things, and then you're like paralyzed of what to do. So how do you help a business owner to be able to begin to navigate that?

Yeah, so I would say the following. I'd say that first of all, all advice and all knowledge that is going to come to an entrepreneur or a business owner is situational and contextual. In other words, in this situation, burning this match may be great, but in that situation, burning this match may just kill you. So I think that we all, we all need to think. And, and I, I, I gotta tell you, some, some of my friends prefer not to think. They prefer to be told like, this is how you go solve the problem. And I would suggest to you that first of all, you, you've got to think because every business situation is different. And there is no one size fits all. There's really, in my opinion, thinking models for you to use to then make the right decision, apply to the correct scenario that you have. Now, your podcast is called Above the Business. I love that. I love that because you were telling me about how, you know, you want people to be able to extract themselves from the business and think above it and, and work on the business, so to speak. So if you think about my model, which is Think, Plan, Do. Think is to help you think about your business. Plan is to actually help you now decide what you're actually gonna do. So if you think of those two components, those two components are really above the business components. And then do, the third component, is actually getting the stuff done. And so I would say that most people have challenges in overeating from the buffet of opportunity. And as you get more and more successful, you get more and more things on that wonderful buffet table. Entrepreneurs are not used to saying no to opportunities, but as you get bigger, you really have to choose the right few opportunities and put your mind to it and really forget about the rest. That is really hard to do, but that is part of the reason why some companies or some firms never make it past a couple of million, because they can't prioritize properly. They can't say, all right, I understand that I've got steak, I've got ribs, I've got roast chicken, but I can only eat one of these things instead of sampling all of them. So I think the ability to really have a way to cut through the chaos, make these right decisions is really critical. So I would share that how I get that done is first of all, I have a framework to help you do that. I have a framework help you put, and it's called rhythm, to put you in a rhythm so that you have a place for stuff. You know, one of my friends said to me, Patrick, what I love about rhythm is that you give me an operating system, a framework to deal with chaos because anytime you have growth, you're gonna have chaos. The question is not how to get rid of it, but how to manage it, how to have a place for things as they happen to solve them before they get to you too much.

Well, a couple things. Absolutely love— we are so aligned, um, in so many of the ways that we think and approach things. I say this often whenever I'm interviewing somebody, I kind of have my, uh, way, my, my structure within doing an interview. As I'm writing my notes down, if I circle something, that becomes a log of lessons learned. And the overeating from the buffet of opportunity just got circled. That is going in my 2024 logbook, Lessons Learned. I love that so much. And I'm going to butcher this, and maybe you can actually help me. I've heard a version of that where people have said more businesses have gone out of business from the indigestion of too many opportunities more than they have the starvation of opportunities, right? And so I think that, uh, or something to that effect. Basically, there's too many options as opposed to, you know, simply there's, there's not enough. Also, I would love for you to— before we get into that framework of dealing with chaos, you mentioned when you talked about your company that we went from fire to fire to fire, yet we still survived. And I think that it— I adopted this. I had this fallacy. I don't believe it was a limiting belief. I think it was just a fallacy of a, a, the wrong way of thinking about it. That if I could get the business to half a million, I could get the business to a million, if I could get the business to 2, then all my problems would be solved.

That's right.

And boy, was that wrong.

Yes, that was wrong. Yes, I'll tell you. And so that's amazing you said that, because I have many clients like that where there's one, one particular gentleman, uh, you know, he said that to me. He said, man, in dealing with capital, he said, if I could only raise some capital, I'd solve my problem. And we raised capital. This is years ago. He raised a couple million dollars. Now he had capital, but he still needed more capital. And I said, dude, what's gonna happen is that you need to understand that this is a systemic issue. It's like, you need to realize that you are so creative and amazing that if I gave you $10 million, you would come up with $15 million worth of opportunity. If I gave you $100 million, you'd have $150 million worth of opportunity. You are always going to have more opportunity than your capital can solve. You're always going to be in a place of abundance but limited resources. And even if I gave you as much money as you wanted, you couldn't hire people fast enough. Like, you couldn't deploy that money fast enough. So you'll still be in this deficit of opportunity to resources. And by the way, that's a good thing. I much rather help a person figure out how to say no to 5 things than the poor guy or gal sitting there wondering what the heck I'm going to do because I've run out of ideas. So to have an overabundance of ideas and to only be able to choose 5 or 6 of them or 3 of them to do, it's actually a really good blessing. But that happens all the time.

