Creating a Culture Focused on Results

The Small business show episode 368 for Wednesday, February 23, 2022. Greetings, folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co where we are small business ing every week. Sponsors for this episode include two renewing sponsors for us, BankNovo.com SBS and HunterDouglas.com SBS. You get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at BankNovo and your free style guide, Style get smarter guide from Hunter Douglas. So we'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. That's cool. Great to see the sponsors come back.

Same.

They'll pay the bills.

Yeah. And it's a nice metric. We're going to talk, talk about a little later in the episode. We're going to talk about results and why it's important to look at those and figure out what you want to, what success looks like. And sponsors returning to the show is a good thing for our business.

Right.

It is a material thing that shows progress.

Well, we offer value. We're not in this for the money on this show. We're trying to give back to the small business community. However, a couple things. One, it helps motivate you because you kind of see some, or at least me know you as well see some results, see it grow. Okay, we're doing the right thing. And the other thing is, you know, there's that quote. I'm going to mention it later in the show. What's measured improves. Right. So constantly tweaking this show, which we've done a lot of in the last year, helps us make it better. And I think our sponsors would agree it's working.

Yeah. Let us know what you think. Feedback Business show co. We would, we really like. As Shannon said, you know, our primary reason for doing this is. Well, he says that it's to give back to the small business community. Really, it's so that I have an excuse to talk about small business with Shannon every week because I learn the most.

So that's really, I think I learned the most. But anyway, that should be on a T shirt. It should. But it's good.

It's good, right?

Whether you were. Yeah, it's great. We both are learning while at the same time sharing our experiences. And it's, it's, it's a good system.

I just had to get that in there. But it is true. That is part of what makes this show hugely valuable for me. But Let us know what makes it hugely valuable for you because we can serve all of us in the community here. So. FeedbackusinessShow Co Speaking of FeedbackusinessShow, co listener Chuck sent in something about Show 336 where we were talking about what Chuck calls the great Resignation. He says, it struck me that there's an aspect to this great resignation that isn't being discussed and that is the role of the employee attitude in this. Everyone is asking for employers to make changes, become more flexible, provide benefits and working circumstances that are new and not in line with the way things always were. What I seldom if ever hear is the role of employee attitude. Shannon mentioned someone wanting to take off early to go to their kids softball game. Absolutely important. But equally, if not more important is the employee's attitude and willingness to make up the time or activities, not necessarily in hours, but in attitude, flexibility and willingness to make other changes to their work processes or take on other responsibilities. Maybe take on additional responsibilities in exchange for the non monetary benefits they desire. Maybe cross training someone to be able and available to fill in training during those times. There has to be a give and take rather than just a give by employers and a take by employees. I love this. He shares a story, but I figured I'd pause for a second here to chat through this a little.

Really great question that I have some comments on, as you can imagine.

Yeah, all right, well I'll share his story because it's fantastic. He says. A recent example that I talked to a friend about came to mind. In a restaurant, a manager who tried to mandate what hours everyone works to make sure the business had the coverage it needed resulted in waitstaff quitting. A regional manager came in, talked to the remaining staff and explained the obvious fact that the restaurant needed coverage from hours X to Y. The waitstaff then negotiated amongst one another, adjusting things to their needs among themselves. Some wanted more hours to make more money. Some wanted less hours because of kids and family. They shifted things around and made it work. In essence, they were empowered and became a team to solve the issue rather than being treated like drones and told what and when. Both sides were flexible, as Chuck points out, rather than becoming entrenched in their own positions. And everyone lived happily ever after, I think. I mean that's what a brilliant example of leadership here, right? Yep. Empower people and get out of the way. Like that's it.

Yeah, that's, that's really good. And I, you know, making that comment about being flexible with, you know, employees and taking off for kids stuff and all that kind of thing. It's great. To that follow up question, you know, you're not going to do that as much if you don't get that give and take with your employee.

Right.

Or your employer. So when you ask someone to stay late or you ask them to finish a project or do something on the weekend, you're hoping that, well, you know, we've been really flexible and allowed for extra time or whatever this person is. And you're hoping that they think and remember those things going, yeah, you know what, we're crunch time, we're going to do this or we're going to do that. And you want it to go both ways. I like that story where you really lay it out. The restaurant concept, you lay it out and let them focus on it. I don't know, it's not as applicable maybe in an office or a tech space coverage.

