What Type of Leadership Leads to Small Business Success? – Small Business Show 190

The Small business show episode 190 for Wednesday, September 26, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at businessshow. Co the show BFA Small business here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm Good. We have two sponsors today. Timingimingapp.com SmallBusiness and a new sponsor, square.com Go SBS all about the new Square payroll app. We'll talk about all that in a minute here. But cool. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah. Things are good, crazy good. But you know, just how it goes. Yeah.

It's better to be that way than to be sitting there not having anything to do, right?

Yeah. I always say, you know, when I tell somebody, somebody, I'm too busy or not too busy, but I'm busy, you know, I always say, well, that's better than the alternative. But lately I've started to follow that up with. It's been so long since I've experienced the alternative, I. I just have to assume that's true. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do. I do believe it's true. Yeah. That it's better. Yeah.

I definitely have, like, a part of me the grass is greener type mentality where I'm thinking, God, it'd be so nice just to be sitting on the beach somewhere not getting anything done. But I've done, you know, the. That. And then I sit there for a couple hours. I'm like, okay, well, God, how's that place making money down the. Down that beach? How do they work out? And then I start, you know, doing, talking, doing things and getting involved in things that I like to do and not sitting around doing nothing.

So I did an interview, the, I don't know, last week for a local small business. I should know what it's called. But it's a. It's a local small business group that they also podcast and stuff. It was on Facebook and I'll put a link in the show. Notes. Yeah. And I was asked, you know, what does retirement look like? And. And I shared an idea that came to mind years and years ago, which was I thought, well, wouldn't it be great to have an ice cream truck? Like, once I'm retired, you know, I could get an ice cream truck and I could just go around and sell ice cream to people like, this is. This would be great. You know, you do it. It's just in here. You just do it in the summer. I don't know about there. If People do it, but, you know, it's just a few months a year. And. And, you know, you get to make kids and adults, you know.

Yeah.

Children of very happy. Right.

People are generally in a good mood when they're getting ice cream.

Yeah, exactly. They're happy to see you come and all that stuff. And I was like, yeah, I might do that. And, you know, the problem is, the first year I do that, that's what I would do. And I would know, okay, well, there's this neighborhood you can go to.

Let's get another truck.

But that's exactly it. By the end of the first year now I know all the neighborhoods to go to. And it's like, well, if I had four trucks, I could hit all of those every day or at the right frequency. You figure out your frequencies or whatever. And that's what would happen is the first summer would be this experimentation of what neighborhoods are good and what frequencies are good, and maybe even looking at the property sale charts and stuff to figure out, all right. Which people are moving into these neighborhoods that are going to have young kids. I want to develop that neighborhood in three years. These neighborhoods are going to grow at different speeds and all that. But that's the problem is that's like. To most people, that's not retirement.

Well, yeah, that's true, but I think it would be. It sounds very interesting to me. And, and. But I. I would say there's a. And I didn't say it, but somebody did. You know, if. If you want to kill your enthusiasm about something, a product or whatever it is, start a business around it, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I. You probably would never want the ice cream again after you did it for a few years. I mean, I. I can rem. I mean, you turn it into a business where you're just constantly thinking about, okay, I gotta move this, I gotta do that. But. But as a retirement thing, you're like, oh, we sell what we sell and we have a great time. That's true.

Yeah. Although, you know, I've been very fortunate that I have basically turned my hobbies into businesses. Right. I mean, I. I love computers and technology, and I found a way to make money with that. You know, I love playing music. I've found a way to make money with that. That. Ha. There have been times when that was my full time. Like, that was my main gig. I can make more money on the computer side and I can sleep at home every night doing the computer thing as opposed to the music thing. So that was a pretty easy decision. To make. Although there are times when it's like, wow, it's fun being on the road and it's exciting and all that stuff. And if I had really focused on that, I think no question I could have turned that into a very lucrative business. It just took a sacrifice of traveling all the time that I at the time and perhaps even now was not willing to make. I don't know that I would learn to hate the ice cream truck because I haven't learned to hate anything else.

That's good.

But you're right, enthusiasm, I mean, if it doesn't, it doesn't completely erode for me, but it, I mean, it becomes a job. Right? So it, yeah, you become a job. It definitely, you know, is reduced. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, like there.

Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. So, hey, let's, you know, I was, I was looking for topics today and I was thinking about what we want to talk about. We had such a great show last, last week with Bill reddy on from PayPal. And you know, he seems like such a great leader. He's just a down to earth nice guy that's been successful, had some great leadership traits. And so I just went up onto the BusinessShow Co website, I typed in leadership. I'm all, who else have we talked about leadership? And I came up, no results. And so I said, wow, we really need to do a show. I know we've talked about leadership and leading and managing and all this kind of stuff ad nauseam on the show over the years, but we're going to do this show all about leadership and not just leading employees. Because I think as a leader, you also lead your partners, your customers, suppliers, all of these people in these satellites that circle around you are impacted by how you lead. And I think it's worth spending the next half hour or so talking about it.

I'm in. But I am going to. Now that you've teased that and that is what we're going to talk about. The first thing I want to do is talk about our sponsor, timing. Where@timingapp.com smallbusiness you can get this app that's really an app and it's a service in and of itself that. Well, here's the deal, right? You know, as, I mean, we just talked about it, right? The next distraction is always right around the corner and that makes it harder and harder to stay on track with your projects and determine how much you really worked. Right. We talked about, you know, combining hobbies and business and that's a great thing. But sometimes it's really hard to tell how productive you've been. And that's why you need an app to help you stay on top of your time. Because manual time tracking interrupts your workflow and it's easy to lose track of timing. The app is different. Timing automates your time tracking to save you as much time as possible. The first thing it does is that it just automatically tracks how much you spend time on your Mac. Right. Broken down by app, but not just by app, by website and by document. But that's a lot of data to sift through on your own. So timing lets you use drag and drop to create rules that automatically categorize your time. And I need to do this too, because my computer right now is telling me that I am 50% productive today. And I know that. I know that's not true. Like, if that is true exactly, I need to pick it up. But really what I need to do is go in and tweak this thing to know what I define as being productive. And I have. I did some different things on this machine. I updated my other computer to Mojave and. And in some of the apps, not timing. Timing's fine, but some of the apps aren't working right. So I came up here to do some stuff and this computer is not quite trained as to what I do. So I need to go in and tweak it and all that. This is the key, folks. So here's the deal. Download their 14 day free trial today. 14 days trial for free at timingapp.com smallbusiness and then you save 10% when you purchase. So go get Timing, stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead. Our thanks to Timing for sponsoring this episode. And now we can go and play with productivity and leadership.

There you go. Yeah, I love about that app. It does it in the background automatically. It's such a big deal.

Yeah, it's great.

That's huge. So, you know, when I was looking around, I'm thinking, okay, you know, what type of leadership creates the most successful small businesses? You know, and there's, there's just tons and tons of info out there, you know, when you're searching for articles about leadership and stuff. But I kept coming back to the one thing is that we are all unique and different people and we all have different leadership and management styles. And I think the number one piece of advice I would give is to be authentic and true to your own nature. Don't try to be something that you're not. And if you're worried about. Well, I'm not that type of leader. I'm not the cheerleader, I'm not the, whatever outgoing, it doesn't matter. Not only can you hire people to do that, to come work for you if you need those folks, but I think it's more important is that the people that are following you, whether they're your employees or otherwise, it's that authenticity that they see that you are really who you are and develop your own style based on your beliefs and what kind of culture you want for your small business. And it's not necessarily an over the top, super charismatic type of thing that always wins the day with these small businesses. There's, there's a lot to be said for other styles and we're going to talk about the, you know, those as well.

I agree with that. Yeah, you need to be you. Now, here's the, here's the thing that I will offer as counterpoint here. You know, a lot of small businesses start out as solopreneurs, right? Where you're doing everything and you're just doing all the work. And you can, you know, you can have a moderate level of, sometimes you can have an immense level of success just doing that. But that, to me, that's not leadership. Showing up and doing the work is. I mean, it's one aspect of leadership. But to me, I don't see that as enough. Right. If all you're going to do is show up and do the work, even if you've hired other people to do their work, that's not enough to lead them. It's enough to show them that you have a standard and you work hard. And they should probably work hard. Otherwise maybe they work hard, work for you.

Yeah, that's a part of leadership.