Yeah, you know, you have done something that, um, transparently is actually on my vision map, is to put a company on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies. And you said you were Inc. 500 fastest growing companies at the time. And I will tell you, I actually did some research on this, is that the Kauffman Foundation has done a study that even that roughly two-thirds of the companies that make the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies list, within 5 years they are either out of business or disadvantageously sold. Not— now, you were not that, uh, percentage, but I think that the point in that— I'd love for you to, um, give your thoughts on this— is that we tend— again, I think this is a fallacy— to believe that growth solves all of our problems. Just, we just need to grow more. We just need to grow more. We need more capital. If we can grow more, get more capital, well, more sales will solve all of our problems. And that too is a fallacy way of thinking. Can you comment?

[Speaker:MICHAEL_SEIBEL] Well, you know something really funny when you said more sales will solve our problems. Actually, what I've discovered is that more sales covers our sins. And so what I jokingly tell people is that, you know, sales covers half your sins and capital covers the other half. And so when you have sales and capital, all your sins are covered. So I say that jokingly because of course when you're growing, you're doing something right. You're doing a lot of things right actually to achieve that kind of growth. And then when you can't solve your growth fast enough, you take capital and that solves the other part for you. That being said, I'll tell you, I've raised a lot of capital in my short little life and some, most companies raise capital because they didn't do something quite right. But really what you should be doing is raising capital to scale. In other words, I figured this out and I know how to solve this problem and I will scale the business. That's why I need capital for. But a lot of people make mistakes. And so now they're raising capital because they need to make payroll to solve the problem and solve the mistake. And sometimes this is not a popular view. But sometimes the better thing to do is actually not to raise the capital, but is to cut the staff that you've overgrown with. So I think that that's what I mean when I say, you know, capital can cover a lot of sins because when you have capital, you give yourself the fallacy of thinking that I don't have to take care of this problem right now. So capital is good, but capital should not make you delay taking care of your problems. So, you know, COVID just happened, right? A couple of years ago, a few years ago. And how many people, if you ask them, they would say to you, well, COVID was tough and I had to let a couple of people go. But you know what? I kind of had to do that anyway. Okay. So first of all, first of all, if you identify with what I just said, you know, that probably means you can do better as a business owner. Like you shouldn't have to wait for a crisis to cause you to do some of the right things which were distasteful to do. But that being said, you know, Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, said, don't waste a good crisis. And I believe that many of us, unfortunately, we're human. So it's easy for me to say this theoretically, but we hit a crisis, then we're forced to do certain things that we didn't want to do before. So, I would say that coming back to this think, plan, do and this working above the business, sometimes we're so busy, especially small businesses, we're so busy, we don't have time to think. And that's why we didn't take care of those issues. When a crisis happens, we're forced to think, we're just forced to. So, instead of thinking only when you're forced to, how about this idea? How about putting yourself into a rhythm of regular thinking, regular planning, and then doing the work. So one of the things I ask people to do is to take a look at the quarter. Quarter has, say, 90 days, right? 3 months. If you took 2 days to proactively think and plan every quarter, and then 88 days to execute and do the work, that's kind of good. Now, some people would say to me, gee, Patrick, I don't have enough time. I'm like, well, if you don't have enough time, to take 2 days out of the 90 in a quarter and think on your business, then you're probably not helping yourself enough. So that's, that's kind of what I share with people, you know, you need to rise above, above it, as you said in your podcast, above the business, take a couple of days, think and plan, and then the rest of the quarter, you can execute and adjust and execute and adjust. So I really believe that companies need to put themselves into a rhythm so that they have the ability to take care of any issues that pop up. By the way, when issues pop up, do you have a place to put them, or does it freak you out and you stop your whole team from working? You have to solve it right now. If that's what you're doing, that means you don't have a place to put it. So I create— I help companies create the rhythm where they have a daily sync up, they have a weekly adjustment where they can can, can adjust and deal with issues that aren't working out well. And then they, they have a parking lot so that every quarter they do a quality planning session where they can come in, talk about the big stuff and any other opportunities that popped up that, that surprised them, and then decide on the right execution plan for the next 13 weeks. And I call that your 13-week race. So I want you to have 2 days of planning and then run a smooth, great, exciting 13-week race.