I think it could be somebody needs to leave, making sure if they can sort it out themselves. And maybe this is the trick. If somebody says, hey, I'm going to go to my, you know, I need to go, I want to go to my kids soccer game. So I've talked with, you know, Timmy and Susie about making sure that, you know, the things that might come in while I'm gone are covered, you know, whatever that might be. But you know, showing people that, empowering people to solve that problem before coming to you.

Right.

Like, well, they shouldn't even. Ideally.

Right.

They shouldn't have you maybe you don't even know. It's just, it just happens.

It just happens.

Yeah, because you know, yeah, your managers, maybe you're talking whatever and oh, hey, I'm this and the other thing. But you're the folks working in the departments. In my case, they're technicians and things. If, you know, I can remember walking around going, oh, where's so and so? And they go, oh yeah, he took off. He's doing this great. You know, I don't, I don't. You don't need to know those kinds of things.

No, you don't. Yeah, you got it figured out amongst you, right? Yeah, exactly. And then even if you do, even if they do inform you, it's just a heads up, not asking permission, Right, Correct. And that I think is whether it should or not, all of this stuff starts with you as the leader, the manager, the business owner, whatever role you are in, you have to allow for these kinds of things to happen and you need to make space for them to happen without you dictating the process.

Right.

Yeah, it's part of the. Well, it's part of your culture. It's just baked in.

Yeah.

But if you have people that take advantage of it and that, you know, or they don't have the right attitude about it being a give and take, that's problematic as well. And so you may have to have that discussion and say, you know, look, I'm ha. We want you to be able to take this time off and this kind of thing, but if you're, I don't know, maybe have somebody's late all the time or taken off or whatever, you, you really do.

Yeah.

There has to be a balance.

It's not a perfect world. Yeah, it has to be a balance. And the more mature, in my experience, well, in my experience, the more experienced employees understand it, they get it. They've been working for other people. They know they're working at a place that's, oh, this is a great place to work because of these, you know, this flexibility versus perhaps a younger maybe or just less experienced people. Age doesn't have anything to do with it. Less experienced folks that just think it's that way for everything. But it also leads into our topic today about focusing on results.

Right?

Well, that's true. Yeah.

If you have your group or your team is just nailing it and doing really well, or an employee that's really knocking out of the park and hitting all their, you know, KPIs and that, that kind of stuff, you're going to be more flexible.

You got it right. Yeah, absolutely. And. And that is it. No, it's a perfect tie in to, to our topic for today. And that's what I want to talk about. The next thing I want to talk about, though, is our two sponsors for this episode. If that works for you, Shannon.

Yeah, it works for me.

All right.

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Yeah, I think you brought this topic up.

I did.

You had, you know, I think you made a comment, you know, the difference between 90% and 100%. Can you expand on that?

Well, I mean that, like, if it's not obvious. Sorry, but no, like, but you're right. Like that it is that, like, you can do good enough or you can do it. All right, okay. And certainly there are times in life where it makes sense to cut a corner, right? Like, that's not what I'm talking about here. It's being committed to doing things right and getting the job done as opposed to saying, well, you know, I put in my 8 hours on this and I am wherever I am. That's the difference to me. Here is, is. Oh, you know, it's great if people try hard, but the results are really what matter in the end.

That's right.

And I know that's. In some circles, in this circle, it's a very positive thing to say.

Yes, it seems obvious, right?

It seems obvious. But in some circles, if you tell people, well, yeah, I understand that you worked hard on this, but it's not. It's not there. It's not finished. Uh, it's not good enough. They can be tough. So, you know, and then, of course, there's the whole management of it, of separating people's self worth from the worth of the product they create.

Right.

And.

And.

And that's a, That's a. That's a thing that we each individually have to learn to deal with. But also, as managers, we have to help our team deal with that too. But that. That's what I mean about the difference between 90% and 100% is, you know, putting in the time is great, but really, I hate having people punch a clock. Like, if I can't do it, somebody brings that up.