But, but there's more to it. You have to, you do have to take, you know, I always call it zooming out a little bit. And especially because I'm, I'm that person, right? I'm always thinking about that, you know, what, what needs to be done, how do we do it? And if there's some problem that shows up, it's like, okay, how do I solve the problem? But sometimes you got to zoom out a little bit and look and like, is this a problem worth solving? Like, is there a better place for me to spend my time? Can that just go away? Can I do a different thing? Can we as a business on these things? And what do we as a business focus on? Right. Like, these are good things to do. And to me, and certainly I'm you know, injecting myself into this. But that's, that's, to me, part of the definition of leadership is being able to kind of zoom out and see the big picture and, and being willing to look at the big picture.

Yeah, I like your comment, you know, it, that setting the priorities and do we need to be solving this problem or, you know, that kind of thing. I think that's really important. And being able to kind of have that dashboard level view of your business, it's really hard to do when you're on your own. But once you start doing other things, and maybe it's contractors and interns and maybe you're not even having employees, but you need to be able to step out and look at this like say this dashboard view of your business. And are there systemic problems that we need to solve and spend a lot of energy on or are these just one ofs that, okay, well that's going to happen and we're going to move on and let's just monitor and see if it continues to happen, then we can address it. But I often see, you know, folks in business, whether it's employee or, you know, managers trying to change policy, set policy, put tons of energy over what I consider one of's, you know, so I think it's more important like if you're having customer service issues is to drill down into, you know, your whole policy and the way you're handling customer service versus trying to build and change a policy every day based on how thing, you know, some other problem that, that pops up. So setting priorities really important.

I like this. Yeah. Categorizing your problems. Right. Systemic versus one offs. Yeah, that's really, it's smart. Yep, yep. Yeah.

And the other thing I really think it's important is that to understand there is no one leadership style that's going to work for you. Always.

Totally.

There will be times when it'll be absolutely the wrong time to be the cheerleader and this and that and, and you know, sometimes you, you do need to be the cheerleader and get ready going and have a Monday meeting and talk about the week. But other times you just need to be the steady hand that shows up and it leads through crisis and that, that reliability and resilience that your followers, and I keep using this word followers because it's just not, not just employees, it's everything. Your bank partners, you know, your finance partners, your investors, they need to see this steady hand of, hey, you know, Shannon shows up every day and yes, he knows these problems are going to Happen and we solve them and knock them out. It's not. We're running around with our hair on fire, you know, at every crisis. And so you want to adapt and know that people skills are really important and to be able to make those adjustments along the way and kind of figure out what role do I need to play right now during this? Sometimes you just need to be quiet, just listen and have people and they'll solve their own problems sitting across from your desk and you let them go and let them go. And, you know, I can recall just sitting there listening, listening. Oh, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. And I barely would say anything, and they become like, man, thanks so much for your help. It's like, well, I really didn't do anything. But sometimes that's. That's what you need. You just need to be quiet.

My first lesson, and perhaps there's a meta lesson in this, but I'll tell the story first. My first lesson in that was the. After we had been running the business for about eight years, and I was finally taking my first real vacation where we were, we were actually taking the kids and going on a cruise, and we were going to be detached from reality for a week, like reachable in a true emergency. But there were no. It wasn't really easy to do cell phones at sea or anything back at this time. So it was like we were going to be away. And that was a good thing, right? And I knew it was going to be a good thing, not just for me and my family, but also for everyone else at the business. And I remember before I went away, I had a conversation with one of my sales guys, and he was, you know, he was stressed about this because he needed. In his mind, he needed me to help him solve these problems. He's like, what am I going to do? I can't make these decisions on my own. I said, hey, man, look, let's walk through this, okay? I said, first of all, it's just going to be a week, which means by Wednesday, it's no longer a week, right? You know, I'm back on Monday. It's really not that big of a deal, you know, Monday, Monday's your, Your, your worst day. And then it just gets better from there because the clock ticks down. That said, so don't sweat it, you know, that it's this crazy thing, and really it's only a week. I said, but what happens when you come to me with a scenario? You know? And he says, he said, well, you, you Know, he asked me to tell. Tell you what's going on. I said, right. What's the next thing I do? He said, well, you. You asked me what I think we should do. And I said, that's right. And I said, and then the next thing is, I agree with what you've suggested 99 times out of 100, you know? And he's like, right. And I said, cool. I said, do you want me to record my half of the conversation for you so that you can have it when. When I'm away? You know? And he's like, right, yeah. I'm like, most of the time, man, you know how to solve these problems, and it's good to talk it out. I said, let's not lose that. It's helpful for all of us, even if every time we're just doing the same thing. It's helpful to talk this stuff out for all of us. But you can do it without me. That's right. And so that's the lesson, the meta lesson, as I'm thinking about this, is change it up every now and then. Give yourself. Force yourself to see your business from a different perspective, especially if you started it and, you know, you did everything initially, and then you just brought in other people to take weight off your shoulders. That's good. But now you need to occasionally, at least, and perhaps, you know, at some point, fundamentally shift your perspective on things and twist things a little so that you're looking at it not as the guy that's got to do all the work or the guy that knows about all the work that needs to be done, but as the person who's looking at this business and saying, okay, if I just inherited this today, what are the three things I would keep and what are the three things I would change?

