Episode 526: Systems Thinking

Hey everyone, well, this is the last solo episode. It's going to drop the day after Christmas. Hope you've had a great year. Hope your Christmas was fantastic. I know we've got a few more days before we get into the new year, but this is the last Friday solo podcast. Usually I do a log of lessons learned, and I think I may end up doing one of those potentially in January. But if you're new to the podcast, you know that we love to talk about having a business blueprint for your small business. That is the core central thesis of that. And a blueprint has a few different components. Number one, it has a roadmap to grow the company. Number two, it has an operating system to run it. And number three, it has a personal leadership track, because I don't believe your business is going to grow past your ability to lead yourself first. And where the genesis of this episode came from As I was working with one of my private clients that I've worked with since 2020 and has had since that point, and I want to give them credit for this, meteoric success. I mean, just has had a tremendous amount of success in their business growing from, you know, about $750,000 in annual revenue to nearly going to cross $2 million. By the way, took them about 18 years to cross $1 million top line revenue. but has been able to go from $1 million to $2 million in about 3 years. And so that's why we actually talk about one of the stages when you get past $1 million, how that actually can begin to accelerate the growth in your organization. But what I wanna talk about today is what we were discussing. We were actually kind of going over his 2026 annual plan of what were some of his objectives that he wanted to accomplish in 2026. Well, One of the things that he put, he actually had two, we had some numbers, some revenue growth numbers, etc., that we went over. But he mentioned around leadership development and team development. He has some leaders in the organization. But he says, I really, I really do want to level up the skills of my team. Now, this is coming off of or on the back of us having the discussion about how important it is for him to really lean into systems thinking. And so we had a probably a 30-45 minute jam on that specifically. And then we got to talk about 2026. And I say this to say, because he then he said, I want to develop my team. There's some individual people. And I said, see, here it is 5 minutes later. This is what's important. Instead of saying, I want team development to be something I want to do. What if we said, was a better way to put it, in congruent, congruency with what we talked about, is we want to create a team development system. A way, a system that we know when we put the component parts into this system, into this factory, so to speak, that we produce on the other end team members that are, have a high return on investment. And help us grow the organization. See, that's systems thinking. Instead of thinking about team development, think about creating a team development system. Instead of thinking about creating, uh, developing individual leaders, think about how can I create a leadership development system? Because what I ended up asking him, I said, let me ask you, in 2026, you are saying that developing your team is important, is that correct? He said, yes, that, that's absolutely important, right? Is that also going to be true in 2027? Are you— do you think developing your team is going to be important? He said yes. If you had a couple additional locations that you were handed to you in 2026, 2027, 2028, do you think developing those team members is also going to be important? If you acquired some of those or given some of those locations, expanded into locations? He said, yeah, it absolutely would be important. And so what is it that was a mindset shift for him was to go back and do this idea of thinking not just in terms of how can I develop maybe, you know, Sam on the team or Julie on the team, but how can you create a system in 2026 that we can put everybody through? See, he's starting to think in terms of scale. He's starting to move from, say, 3 million excuse me, a couple million in revenue. He wants to get to $3 million. And now even scaling past that is something that went from fantasyland to something that he feels like he could actually accomplish. He could actually get to where he has a company that's doing $3, $4, $5 million, something that was literally just a figment or a dream a handful of years ago. And he's done— to his credit, he's done a good job with developing his team and developing some systems. But now it really is about a level of scale. I did a podcast episode on this a few weeks ago called Build Once, Ship Twice. And this is yet another example of that. I'm just saying it a different way. And so for you listening to this, as you go into 2026, and you have created and put down your goals, we refer to them as objectives for this next coming year. Are there any of those that you could re-look at and say, well, yeah, instead of that, maybe I could create a system that allow me to do this. Maybe you are lacking in some capacity currently. Maybe there is— we, we need to develop and we need to really have a really much better recruiting system. And you work with a company like Autopilot and you bring them in to, to help you on the front side with the vetting and the posting and handling some of the volume of candidate leads that are coming in. So you work with Autopilot Recruiting, but obviously there's a whole system that needs to be behind all of this. And so we work to create not just, I need to go get 2 new sales reps in 2026. Maybe I need to create a recruiting system that consistently, reliably and ongoingly is serving up quality