Like, I've done this, put so much time in this. Yeah, I get it.

It's like, okay, well, you did the wrong thing. And I mean, where is it? I've done it too.

Right.

Where, you know, where I see this often, or maybe most recently is with programming projects. You know, whether it's. It's me that's doing it or, you know, I've got somebody that works with me that does it. Adam, he and I will. Will team up on stuff, and sometimes, you know, we'll. We'll bring something to the table for the other, and it'll be like, okay, well, look, I. I spent a bunch of time on this. And the other one, I'll say, well, yeah, but like, that's not really getting it done the way we needed to get it done.

Sure.

So let's look at it, you know, and it's like, okay. And you just got to, you know, okay, great. You invested that time and you got it to this point. Now let's work on it and make it right. Let's make it, you know, and that. And that can be true with anything we have going on.

Yeah.

You know, okay, cool.

Yeah.

So that's. That's right.

That's where this came from for me.

Let's break it down. Talk about ways to get your team on board, kind of creating like culture, a culture focused on results instead of just, you know, I put my time in, of course, and I can't think of a better thing to focus on first is systems over goals. Right. We talk about this on the show a lot and I think it's easily relatable to focusing on results.

Right.

And the reason why I say that is because I think part of the problem with a number of people is really keeping things in front of them of that measurement of success.

Right.

Instead of just, well, I come to work and I do my job and I get these things done. And I'm going to come back full circle to this at the end of the conversation about the kind of steady eddies that grind it out, because I do have some stuff to say about that. But training your people to embrace systems over goals. Goals are for losers. If you don't make the goal, you lose. If you get started with and embrace systems and you set this KPI key performance indicators, you set those as your guides along the way in your system, you can focus on never ending improvement and never ending achievement because you can say, okay, well this is what we want to get done. But it doesn't end. It's not like, hey, we made it. We hit our goal for the quarter. It's like, okay, we're going to continually improve and yes, you're going to celebrate that success. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. But I think learning more about systems over goals and just if you go to businessshow co and search for systems, you'll find some episodes where we really break it down, the power of it and why we think it's important.

Yeah, it's important though, that your system not be. Show up and work for eight hours and go home and everything will magically get done.

That's not a system.

Well, it is a system, to be fair, that is, you know, but it's.

Not one you want to use.

It's not the system you want to use.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so I think coupled with this system mentality is you have to quantify what the success is.

Right.

And you have to. It comes back to the. That quote. I said that during the intro. What's measured improves. Right. I think like Peter Drucker or somebody.

Well, yeah, the way I always heard that. And it's a little different. And so I kind of like both of these phrases. I don't know which one he said or maybe he said both.

Sure.

But is, you know, that which is monitored is managed.

And that's good. Yeah, it's great.

They both basically say the same thing, but with a slightly different emphasis.

Right.

And I'D never heard what's measured improves before. When I read it in as we were kind of preparing for the show, I was like, oh, that's interesting, you know, because that defines a successful outcome. I like this.

Yeah, right.

That's right. And you know, you're tricking yourself. You're hacking your brain into saying, well, if I'm measuring it, then therefore it will improve better. Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

Because it gives you a guide and you need that. You and your people that work for you, your employees, your team, your contractors, whoever, they need that guide as well. Because you can't go say, well, you didn't achieve what we wanted if they don't know.

Right.

You have to be able to measure it. And some things are really easy to measure. More sales, more shipments, fewer returns, fewer mistakes, whatever. More customers. Those are easy. But I think you can, if you sit down, you can quantify other things as well. Things like how many conversations did we have to have to solve a customer problem? You know, customer issue, how much was it escalated, how many times, how long, you know, how long does it take for a customer to place an order? You know, clicks, how many clicks, how many calls, whatever. And how long is. Are your customer service calls on average? Can you set up a system to get those? Can we continue to drop those? Can we keep people from calling? Can we, you know, do we. Did we answer it via our, you know, our CRM software?

Whatever.

You want to quantify those things throughout your organization and you want to push that system of whatever we're going to measure is going to get better.

Okay. So I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here.

Yeah.

Just to dig into this. So I like this.