Yeah, that's great. And I like, you know, I always make the comment to, you know, my followers, look, always make a decision. I'll never criticize the fact that you made a decision. Now, I may critique the decision you made and try to learn from it and everything, but I would never say, oh, you shouldn't have made that decision until you talk to me, because that's. That's a nightmare. You need to, you know, you need to grant autonomy and, and really, you know, you. Sometimes, you really have to push for your followers to be able to make those decisions on their own and achieve things on their own, knowing that you've got their back. You know, you're. This, this whole thing is you're trying to build trust. You know, they know and, and they're safe. Okay. If I make this decision, I feel it's in the best interest of the business. I'm not going to get, you know, railed publicly or whatever, you know, get, get disciplined or hammer whatever it is. They, they know that you're going to. Okay, hey, give me the background on why you made that decision and let's analyze it. So I really like that lesson. I think it's important.

And, and when. I was going to say if, but, but I'll say when. And again, speaking you know, from personal experience, when you make that mistake, when an employee or, you know, that looks to you and relies on you does make that decision that you would not have done, and your gut reaction is to chastise them for it. Right? I've done it. You know, what the heck were you thinking? Like, you know, like, you know, something that, that resulted in perhaps some level of catastrophe or whatever, like, oh, I can't believe you did that. What were you thinking? I always remind myself after the fact, once I, once I have my own perspective on it. Go back to them, you know, bring your own meal of crow, sit down at the table in front of them and say, I'm sorry I, I acted the way that I did. I can explain to you why, but the reality is that's not, if I had it to do over again, that's not what I would have done. I'm sorry. You know, you made a decision, a decision I prioritize that, you know, that we like to give you autonomy and I apologize, you know, and you really, I mean, you have to mean it, right? Yeah, sure. But, but you gotta do that. Otherwise all that autonomy that you've created, I mean, no matter what you do to apologize, you've still kind of reduced it a little bit. Like you've given these people a reason to be gun shy and you want to mitigate that as best you can in this scenario when, you know, you wind up kind of flying off the handle a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, it happens.

I just don't do it often. Yeah, exactly.

Well, yeah, I mean, one of my lines here in the outlines talk about is openly praise and privately correct. And when you do that, you'll build trust, they'll respect you and you kind of build this safe environment, which is what you're trying to do because you want people to experiment, you want people to try new things. And you know, everybody's watching, everybody's look, you know, how did this handle? You know, things are going to happen, things are going to go Wrong. How was it handled? You know, is somebody yelling and screaming is. Or you just. Again, calm, you know, steady hand. Okay, well, let's talk about this. So this. How did this happen? Okay, great. What, what decisions were made that led us to that? And then if you want to kind of rip into somebody a bit about, you know, something or criticize a bit more, pull them aside and, you know, let them know privately, and you will. It'll go a long way towards, you know, building that expect in that safe environment.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I like this sort of mantra of yours, building trust, building a safe environment. Yeah. It kind of furthers a mantra of mine that I tell employees and people that work for me, I am the worst micromanager. I do not want to be that micromanager. So you and I are going to work together so that I don't feel like I have to. And, you know, and I'm going to work on my part of it, but you're going to work on your part of it. And together we're going to trust that you're going to be able to do what you do, and that's that. And if you need help, you're going to ask me. Because if you don't ask me for help and I find out that you're in trouble, that's going to make me want to micromanage you more. Right. You gotta come to me, ask for help.