candidates that then we put in our team development system that gets people up to speed in the first 90 days and then continues to develop them. And here's the analogy. Um, at the time this recording, Auburn has just hired a new football coach. Golish from South Florida. And think about in college football, you're going to have a kid— let's just say a quarterback because he's an offensive guy— for 4 to 5 years. Well, you're— maybe you have them 5, but you're not going to have them 10. Okay, I think that's similar to the way to think about with team members. I hope we can have people 4, 5, 6 years, but at some point you're probably going to have some level of turnover with people. But if you think about that from a college football perspective, there's a way that coaches have to be able to bring— like, have a really good recruiting system out of high school, or now evaluate talent from the transfer portal. So they have a transfer portal evaluation system that they put players through, and I'm just using quarterback as an example. And then we get them on campus. They start going through camps. What is their player development system? Because it's not just one quarterback at Auburn. We got a freshman, uh, uh, Deuce Knight. He's got, you know, 4, 4 years remaining. We hope we're able to keep him. By this recording, who knows, he probably is playing for somebody else. But either way, whoever the quarterback is, this is actually my point, is that even if that quarterback were to leave, Does our coach— and this is similar for other coaches— have a system in place that can take talented quarterbacks and then train and develop them into their offensive philosophy, their methodology, their way of doing things, and then continue to develop them? A player development system. I think the same thing can be true if we think in systems. We have systems thinking. Now, we, as an example, we've produced this podcast for 5 years. We have a lot of things that are very system-driven. I have to do, obviously, my part to ensure that the content is there for us to be— for you all to be able to put out. But then past that, there is a uniform system that so many people are touching to be able to make sure that we get these podcasts and episodes out there. So as you go into next year, if you're listening to this after Christmas sometime, I would urge you to, to take a look at your objectives for 2026. And instead of thinking about maybe I need to go recruit X number of people, think about how can I develop a system of recruiting? How can I develop a repeatable sales system? How can I create a repeatable team development system? How can I create a marketing system that brings in leads qualified leads on a regular basis. It's that level. It's, it's, it's thinking in terms of systems. And honestly, it's thinking like an architect. That's really what it is. It's thinking like the person who designs it and then goes and builds it, not just the one who's doing it. And I think that's an example of what it means to become the architect of your business. If you still feel like that you are, you know, the rainmaker of your business, that you're still stuck in that rainmaker seat where everything is dependent upon you, I would encourage you you have to first start thinking like an architect. And one of the first ways to do that is what we fundamentally believe is to shift that and be able to have the business of your dreams that you've always wanted, one that gives you fun, freedom, flexibility, and financial success. The way to do that is you need to have a blueprint for your business instead of running around, okay, just like a chicken with your head cut off. We need to have— we need to follow a blueprint. And the way we do that is in 3 steps. Number 1, we gotta get above it. I hope that listening to this 10-minute or so episode helps you to kind of get above the business yourself. Step number 2, when you get above it, you can start to think clear— more clearly. You start to think like an architect. And then step number 3, what architects do, they design things. What do they use to design them? Blueprints. We think you should do the same thing. Design the blueprint for your business. And that's what we help small businesses to be able to do. I'm excited to continue to talk about this concept. Concept of having a business blueprint and you becoming the architect of your business in 2026 and beyond. Thanks so much for being on, uh, this ride with us this past year. Most successful year, uh, that we've had with the podcast and with the brand. Really excited about what we've got coming in 2026. If you'd like to come to one of our workshops, one of our Above the Business workshops, just go to blueprintos.com/asset. You'll be able to see some information there. On the screen about some of our upcoming workshops. Running a workshop every single month, as a matter of fact, and we'd love to see you at our upcoming workshop in, in January. And what we're going to do in the workshop in January specifically is we're going to help you take these annual plans, and quite frankly, even your quarterly plan, we're going to help you take those, and we're going to help you make sure that you go and implement and Execute on them. Now that we've done all this preparing, how do we actually go and execute? That's what we're going to help you to be able to do. All right, everyone. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Can't wait to see you on the other side. Thanks so much for being along with us. Until next time, lead well and go be great. And if you're watching this on YouTube, would love for you to be able to hit that like and hit the subscribe button. We've got some really awesome things coming in 2026. We'd love for you to be a part of it.