Right.

But there's two things that you as a manager need to get right or eventually get right. Everything's a process, including yours.

Right.

One of them is figuring out how granular is the right amount of granularity.

Right.

You just listed a lot of things that could be seen as nitpicky, right?

Yeah. Maybe you don't need to track those. Right. That's a good point.

But some level of that is exactly what you're going to need to do in order to change the system from, I worked eight hours, therefore I succeeded.

Right.

Like, you need to have some level of granularity and like you said, some KPIs that you can measure. So I like this. For your business, it's going to be different. And some businesses are going to be a lot more granular or appear to Be a lot more granular than others. That's ok. The other thing, but be aware of that, that you're going to have to, you are going to define that for your business or at least you need to listen to your business to figure out what that definition is.

But hopefully you can automate a lot of it because your phone system should track the length of time you should be able to with technology and automation. A lot of these things which would drive you absolutely insane trying to track.

Yep.

Should happen automatically.

That's fair. That's fair. But you might have, you could get data overload.

Right.

Like the flip side of that is true. Like I'm sure your phone system tracks a lot of things. Which of those things are the ones that you're going to focus on and what are noise for your business?

Right.

And so you know, you, you have to sit down and you can do this with your team. You can say, okay look, here's 15 things. The data points that we get from the phone system. Which ones do we think really matter to our business? And this is a nice way to do it because you get buy in at the end of this process too.

Right.

So you know, figuring that out with your team and evolving it is great because they're going to see things you don't too.

Right.

So this is, you know, that's, that's the, the, that's one way to go. The other part of the devil's advocate in me is if you have too many things or if you, even if you just have one thing that you're looking at, but you're probably going to have, let's say five, what is, where is the number that you celebrate?

Right.

I know we talk about, you know, goals are for losers and systems are better than goals, but goals, you know, milestones are important.

Right?

Yes.

This is, I would agree. You know, and so you have to come up with where that is because otherwise you're just chasing something that never, that, that you never achieve. And that with the wrong people or the wrong culture can be numbing after a while. That's right.

You, you can't grind it down to, you know, where it's all data and you don't care about anybody. It doesn't work.

No.

And just like you can't hand this stuff down from on high and think it's going to be embraced by everybody. You have to get everybody involved in this. Yeah. Very important to point out. And there will be some things you're gonna be like, you know what, this works well enough for Us, let's not track this or let's check in quarterly with it instead of monthly or weekly.

Right.

Because we've set up this system and it seems to be working well. We're not getting complaints. I mean, maybe things should bubble up a bit before you have to measure them. It's like, wow, we're getting customers. People are on the hold for X. Or those customer service calls are taking a lot longer since we started selling this product or whatever that. I guess what I trying to get across is you can measure, you know, set quantifiable measurements for most things in your business. And it's a very important process for people to understand how are we going to define success? And you can't, like, you can't grind people into dust trying to get seconds out of it, but you can measure, hey, how are we doing? Is it great? Hey, that's, that's, that's terrific. Right? Which I think, to your point, kind of leads me into. My next topic is focusing on less.

Right.

Oh, all right.

Because this, you know, we'll flip it on its head. Small successes are a great foundation for greater, you know, success, for lack of a better word. You know, thinking about, like the success list concept that we have talked about on the show, you can download, I think, I think we might have a sample up there of a success list somewhere. But if you search@businessshow co, that list is for you to remind yourself of all the small things you got right during the day. Another brain hack. You want to keep working out and getting that judge in your head. Well, you want to do that in your business as well. You don't want to create these giant let's eat the elephant all at one time. But what can we work on that leads to overall improvement, Especially if you have new people or new teams? Starting with small things really helps to build trust and cohesiveness in a team because, oh, yeah, look, we were able to just even figuring out how to communicate.

Yeah, right.

Figuring out what your, what your KPIs are going to be like.

What is it?

That's success.