That's good.

Yeah.

And I have a couple more comments on this, but let's talk about the Square payroll service for a second and then for a minute or so, and then we'll keep going.

Absolutely, yeah. Our next sponsor here is a new sponsor for us. It's Square. It's Square Payroll, and it is the Square Payroll mobile app. Right. So the cool part about this is they've got this great payroll service, right, that totally helps you manage your small business payroll. And now they've got the Square Payroll app, which brings that critical element of any business's back office to your back pocket. Right. With the Payroll app, you can manage one of the most important, yet complicated aspects of running your business, no matter where you are. The Payroll app. The Square Payroll app can do everything you can do on a desktop, from setting up an account to paying your team. It's fully integrated with Square payments and time cards for W2 employees and 1099 contractors. Square even takes care of your tax withholdings, your payments and filings at no extra cost. Flexible and transparent pricing that scales with your business. And I love it when they give US pricing to share. Like not only do they give it to us and give us permission to share with you, this is a mandatory thing that they have asked us to tell you. And I love the fact that they are being this transparent. It's just 29 bucks a month plus $5 per employee for month per month. Right.

Which is great deal, man.

It's a good deal. Yeah, it really is. So you can search for Square Payroll in the, you know, Apple App Store, the Google Play App Store to download the app or you can visit square.comgosbs again, that's square.com gosbs to learn more. And our sincere thanks to Square and the Square Payroll app for sponsoring this episode.

Yeah. And we'll post that link up in the small business support group. If you haven't been over there yet, just go to BusinessShow Co Facebook and come on over and join the conversation. There's lots of good comments after the show and, you know, ask questions. There's a 3, 400 small business owners that hang out in there. It's great.

Yeah, it's a good place to be. Absolutely cool.

So to jump back on this, you know, talking about safe, trusting, environment, all this kind of stuff, I think what it is is there's two different ways to handle it. There's focusing your leadership and like your management on tasks as the priority or relationships as the priority. And I have always tried to, and I can't say I planned it, I'm just this type of person but I always focused on the relationship part of and I have found that if you focus on the person and figuring out what you need to do to help them and to become a better follower, employee, whatever it is, they're going to get the tasks done that you need to get done. They'll respect you, they'll trust you. They'll want to do it out of loyalty, out of that respect and trust, not out of fear that something bad is going to happen if they don't get these tasks done. And you know, I often said I've had just some great people working for me over the years in various businesses. And one of the comments I often make when I'm describing, you know, one of these people is like, look, these, these people care about the business or maybe not care, but these people worry, worry about the business more than I do. You know, I have this, create my own reality, optimism. I just power through everything. Right. But it's, I'm benefiting dramatically from having a team of people working alongside me that are handling the small things That I am definitely brushing over and they're solving these kind of problems. And I believe it's because I have a good relationship with them, and I've developed it over time. And they feel like we are working side by side. I've had them tell me that before. It's like, well, I don't feel like I'm just working for you. We're trying to build this business together, which is great.

Great. Yeah, that's great. So when I'm going to dig in a little bit there, when you say that, you focus on the people, the relationships, but really it's developing your people. What are a couple of specific things that you can do or you can guide others to do to develop employees in that way?