I love that so much. I want to, I want to double tap. I want to go back to think for just a second. So I have a framework called MIT, and it's the most important thing you can do for you, your team, and the business. And I think the most important thing you can do for the business is spend time thinking about the business. The most important thing, because then, to your point, planning and then the doing, the actual execution, is all downhill from the first thing that you said, which is thinking. Why do you believe that so few entrepreneurs, business owners, create the rhythm for themselves to strategically think about the business on a regular basis?

Well, I think some of us don't do it because we don't know to do that. Number one, we're not aware. So I would also say that, you know, Stephen Covey taught us this, right? He shares about put first things first, prioritize. And he's got a beautiful quadrant, a four-quadrant chart where he asks us to look at things which are urgent versus importance. And what you really should be doing is spending more time on things which are important but not urgent. But we suffer from what I call the tyranny of the urgent. When something is urgent, squeaky wheel, whatever you call it, right? Squeaky wheel gets the oil. Whenever something's really urgent, it makes us, if we don't think about it, it makes us automatically believe that it's really, really important. So, we get fooled by things which are urgent and not important, gets our attention, gets the noise, gets between our ears and we start thinking about it. We start solving that when we should have really stopped first to ask ourselves, was that important or was it just purely urgent? So therefore, I would say that, you know, what you can do for yourself is make a decision that I should be very intentional and I shall schedule it, that I have my think time. I also say to you that most of us, you know, I, I, I run a lot of planning sessions. My team here, runs a lot of planning sessions for companies. That's what we do. And we, I, I myself have probably done about 600 planning sessions over the years. And my company would probably done about 3000 planning sessions. So one thing we've learned in all these planning sessions across all these companies is that if we don't schedule it, it won't get done. Like, we'll show up and we'll say, guys, let's do a planning session for this quarter. Like, oh my gosh, we just can't seem to schedule it. So the best way to do that is when the year starts, we get our customers to go ahead and pen in their planning sessions for the whole year. So these are what I call the big rocks that you put down that are important so that all your other stuff flows around it like water flowing around a rock in a stream. And I think that's really important. Sometimes we just don't plan for it because we didn't prioritize it, and therefore the tyranny of the urgent life happens, and we, we don't We don't get that done. I, I will share with you, you know, I like at MIT, what's the most important thing? And I do think that the most important thing for the company, you gotta think about it, yes. But I'll also share with you the most important thing for you and for myself is to actually spend some time reflecting. By the way, reflecting is actually thinking too. So at the end of the week, you reflect and you do a bit of journaling and, and you, I call this a meeting with myself. You kind of meet with yourself and you You ask yourself what you're grateful for, for the week that just ended. What can you learn? What didn't go right or what went so right that you've got to learn and replicate it? And then what are the most important things for you to do next week? So you take this little bit of reflection time and in doing that, you learn and then you also prioritize next week so you don't get pulled by the tyranny of the urgent.

You know, so in, in my model, the most important thing you can do for yourself is very similar, very, very similar. You said reflect, and I, I actually have it to where it's, uh, protect your confidence. But let me explain that, let me expand upon that just a second. The reason and how you actually protect your confidence is through the routine of reflecting on the past week, and one of the things is looking at the wins that you've had. So that's what I'm saying, we're so aligned in so many different things. Maybe we use a little bit different language with certain things, but the, but the elements are there. And I hope what people hear by this is to say, when you start to see patterns emerge, principles emerge within that, those are the things to say, yeah, do I actually have my planning sessions laid out for the year? That is something you could go do right now when you finish this podcast is go into your calendar and say, when are we going to plan for the next quarter? When am I going to spend time thinking about reflecting on the past quarter with that? And those become actual implementation ideas, which is kind of where we're going to transition in a second, is kind of down into the— we'll touch on plan, and then I really want to get to do because I think that's where the rubber meets the road, um, at the end of the day. And so that's something somebody can go and implement right away. Okay, when— so I've got the rhythm of thinking, I put that in place, I spend some time at my favorite Starbucks, 60 minutes, 90 minutes every single week doing some thinking, etc., and then doing some planning. I want to ask this question, and admittedly it may be a little too vague, but, um, I'll ask it nonetheless. And that is What does planning done right and poor planning look like? Meaning just in general, like somebody's planning for the quarter, and, and I'm kind of a little bit high level here, but sometimes we're just like, yeah, you did it, you put it on the calendar, okay, great, we want to celebrate that win. But honestly, that's kind of garbage, right? And what, what really is good and what's really not so good? What are some elements of those things?