Yeah, yeah. Forgetting everybody to use Slack correctly. If slack is your one or Microsoft Teams or whatever it is, that's huge. Sauna. Yeah. Those are, you know, what may seem like, well, everybody will figure this out. No, no, no. It doesn't work that way. So if you're celebrating just the fact that we're working together to achieve these things really helps you build this mentality of, okay, look, we can do this. We're measuring and it's a positive. You know, small little pieces of things. And yes, it's granular, but you can certainly make it human at the same time and focus on that. Get everybody get their buy in. And also, I think as you work, I know Dave, you and I do this, we start talking about one thing we want to do and then like five other things pop up. So keeping a separate list or know that, you know what, this is another process we want to put in place that we've identified. Let's put that off to the side so we can keep focused on our smaller goal right now. That way you don't get going around in circles and just keep thinking of new things that are going to drive you crazy.

I like this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's really. I never thought about celebrating, you know, making Slack work for your business, but. Yeah, but that's a huge. Every business that I've moved to that has been a huge shift. It takes time.

Yeah, I, yes, absolutely. And I, you know, I failed with some.

Yeah.

Oh, of course. There's some people I still can't get using it. You know, I'm part of a volunteer organization and I said, hey, you know, we've got this, all these email threads going back and forth. Let's move this onto Slack and it'll be there. Some people have done really well, other people still resist. And it's like, well, I didn't get the email. It's like, well, we're not sending those emails out anymore. But if you go search Slack, you'll find anything you want. And, but those small successes are huge and they get everybody's mind, right? Yeah, look, we're going to be successful all the time. It's that same thing with systems. Like, you're constantly celebrating your success as the system gets to work and you refine it and it gets better and better and better. It just kicks off success.

Yeah.

Or it, I think it alerts you sooner to problems versus we set a goal for, for the end of the quarter, reach this number and you get busy and you don't talk till towards the end of the quarter and you're like, there's no way we're going to hit this number.

Yeah. Right.

The system, it's just kind of constantly refined.

Yeah, I like it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well. And it teaches the team that you can do, you can accomplish things together.

Yeah.

And that's huge. Like, that gives you confidence for the next thing you need to accomplish together.

Exactly.

And then you slowly sort of raise the bar of difficulty up and suddenly you're doing the things that you need to do to increase the bottom line and all of that stuff. But everybody is doing it together and that's huge.

Yeah, yeah. Supporting one another, being supported, all that kind of stuff you're building, you know, I mean, it's persuasion 101, but you're getting them to be involved in it and helping them to define their success as well. Even though, you know, at the end you're like, okay, this is what we need to do. It may be so big that you just can't dump it on your managers or supervisors or a team of people, but you've got to break it and parse it down for them to get to. To get buy in.

Yeah.

So I like your, your two week experiment. Hey, we're going to try this for two weeks.

Try this for two weeks. Yeah.

Even though you may have in your head already said this is the way it's going to be from now on, you get that buy in because, okay, we're trying this new thing and you slowly sneak it in. So.

Yeah, you sneak it in. Yeah, that's how it works.

Yeah.

A few more things that I thought are important. One is sharing the progress, you know, how you share it. How do they know if you're making progress or if you need to adjust?

Right.

Some kind of visual scoreboard I think is incredibly important. I come back to the, you know, we talk about this quartet thing that Dave and I both have in between our keyboard and our screen. And it's like.

It's a glass whiteboard. Yeah, exactly.

It's a game changer.

It sounds stupid, but it's totally a game changer.

Yep.

And it's in front of you all the time because you're constantly looking there. And you can write things on it that we'll put a link in the show notes. But everybody I. Well, not everybody, but I send this out all the time as a gift. And everybody's like, hey, this thing is incredible. If you're in front of your computer a lot, it works out great. Same thing for your employees. What kind of visualization can you put in front of them? And maybe one of your walls needs to be painted in whiteboard paint or chalkboard. Or maybe your group works better with an Excel sheet or Google sheets. And you have a monitor, a big TV up on the wall that you keep it up there.

Right.

So where they can look at and go, oh, this is doing great. Or you turn it on once a week, whatever, however you're doing it. But I think it. You Know, it helps to define what it is you're measuring and to kind of remind that, because you put that as the title. Oh, we want to check this out.

We want to.