Yeah, I think one of the first things is right person, right task or right job, you know, is the. You'll see. You get a new person in. They start in a position, and you can kind of find out, wow, you know, is this what they're good at? Or are they better at other logistical things? Or that? And, you know, we constantly would make adjustments and not be set in, like, okay, look, you were hired as a technician, and that's it. You have to fill this role. But I think you really need to be flexible to take advantage of. Of someone's inherent skills that they bring to the table or bring to the job. And then the other thing is to actually be interested in them. You know, we, you know, we used to do these Friday lunches at Tech Restore, and you get a chance to actually talk and meet and what's going on and, you know, their family and this kind of thing where you have to be genuine about it. You can't just make it up, but you have to talk and joke around and, you know, be human about it. And then you can, you know, use those tidbits of information that, you know, you know, about. Like, I would learn somebody has a young kid that's still in school, I. I know that one of their priorities is to be available and not miss things that young elementary kids have at school, whether it's play and music recital, that kind of stuff. So I would go and say, hey, you know, if you need to take off and you got something coming up, please talk to me. Because that's really important that you go out and be able to do that. And again, you can just say, oh, that's great. You know, and you have to. Little things like that, you know, help build trust, getting to know that person. And, you know, you got to try to create an environment that you actually enjoy working with these people. If you don't like them, I mean, that kind of sucks. You know, it's gonna. It's gonna happen. I mean, there's no doubt. You're gonna have people like, well, they're not my favorite, but, you know, they do whatever. But if you get enough people that you can connect with in your company or follow whatever it is, what happens is they begin to sing your praises and to reinforce that trust and that safety and the respect that you're trying to build with new employees. Because I can hear it. You hear them talking about it. Oh, you can go ahead. Just go ask Shannon. He'll let you do that. You gotta go, go. You have to do this. Or whatever. They wind up kind of defending you is like, he. He's not like the normal boss, just, right, go ahead. You can get this problem solved. Go ask. Yeah, you need a new piece of equipment that's expensive. You know, like, I would tell people, I'd just walk up, hey, how's it going? I mean, is there anything that you need at your. You know, we had a ton of technicians, and I would always ask, do you need anything at your workstation? And I can remember, you know, a guy that was relatively new, and he was asking me. He's like, well, gosh, you know, I know we only have three of these heat stations, but, you know, if everybody had one of those, it would make things much, much faster. And, you know, I was like, wow, okay, well, they're expensive. You know, they're like 500 bucks a piece. And I said, okay, well, let me. Let me figure this out. And so slowly, over, like, the next six months, we started picking them up when we could get deals. And, you know, by the end of that year, everybody had one at their workstation. And he was right. And this was some really young guy that it wasn't that he had a ton of experience in productivity or logistics or he could just see it. He's like, I'm waiting in line behind this guy to use this piece of equipment.

Oh.

And, you know, and I'm not seeing it because I'm not in the lab. I'm in my office, or I'm out and about.

Not at all. And to you, things are going as fast as they always have, so there's no problem. Right. Like, that's. And. And that is the benefit of bringing in new people, or to your point, you know, adjusting someone and putting them in a different job or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My. My dad worked for. For a While for a company called the Danbury Mint, which was the second largest company in the market of people that build these things, like the dust collectors, really the Franklin Mint is the most popular one. Right.

And then I've seen those. Yeah.

And then the Danbury Mint is a very different distant second, but they are number two. I mean, they. You know, they. They hold that. And I remember when he started working there, he said, it's amazing. No one has ever let go here. Like, it's part of their culture. They hire slowly. They make sure that the people are good people, he said, but it is routine that they move people around to, you know, to. To make sure that they stay productive. If somebody. Even if somebody did a good job in one role for a while and they get a little stagnant, they'll just move around them. And it's just part of the culture, and no one takes it personally. And everybody appreciates the loyalty that goes in both directions and all of that stuff. Yeah, it's a big deal. But you have to make it part of the culture so that somebody doesn't see, like, oh, my gosh, I failed at this. So now I'm being forced to do that. But to your point, just there, right? You have somebody that's new in a job. Whether they're new to the company or not is almost irrelevant. Right. It's just, okay, I'm doing this job. I see this inefficiency. And you asked. Had you not asked, do you need anything? We wouldn't be having this conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I know after that, I made it a point to the service manager. I'm like, look, let's tell everybody they've got a budget to get missing tools or different things. And, hey, you've got a hundred bucks if you need to use it in a month to go buy whatever and order whatever you need and that kind of stuff. What happens is people don't talk about it, and they assume that, oh, they don't want to spend the money, they don't want to do this. So you encourage everyone to speak up, and it works out really well. And that's part of the relationship thing, because they feel, and it's true, that you're like, hey, what do you think? I don't know how to do your job. I don't know your job anymore. I used to, but I don't know anything about it. So what do you need to do your job better and to really listen to them when they say, oh, I need a $500 piece of equipment. For a guy that's know, just got hired, like, okay, that's great. And it builds trust over time. And those people, you know, they work for me forever, you know. And so we're, we're kind of getting in, you know, towards the end here. But I have a few really, a couple more important things I want to talk about. One is ethics and the other is persistence. And ethics is really important. And you're going to get challenged ethically on the decisions that you make and that your employees make a lot. And we probably need to do a whole show on small business ethics. But in this context, everyone is watching you, your followers, and they want to see the decisions that you make, the ethical decisions you make towards your customers, your partners. If you get an extra shipment worth of stuff that didn't get billed to you and your shipping department knows about it, they're interested to see how you are going to handle it. And I would suggest that you need to think very carefully because it sets a tone. And if you're making decisions that cut corners and are ethically, sometimes maybe on the edge, and I'm not preaching here, I've been in this decision and I have made the wrong decision about things like this before. That's come back to bite me in the rear. You so take a moment and think about the broader repercussions of the ethical decisions that you make about, about all the, all parts of your business because they're not, they're not isolated. It impacts your, your leadership and, and you know, people that are following you.