So if you've done a, if you've done a good planning session, what you should feel, first of all, emotionally, you should feel relief, frankly. You should feel like, oh, took care of a couple of crazy things that I thought, some of them I didn't even know about. But I'll also share with you that as part of good planning, you've got to write goals well. Writing goals is really hard. Writing a SMART goal, specific and measurable and all that stuff, is really hard. So we actually have in our software now, we actually create the first Last year we built it, the first, you know, artificial intelligence smart coach writing. So we have an AI coach writer. You put in, hey, I want to attend a workshop, I want to attend a trade show, press the button and it comes back and it writes a goal for you that you can now edit because I believe it's a lot easier to edit than to create. But you want to first of all write your goals so that it's easy to understand and you've articulated it well. And the, the best test would be if you get someone who doesn't understand your business from the outside, a friend, your wife, your spouse, uh, to walk in and you ask her to read the goal. If they don't understand it, uh, it was probably— that means it wasn't written well enough. So if your goal says something like get MTO to 5.0, what the heck does that mean? Probably you know what that means, but nobody else knows what MTO means or why is it 5.0, not 6.0. So That's a bad goal. So first of all, you've got to have goals written well. And part of writing a goal well is we employ a technique we call it red, yellow, green. If you can start your goal with a verb and provide me with a visualization of success, what does the goal look like? We call that green. What is the minimum level of achievement that's allowable, below which is failure? We call that red. And then what is your stretch goal? What's super green that your A players would love to hit? So we call that red, yellow, green. If you start your goal with a verb and you put a red, yellow, green on it and an end date, it's probably gonna be SMART. So that's kind of our magic formula to write a goal, write it well. And then I'll, I'll say then that you can't have too many of them. So I would say 3 to 5 goals. So if you look at your plan, 3 to 5 goals, and then if you have teams working with you, did you then collaborate with the teams to understand how they will execute these goals properly. Then ultimately, when you finish the planning session, every team member of yours, including yourself, should have your personal dashboard of no more than 5 goals and 1 KPI. So I like to say, look, you got 5 priorities. Priorities are things that you do. So 5, no more than 5 things you're gonna do, and 1 key metric that you're gonna measure. So that those are the most important things for the quarter. Now you have your list. You've got your list of the 5 most important things you're going to do and the number 1 most important indicator you're going to measure. That is your dashboard or your doing commitments for the quarter.

I love— well, I love all of that. I really want to comment on— I really love the red, yellow, green. And the reason I love that is because a couple of things. It is— it forces you to then decide what is green. What is green? I mean, I think you can, um, I'm sure this has been your experience, but a lot of times you— somebody asks them, okay, what, what, what's the target specific number that we need to be able to hit? And the answer is, I don't know, more, more, right? It's like, okay, well, how much more, right?

Right.

And so it, it becomes a forcing function. And I actually did a podcast on this. This is what I'm saying, like, what— we're like so aligned in so many different things, it's crazy. I did one called, uh, red to yellow, yellow to green, uh, green to yellow. And the idea is that on that, you've defined this, this metric for this 13 weeks. If it's this number to this number, it's red.

Yes.

And so what's our plan to turn that number from red to yellow? And then if when it's yellow, great, what's our plan? What are we specifically doing to turn this, this number, this metric, from yellow to green? And then What do we need to do to turn it back from green to yellow? Because then if we're hitting all greens, we're probably not stretching ourselves enough, right? And so that becomes kind of the balance that you have. So I love that so much. I have not heard, interestingly though, so I love this angle on it and totally this was a circle thing for me too. And I agree with you is edit is easier than creating. I think that that where people get into is the, is the blinking cursor on the Google Doc or the Word document, right? And they're like, yeah, I need to do this thing, I need to create the goals, I need to create this document, I need to document this system, I need to— I mean, I could go on. And it's just the blinking cursor versus if I have something, then I can edit it, or I can begin to fill it in, or have these prompts, etc. It makes it easier to edit than to create it from zero. I, I thought that, that's fantastic.