We're having an issue with, I don't know, people taking too many abandoned shopping carts or whatever in E Commerce. So we want to tweak that. And also, who's in charge of this one person? What manager or supervisor is going to take the lead and kind of work on this and then are you on track? Are things moving in the right direction? And I also coupled with this, I love the concept of a shared to do list for your team. When you talk quickly and briefly and, you know, not sitting down for an hour meeting, that'll, you know, numb your brain. But little things, hey, could you take care of that? That can go on your shared to do list. Also important.

And you can use things like asana or trello or, you know, whatever works for your organization to have these in a easily publicly or team accessible way so that it's, you know, you see. Oh, great. We. That's got knocked off the list. Okay, moving on. You know that that whole scrum mentality is based on that, right? Like, here's all the things on the board. Okay, I'm gonna go grab the next one and get it done and move it over. You know, your, your team may or may not. What your team is doing may or may not work with that scrum mentality, but something that employs that same idea of sharing the load, if you will. Here's all the things that need to get done. Now, look, we moved them. I mean, okay, well, I know I moved 10 of those things over and if you're keeping track, that person moved 12. But that's fine. A little bit of competition like that. Yeah, it is a great thing. It motivates everyone.

It does. And it helps to identify somebody that may need some help. You know, maybe a part of what you're working on is just turns out to be much bigger than you thought. But someone has just got their. They're just trying to pump through it and you're like, hey, man, you know, do we need to assign somebody else or give you some more resources? What's going on?

Yeah, what's with this thing that's taking, you know, that's taking so much energy and focus? Like, should we break it down further?

Yeah, you got it. And it's not. You gotta be careful in the way you do it because you want to keep them motivated. You're not trying to just browbeat Them. But if it turns out that, like, wow, you know, this person hasn't completed these things, that's maybe a private talk.

But it can be a private talk. It depends on the culture, you know.

Yeah, that's true.

I mentioned how Adam and I work on programming stuff at the beginning of the episode. And like, we learned the hard way that we both will have a tendency to just keep our head down until we've solved the problem. And that is a great strength, right? Like, you know, being committed. I've always said bullheaded persistence is the key to my success. However, we've also found that when we have a little check in, especially on something where we've had our head down and are trying to plow through it and it's not maybe going as smoothly as we would have wanted, a little conversation with one another can often solves it. And it's usually one of two things. It's as you know, if I'm having the problem, me explaining it to him opens my eyes and say, oh, wait a minute, there's something I haven't tried, or there's a better way to approach this. Or he'll say, hey, have you tried this or have you approached it that way? And be like, no. Oh, well, maybe try that. Like, oh, okay, great. And we do this for each other. It's very much a bi directional thing and it's okay. And I've done it in larger groups of more than two, so it's not just a one on one conversation. And again, if it's all in this essence of being supportive, it can be fine. But it takes a little bit of confidence from everyone to be able to say I'm stuck, essentially, what you need to be able to say, and it's up to you as the leader and the manager to be the first one to say I'm stuck.

Right?

Make it okay. And then the team helps each other. It's totally fine, right?

And if you've got or as well, it's up to us as leaders to be able to look at like this visual scoreboard and identify problematic areas. And you say, wow, we're constantly not making it in this area, or maybe we're not measuring this thing right in the first place. And I think it's, you know, this is an overall thing, but it's important to be okay. Be open to being wrong, especially as the leader. You know, if you're setting timelines or you're leaning. If they come in and say it's going to take two weeks and you say, get it done in a week. Well, maybe that works. I mean, there is a concept, right, that the work just fills up based on whatever space it can.

Right?

That's fair.

Yeah, right.

That. That is true. So you. There's some nuance here, but you gotta be open to some pushback if it can be justified. And you also have to look and be able to tease out when there's problems with particular folks that do need that help and be able to do it in a positive way to try to get them over the hump. I think that's. That's important. And having that scoreboard as well, you want to allow people to. To use it like a to did list. Right. If you're not familiar with that concept. BusinessShow Co search for to did. And I use this list all the time because I'm not that great at to do lists, but at the end of the day, end of the week or whatever, I can sit down and write a list of the things I did get done. And it's important for me, as part of my success list, to look and go, wow, I did get a lot of stuff done today. And I recognize that I got these things done. Maybe it was, you know, not systematic, but I got these things done or identified. Do it. I need to get these other things done the next day. It's important.

