Episode 374: People or Systems?

Hey everyone, I don't know exactly why you may have gotten into business or entrepreneurship, kind of what your journey has been. Maybe you've had friends or family members that got you into it, but for most people it comes down to that they sought after some level of freedom, flexibility, income potential. They wanted to be able to make money, they wanted to be able to, to do what they love and to be able to go play more golf, to go fishing, to do— spend time with their family, have plenty of cash in the bank, etc. Okay. And so when we think about that freedom and flexibility and income potential, and then we hear things like systems and processes, organizational structure, etc., oftentimes what we can do— pressure, process, structure, and routine— what we can do probably subconsciously is begin to kind of push against that. I know that that's certainly my case. You've heard me say that before, is that, hey, I got into this thing because I didn't want to be told what to do. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it with who I wanted to do it, and I wanted to have the money to be able to do so. And so your journey is probably, and for all of clients that we work with, is fairly similar. Whether it's, again, golf or fishing or time with your friends or traveling, etc. And so when we hear those kind of things, we can kind of, again, begin to push against it. And so what my own journey taught me was everything that I wanted was on the other side of structure, process, and routine. Actually creating systems, not hearing I needed to be able to create systems and processes in my business, but actually doing it. See, I heard that for years before I actually created what was my first one, but it wasn't even— it wasn't that I heard it, I actually needed to see it. And so what I'm going to share with you today is kind of an example as to why we want to have certain systems and processes in place and not just rely only on people. Now look, you think about a couple of our podcast sponsors like Autopilot Recruiting as an example. You hear all the time talk about that you have to have great people in the business, and I absolutely believe that. However, if you only rely on people and we don't have any systems in place, then when those great people move, possibly, or move on or retire or whatever the case may be, Then what are you left with? You left with a huge hole because there was nothing in place. All of that intellectual knowledge, that, um, IP, that intellectual property really of the business has also left with them. And so I'm actually recording this on the day that it's being dropped, and that is very abnormal for us. As a matter of fact, That is a mistake. We are usually with our Monday interviews, uh, somewhere between 4 at the low end and upwards of, at times we've gotten 12 weeks out. I think the sweet spot for us seems to be in that 6 to 8 weeks. Um, it's not a lot of pressure for me. We can record 1 or 2 interviews a week. It's not, puts it, doesn't put a lot of pressure on our podcast team. That produces the episodes, that edits the episodes, which, thanks to all of you for turning this around so quickly. And that system has been in place for a really long time. We utilize some tools, uh, everybody knows kind of what their role is, what my role is to do. Well, also, it's— there's some accountability about who kind of owns making sure that we're ahead. But on the Friday episodes they're handled a little bit different. There's not an interview to schedule. I've recorded some episodes from my truck. I recorded many episodes sitting here at my desk, and sometimes I will batch and record 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 episodes in a row when I batch them together. But sometimes that's not necessarily the case. And so there have been times over the past couple years where the team has said, hey Bradley, we don't have an episode for next week or the next 2 weeks, and so I'll go record 2 or 3. Well, this morning we as a team began to get messages that, hey, we don't have an episode for today. And so instead of going around and thinking— and this is the key takeaway for everybody today— is number 1, hopefully I'm sharing with you kind of vulnerability, is to say, hey, sometimes, you know, we, we mess up too. I never want to give the impression that, hey, we've got it all together. I don't think that that's, uh, number 1, that's not honesty, um, and number 2, um, hopefully you can begin to see how we think about it. And so today is not necessarily going to be an actual specific tool that we can use, but this does fall under mindset. And so I'll get to what the kind of the mindset, the takeaway is in just a second. But in all of these episodes, whether they're Monday but especially on Friday episodes, I try to begin to think about what's the mindset, what's the skill, And what's the tool? Mindset, the skill set, the tool set, one of those. And sometimes it becomes a combination of those. I think today is really how we approach it, how we think about the problem. And so the way when I see that, instead of just looking for someone to blame on the team, who dropped the ball on this? Ultimately, number one, I take responsibility. And truly take extreme ownership, as Jocko Willink says, to say, at the end of the day, it falls on my responsibility to make sure that those things are in place. But instead of saying, this person dropped the ball, why did this not get, uh, put in place, I think about what was the system that's missing, what was the function that should— we should have been pushing on that would have been a big red blinking light to say you are low on fuel, you need to, you know, uh, you need to land this plane quickly because you're low on fuel, or whatever the case may be. So for us, this was an opportunity to us, for us to go to our work management tool that we use and to say, hey, now we need to put this in place to make sure that this never happens again. And that's exactly what we've done. In fact, already before I've recorded this episode today, we began— I began to think, okay, what's the system that's missing here? We had some communication back and forth as a team, um, asynchronously, meaning we're recording it specifically some voice messages through Slack. And we've already put and improved our system. So we thought we had a pretty good system before But today we found that there was a gap. And so the big takeaway for this message for all of you is when something gets dropped, when something in the business doesn't happen, you, um, are onboarding a customer and you make assumptions to something is happening, or the way that you manage and work through a claim in your organization, the way you onboard a team member Instead of just thinking about this person, first think about where is the— where was the system missing here? How can we improve and tighten up our system first? Then the person who has accountability can then be held accountable, because in this particular case it was a little murky. As to whose responsibility it ultimately landed on. And so therefore, now we've been able to look and improve our overall podcast production system to make sure that we all get ahead so that we're not, uh, kind of last minute as we are today. And so as I was actually cooking breakfast this morning, I was thinking to myself, You know what? I think I'm just going to share this example instead of me going back through. So I have kind of a Rolodex of ideas or of solo podcast ideas that I keep really for myself as things pop up, and I'll go to that. So when it's time to record a Friday episode, I'll go to that list and I'll think, oh, actually, that's a, that's a really good idea. And I got some other things that I'll kind of pull up. I thought I would just share with you openly how some of these things happen. And when you do start to create an operating system for the entire business, that operating system really runs outside of you. You can begin to kind of see where there are holes that you can then fill. And I believe that for us as a team— now, I could have recorded an episode about another topic today and moved on, and this would have gotten released a little bit later on a Friday than it normally does, um, and many of you wouldn't have known. But I thought instead I wanted to share very openly, hey, we, we kind of as a team dropped the ball. And so while you may not have seen any of that, what I go back to is really the dropping the ball is the fact that we didn't have some things in our system to make sure that we were well ahead of our podcast, solo podcast recordings. So again, the takeaway is when something doesn't go well in the business, when you're a little agitated or frustrated because something did not get done— a team member did not follow up with prospects, a new team member that you just onboarded, it was a little clunky to get them onboarded— whenever you're onboarding a customer and you make assumptions— so we all kind of made assumptions that, uh, somebody else was on top of this episode being recorded today, that, you know, instead of going and saying, hey, there's not assumptions, we can actually make sure that there's a system in place. And so whether it's team member issues or working with customers or delivery issues with customers such as payments and claims and all of those other type of things that happen once a customer comes on board Instead of thinking about just the person, first think about the system. And then once a system is in place, and if this happens again for us, we know who is ultimately responsible and we can go back to the system and then it becomes all about execution. So hopefully that has served you well today and you can learn from kind of us and from me today about something about how we or how I began to approach this. Hope this served you well. Until next episode, lead well.