Okay.

So let's move. Let's transition into the last part of your framework, and that's doing. So we've, we've spent time thinking, we spent time planning, we put out the numbers. Okay, that should be good enough, right? I mean, we'll just do that. We'll just do that all day long. We'll just, we'll just think and plan all day long, but we're not actually going to do something. Clearly, that's not going to work. It's actually in the implementation and the execution. What do you coach to help people coming out of a planning session Actually, GSD. Let's get some stuff done here.

You know, I, I love this quote from Mike Tyson. He said, everyone has a strategy till I punch him in the mouth. And, um, I'll tell you that I've done so many plans. I've never met a plan that did not get punched in the mouth. So no matter how good you think your plan's gonna be, it's gonna get punched in the mouth. Uh, so As part of the Do, part of the rhythm, first of all, to me, Do is really simple to understand. Can you achieve the commitments that you made? That's it. If you did not achieve the commitments that you made, then you did not do a good job doing, you didn't get the right things done. So you, you've, so you decide that you're gonna go and achieve the commitments that you've made on a weekly basis. You need to hold yourself and your teammates accountable accountable to the goal. Accountable to the goal. Sometimes I get this phone call, Bradley, you know, it says, hey Patrick, can you come help me with accountability? Because I really want this person to be held accountable. And usually when I get that phone call, it's a bit too late because what that person really meant was, how do you dish out the consequences to this guy who didn't get it done? From the tone of that voice, I can tell he's already mad that the guy didn't get it So when he says, how do I hold this person accountable? He's really saying, how do I met out the consequences? And I look at accountability a little bit differently. I look at accountability as doing the plan. And then every week you assess yourself, how likely are you to achieve the goals and the commitments that you've promised? And if you have not achieved that or you don't think you're on track to achieve that, I would status that red or yellow depending on the criteria. And now in your weekly meeting, instead of a status meeting, I call this a weekly adjustment meeting, your WAM, your W-A-M, because I want you to come together. It's a very expensive meeting, by the way, because you're having your executive team there. You wanna discuss how to make the right adjustments to keep the plan on track. You want to either achieve the plan or exceed it. If there's anything that's in the way or anything comes up early that are points of failure potentially, that's the equivalent of getting your plant punched in the mouth by Mike Tyson. And so I call this a gift of red. If somebody comes up and says, Bradley, I got this problem, this particular goal I signed up for, I'm having some difficulty. What you don't wanna do is get mad and tell that person, I can't believe you did all that. Why can't you solve the problem? Instead, you just wanna Grit your teeth and just say thank you. Because what that person did was they gave you what I call the gift of red. They just gave you a gift because, you know, whether it's week 5, week 6, or week 10, this ain't happening. So to know about it in week 5, a quarter has 13 weeks. To know about it week 5 or week 6 still gives me 7 or 8 weeks to solve the problem. But if I kept mum about it, tried to solve it myself, and told you I had a problem in week 11, now I only have 2 weeks left to solve the problem. So part of the Do Rhythm is, first of all, staying very focused to get your accountabilities done. Second of all, being accountable to the goal as a successful team, being willing to share what's not working so that the intelligence of the team can come together to figure it out. So I call that the gift of red. And then I call that an adjustment. Now, I love what you said about when something's yellow or red, you wanna, you know, move it. How do you— we call this, my term for this is PTG. What's your path to green? If something's red or yellow, fine. What's your path to green? And then let's work on that solution. But staring at it week after week when it's red, that doesn't work. Figuring it out together as a team It's a much better way of working. That's why I call it a WAM, your weekly adjustment meeting, where you come together and figure out how to stay on track and get your plan done.

Oh, I love path to green. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, totally. I'm totally ripping that one off. I'm gonna credit you, Patrick. Uh, you, you, you, this has been really good. I, I love the—

I'm counting, by the way, how many times I said circle. So my KPI for success today, I decided this as you got into this podcast with me is how many times is Bradley gonna circle something I say? Because, because that means it was good. So that's kind of, that's kind of my, uh, my, my new KPI is like, all right, how many circles did I get today?