No, that's. Yeah, I'm the same way with that. If you've listened to this show long enough, you might have an inkling that at least one of us might be a little bit distractible. Yeah, I know. No, it might not be you, it might not be me. I'm not sure. However, one thing I've learned as a distractible person is that, yeah, sometimes I get to the end of the day and it's like, oh, yeah, I didn't accomplish a lot. But that motivates me the next day to sit down and say, okay, I need to start the day with some focus and a plan. Because some days it's good not to have a plan. And like you said, you look back on those days and you say at times and say, wow, this was. Look at all the things I accomplished. It wasn't on my list, but I got all this stuff done. And then other days, for me anyway, it's like, okay, I need to start with a list. And, you know, I get three or four things done. And now I'm on a tear right now. I've got that confidence of, okay, I'm focused, I'm able to do things. I'm Rolling. I'm just going to keep going with it, you know, and those days can also be very productive, even if at the end of the day, you know, I started with five things on my list, and I wind up putting 15 on my to did list. Right. The to do list has five. The to did list has 15. It's like, yeah, because I got my momentum going. But some days, you know, you start and you look at your to did list and it's like, oh, there's two things on it. Yeah, yeah, they weren't really important. I gotta hustle tomorrow. Yeah, but that's. I mean, that's fine. Like, you have to. I find that I have to give myself permission to not just produce 100% of the time, because I don't. And it's okay. It's like, all right, today was not a productive day. But you know what? Watch me tomorrow. Watch and learn.

So I mentioned earlier kind of about the steady Eddies, the folks that show up and just kind of grind it out. And I want to wrap up with this concept of I spent many, or I spent, put forth a lot of effort during my business, small business career trying to just find people that I thought should think like me. And I realized I was wrong. You know, you want to surround yourself with people that don't think like you in many ways. And especially the people that there are, you know, needs. Tremendous needs, and they're super valuable people that are going to show up, be consistent, but they're not going to, you know, fall in love with your business concept, business culture, but they're going to be there. They're going to get the work done. So it's, you know, your job, your supervisors, your managers, to slot those people in to this process. They may not even be aware that they're involved in this process, but you're going to, you know, give them the tools and resources and support to show up and just grind it out every day. You know, in my line of work, let's face it, shipping orders isn't the most exciting thing. And it's critically, you know, that it's done right, it's timely, and it, you know, it's got to be, you know, accurate and all this kind of stuff.

Yeah. It's not. It's not exciting, but it is arguably one of the top three important things to that type of business.

Yep.

Yeah. And you have to really. The shipping department I used to walk through, and I would tell those guys, you guys are the most important people here.

Yeah.

Because you are the people that come into contact, physical contact with our customers. Everybody else was, you know, really virtual. Right. And it's online this and that's interesting and the phone and it's like you are the guy, you know. So you have to tease out how to make them feel good about themselves and, and recognize that yes, you can measure the number of mistakes and all that kind of stuff, but maybe you have to do that with your warehouse manager or something like that. But the folks that come in and out because those positions tend to have more turnover maybe than some other ones or part timers, students. You know, we used to love hiring students but know that those people are critically important and maybe they're not going to grasp this whole systems over goals concept and you may be wasting your breath trying to explain a lot of this stuff to them. So maybe you don't do it but just recognize them in some way and realize that they're just as, you know, they're equally or more so sometimes important to your overall success.

I think so, yeah. I like it. I like it.

Great conversation. Love to hear what you think we got right, what we got wrong. Feedbackus show co we love featuring your questions on here and let us know how's it go, how it's going. We have a new mastermind group up on LinkedIn. If you just go up and you can search for the smart business show or my name.

Why don't we make it businessshow co LinkedIn and then we'll link it there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sounds great. Come up and see some of the things that we're posting and join the conversation.

Sounds good man. Thank you so much for listening, folks. Chuck, thank you for your comment folks. Thank you for your comments again. Feedbackusinessshow co thanks to our sponsors for this episode. Banknovo.com and HunterDouglas.com SBS go check it out and see you next week. Keep living that charmed life, will you?