Yeah. You know, I'm always building our show notes while we're, we're doing the show as I'm keeping the timestamps. In fact, for those of you that don't know if you visit BusinessShow Co or you are subscribed to our YouTube channel, we do timestamps for every episode and you can just click on the timestamp to get right to the chapter where we're talking about whatever it is we're talking about, or if your podcast app supports chapters, we're there, just go look and you'll see them. But I almost named that chapter manage your ethics and then as we were talking, I changed it. Monitor your ethics because that which is monitored is managed. Right.

I like it. That's great. And then, you know, persistence, same thing. Everyone is looking. How are you going to handle things? You know, your followers are looking for you to keep powering through during adverse times. They want to feel that steady hand, your calm demeanor during crisis. If you need to go outside and scream or sit in your car and bang your head or spill your guts to your spouse, that's one thing. But I wouldn't do it in front of your followers, your employees, your partners, whoever they are. Set the example and be the bridge that gets you to the other side. When crisis and things happen. And the other thing, and I've mentioned this on the show a couple times, when crisis and bad things happen, and you may want to go in your office and shut your door and sit down and just lay your head on your desk, that's absolutely the worst time to do it is during crisis situations or conflicts or whatever. Your followers, your employees, all these people, they need to see you operating in a steady manner. Your door needs to be open and welcoming in case they need to come in and talk. Keep your door open. And, you know, when things are going good, you can just close your door, get a little private time, whatever you want, that's fine. But no, you know, I would suggest that when things are not going good or you have a meeting, like, I think the worst thing to do is to have a. A meeting that's not good. And maybe you have to break some bad news or you're letting people go and that stuff's gonna happen. And then to go into an office and close the door, either you alone or you with another manager, because everybody knows what's going on. You're talking about what just happened. You need to be talking about it with them. They need to be able to come in. So leave your door open during that.

Yeah. Communicate during crisis. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. And lastly, I'll leave you with this. I'm a firm believer in your, you know, you can be successful as you want, but emptying the trash for your employees and making them lunch pays back in dividends that you will, you know, exponentially. Because they look at you and like, what are you doing? It's like, oh, I'm gonna do it. I'm just doing the trash real quick before I go home for the weekend. Or you don't have to do it every. Every week, but they need to see you doing that stuff. And one of the best things we ever did was, you know, we cook for people and, you know, barbecue. What do you want? How can I make that for you? And, you know, buy them lunch. It's a minim. But even better, make them lunch or make them, make them breakfast, whatever you're comfortable with doing. People love food and they love to have their boss doing something for them. It's really a great way to flip it up. And I'll leave you with that.

Yeah. Be the janitor and the cook. I like it. There's your leadership lesson from the small business show. That's it, right? In a nutshell, be the janitor and the cook.

Humility.

Yeah, right, right.

Humility.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep. So it pays off great. And you know, we'd love to hear your tips. What's worked for you? What did we get wrong here? Feedbackusinessshow Co, you know, communicate with us, talk with us, come on the show and talk about your experiences. We'd love to hear it and thank you.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Thanks for listening.

Thanks so much, everybody. Yep. And make sure to check out our sponsors. Square.com go SBS timingapp.com small business. Just remember, keep living that charmed life, folks. We'll see you next time.