4. All right, that's really good. That's really good. Because for something to go that— I usually have 1 or 2. So for me to have 4 on there is like, okay, that's actually gonna go from after this podcast. Forget the intro and the outro that I record. This is actually things that I personally even tell you away. That's a, that, that's a, that's a really, really high number. I've actually never started to measure that, um, specifically. Usually it's 1 or 2, so to get 4, that, that, that, that's really excellent. Well, Patrick, this has been fantastic. I've learned, I've loved learning from you. Uh, I know that this has been really fantastic for our listeners. Um, I know people are going to want to connect with you. How, what's the best way for them to be able to do that?

So they come to my company's website, you know, rhythmsystems.com. That's the best way to connect with me. Come to rhythmsystems.com. And oh, by the way, if you do that, there's an offer there for free download of a digital version of the book as well. So it's a Wall Street Journal and Rhythm is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling book. So, you know, please, please receive my gift and download that at no cost to you.

Uh, well, I really have learned a tremendous amount today. Uh, it's clear that you have, uh, not only a breadth of knowledge and experience yourself, I think that there's a lot of very successful entrepreneurs out there, and I mean this genuinely, people that have been able to be very successful in business, but there's a difference between you doing it and then being able to transfer the knowledge of what you do, how you think about it, to other people. And that in and of itself is a skill set. And so I can definitely tell through your models, frameworks, um, that you have of people be able to adopt it. Just like, again, WAMs, uh, PTGs, etc. I think I love those. Um, what do you think above the business? What do you— we've already kind of talked about that. Usually we don't necessarily hit around it, but you know, what do you, uh— we talk about work, working not just in it but on it, but then also being able to be above the business. What What resonates with you there?

I think being able to reflect and being above the business on a regular basis really resonates with me because I think it's, that's really the hardest thing to do. You know, some of the things which are the easiest to do on paper are the hardest. Every time I coach a CEO, one of the mission, one of the homework assignments I give them, so I'll say, all right, I'll give you a template. I want you to do a 20-minute reflection. Every week. And then next time we chat, tell me about your reflections. Most of the time when I get on a call the next month, that person hasn't done it. And first time this happened, I was surprised because it's pretty easy to do, right? Come on, 20 minutes out of the whole week. I'm not asking for much, but they couldn't do it. And then, and then I'll, we'll go another month. We'll say, okay, well, try harder this time. Alright. And the second month goes by and again, couldn't reflect. And so what I've learned is I now ask them to find someplace in their schedule where I can drop in the reflection time. I call that putting it into your flight path, where it's a natural thing that you can pause over here and actually find a spot to reflect. When I started doing that, they would actually get it done. So my lesson from this is reflection, slowing down enough to reflect even 20 minutes a week, is really hard. So I would encourage everyone to, you know, to stay above the business or get above the business every single week and reflect. Now, you asked me also, you said, you know, you're always going to ask about the question about, hey, what's one thing that everyone should do? And I would share with you that getting focused, getting aligned, getting accountable is really hard. So I would say I would love everyone to be able to create— you're one dashboard away from success, by the way. And your one dashboard should have your top 3 to 5, uh, things you're gonna do and the one key metric that you're gonna measure for the quarter. So you're one dashboard away from success. Uh, whatever chaos you're having right now, you're one dashboard away from solving that chaos. And I love for you to write down no more than 5, and no more than 5 things you're gonna do and one thing you're gonna measure. And that is your guiding dashboard for the quarter for your 30-week rates.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Patrick, you've been great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and would love to have you back on in the future.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me, Bradley.

Awesome. Great job, my friend. That was wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you. My book is, like I said, on the website. And what I didn't say, I forgot to say, my publicist would be angry with me, is that My next book is coming out in October. It's about the journey for CEO success, 7 practices for high-growth leadership. And that will be a nice companion to this, this, uh, this book as well. So it's coming out.

We're recording, we are recording right now. I have my podcast engineers to do it. So Ali and team, if we'll keep this rolling, um, and, um, uh, why don't you just start off and say, oh, and Patrick, uh, or just say, hey Bradley, I have one other thing I would like to add to that, and we'll put it, we'll put it in there in your, uh, your recap. Does that sound good?

Sure. So Bradley, I've got one other thing to share is that, you know, I have a new book coming out in October. It's called The Journey to CEO Success: 7 Practices for High Growth Leadership. And this is going to be wonderful. It's a good companion to the Rhythm book. That's a Wall Street Journal bestselling book. And this is more for any leader, anybody who wants to create their own processes and be successful as a leader, uh, this, this book is for them. So, oh, that's fantastic. Launches—

well, whenever it does, I'm going to have you definitely come back on. I'd love to get a copy of it myself and, uh, have you come back on and we'll chat about it.

Thank you. I look forward to that.

Well, I really enjoyed that episode with Patrick, and I mentioned at the very beginning that I had 4 things that I circled, so I thought I would share what those are. Number 1, the overeating from the buffet of opportunity. We discussed that, and there really is a never-ending amount of good ideas out there, even You know, I don't care how long you've been in business. Mark Zuckerberg, he has— think about how many opportunities come to a guy like that at this point in his career that he has to say no to. Number 2, just the importance of scheduling and planning, putting your planning sessions on the calendar, just preloading the year into what are the times and the rhythms, which I love that word that Patrick has for his book. Putting that in the calendar at the very beginning. Number 3, edit, not creating. And so at times, how many— how much can you work off of something and then make edits to it? So that's, I think, where templates come into play that you can use versus having that blinking cursor syndrome of just looking at a document, a Word document, and having to begin from scratch. So I love that. And then the last one was path to green. I did the episode that I mentioned on there about red to yellow, yellow to green, but it didn't add the PTG, meaning adding what is our path to green. So it's assuming, hey, we're at red or yellow. Okay, what is our PTG, our path to green? So love those things. Make sure to check him out. Definitely look forward to having Patrick come back on the podcast with his new book coming out soon. As always, shout out to our podcast sponsors, Club Capital. Autopilot Recruiting, Today@Pro, and Coach P Consulting. I'm actually recording this from a hotel in Austin, Texas. I was down here giving a speech actually to the team at Club Capital, and it was really amazing to be able to be around everybody on the team and meet many of them that I've talked to many, many times before, whether it's on Slack or on phone calls or Zoom sessions. So it's great to be with people person. Now, I will say this one thing that means I love remote cultures, and the ability to get to do that is unlike it's ever been. But there's never a replacement for actually being in person and being with other entrepreneurs and other people, let alone your own company, for sure. So, but for you, if you want to be able to get help and be able to use your financials as a strategic tool that you can use in the business to be able to make better decisions grow your revenue, become more profitable, book a no-obligation demo with Club Capital. Go to club.capital. I talk about the value of A-players, and I actually heard Alex Hormozi say this, that he thinks that there's still no greater arbitrage in business than what it actually means to have A-players on the team. Because you get an A-player, you pay them a little bit more, but the output that you get from a true A-player is 10 times what it's going to be from B or C player. If you want help to develop or find great talent, Autopilot Recruiting can help you. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. When you get them on board, it's important to develop your team. Some of you are incredible coaches, trainers, uh, leaders, but some of you maybe struggle with not knowing exactly how to coach and how to train. And not to say that you can delegate that completely, but you can certainly be able to get help so your team is getting exposure to other team members like David's team, etc., who are trying to do the exact same thing. And that's where Coach P Consulting comes in. Go to coachpconsulting.com. Let him and Alex and the team at Autopilot Recruiting know that you heard about them on the Above the Business podcast. I was just talking to some people about software, and software is just— it's been so important. It's getting more and more important. All of us have a tech stack that we use, and we usually love the tech stack that we have because of the, you know, how beautiful it is to interact with. Does it sync with all the other systems that we need it to sync with? Does our team use it? And more importantly, does it give us the data and does it give us the information that we need? If you're an insurance agency owner, you've not taken a look at TodayApp Pro, I would be remiss if you don't just book a demo with somebody on the team and see how you can get away from get away from some of these other complicated tools and see how easy it is to get up to speed and use a tool that you, and especially your team, is going to love to work with. TodayAppPro.com. Part of one. Till next episode, lead well.