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You're listening to Shorts and Suits conversations about business, leadership, culture and families through the eyes of two entrepreneurs in the small business community with Ben Kaulfman and J.W. rayhans.

Well, Ben, I mean, you know, entrepreneurs have opportunity. They see opportunity all over the place.

Do we ever.

Oh, man. All over. So how in the world do you determine what you're gonna say yes to and what you say no to?

My problem is I say yes to everything.

Yeah, well, that can be a problem for entrepreneurs though. Can it? Because you see the opportunity you want to say yes to as much as possible.

Here's the deal. When you're starting out, you want to be as helpful. You're in this mode of like, I want to be as helpful to everybody that I can be. And. And so you do say yes to everything. In fact, you find yourself giving away your work all the time too, because you're like, oh, I'll just do it. Because I think that's sometimes how you got into the business is because you started doing this as a hobby and people used you like, hey, can you do this invitation for me? Can you do this website for me? And you start doing it and next thing you know it becomes your career. And now you have to stop saying yes to all these people ask you to do for free because that takes you away. Right?

Yeah, yeah, well, and I mean, so even think about when are some opportunities or when are some times that you found yourself that you said yes to something and then later on went, you know what? I probably should have said no.

I honestly think of you all the time in this and I'll tell some stories on that. But you can over commit yourself, I think, to a lot of just different groups and organizations that need your help. I love our chamber. You love our chamber too. But you can get involved in a lot of things there real quick and you can overcommit yourself. And that's the kind of example, I think, where you have to be cognizant of like, where can I bring the most value and still have time to do what I suppose I'm supposed to be doing and what I need to be doing for the business. That's one example. Family is another way, of course. Right. Because you got a lot of family commitments. We both do on that side. And then just, you know, your own personal hobbies and things like that that you get involved with, which can really consume you, you know? Yeah, I know some people this time of year, the new PlayStation's coming out and there's a lot of people are into that. And so you can easily say, yes, I'm going to buy a PlayStation. The next thing you know your world is that for weeks I know a couple people.

Yeah, I've never been into video games, so I can't relate to that. But I can relate to, you know, showing up at the basketball court and then three hours later leaving and thinking I was there like 15 minutes, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, here's, here's what I would share too is I think the more clear you are about your, your strategy, your vision, your goals for your organization and the values that you have for that organization, that's kind of what I feel like if the more clarity you have on those, you can use those as a way to determine what to say yes to and what to say no to. So, so by way of example, even the story you brought up where you can get over committed, you can say yes to a lot of things, I can say yes to a lot of things. But if all of those, if those are aligned to advancing your mission, then they serve a purpose. There's obviously a delicate balance in that. So, you know, when you think about the opportunities that show themselves, what are some of your measuring sticks? Like what are some of the things that you do to determine. Yeah, I must say yes to this and here's why.

Yep. So the easy, easy answer that right away is of course, is this going to help me in my financial growth endeavors for the business? Do I see lead opportunity in this particular. Whatever it is, that's an easy one. I think a lot of people consider that first and foremost. Secondly though, I think is educational opportunities. Is there a way for me to grant, grow my knowledge base in some area, some way by being part of this group or being part of this thing? And I think the last one then is just that the wholesome good heartedness that we all have inside of us, that the willingness to want to give back to the community, give back to the people and the people around us. You know, whether it be family, friends, community, whatever, and just serve. That could be through church, that could be through community organizations, that kind of thing. I think those three are the pillars that I think you kind of find. Do you see any more than that?

Yeah, which I appreciate even those, because I think those are common ones that people can relate to. And hopefully maybe I can mention a couple of additional ones that I think are common for people to relate to. And that is looking at impact. You know, what, what is, what is the impact of this effort? Whether that's Internally or whether it's externally. And what I mean by that is, you know, if we think about just the ripple effect of the things that we do, right. And so on, that ripple effect, for us, you know, we almost look at what that impact is going to be and then later on go, you know what, we've got the faith to know that the financial part of it will show up or that the relationship part of it will show up by being focused on what is, what's the impact and does it align to our overall vision? So, yeah, for us, I would say it starts with impact.

Yeah, I definitely think so. So your question was, how do we. How do we. What do we say yes to? And what does that have to impact? But then the other side of that, of course, is what do you say no to? And how does that impact, like, think. Do you have any. Any ideas that come to mind or situations where you've said no and you're like, man, I shouldn't have said no to that.

You know what? Here's the first thing I thought of. I think I'm going to come back to that part of it, because, you know, Tiffany, my wife, is really good at helping me understand, you know, where I need to keep my priorities.

And.

And it was not uncommon for her, especially a few years back, and she can still do this from time to time and just remind me that, hey, everything you say yes to means you're saying no to something else. And when you say no to something, it gives you the opportunity to say yes to something else. And so when I think of things that we've said no to, it really has been in the aspect of saying, okay, well, if we say no to this, it's because we're going to put an even greater focus over here. So I'll give you an example, and this is a relatively recent one, is with all of the changes that have been happening, whether it's Covid or whether it's other social things that have been going on or election or whatever it is, that kind of spun a spiral into just major decisions that had to be made. And so when I think of the fact that lots of people want advice, and so we were determining, you know, how is it that we can be visible and available to people, but yet at the same time deliver a great amount of value in the advice that we're giving. So in an effort, we had to say no to actually doing some of the initiatives that we already had in place and almost put those on hold to be more available to people, right? Now, when we knew they needed the advice and when they were leaning on us with that level of trust, I.

Can relate to that. I think that, I think a lot of businesses had to do that, whether it was forced or decided like you've done. And I think that through our business we had a similar situation where we had to readjust our, our goals and initiatives to align to what was happening. So I think that can relate to that.

Yeah.

How much of intuition goes into that type of thing? We had a good consultant that came in and talked to us about intuition and understanding that a bit more, and he actually wrote a book on that. Curious what you think about that. I mean, when you're going through these decisions, do you base that on more factual type things? Like you actually analyze it and say, you know, what are the plus minuses of this particular. Or is it more gut based? My intuition tells me to do this kind of thing.

Man, that's such a great question. Because I think over the years, what I found is the times where I didn't trust my intuition is when I look back and go, I wish I would have just trusted my gut on that one. And so I think that's actually allowed me to trust my intuition more now than maybe I did, say 10 years ago, and lean heavily on that now. Some of that comes from experience too, right after you've been through a number of different situations, you've been through some challenges, you've been through some successes, and some of that just starts to come more natural. And so it gives you a greater confidence in your intuition. But man, I think there's a lot to be said about that intuition and trusting your gut when you know it feels right, even if the numbers don't match up. I mean, I can tell you there's been a number of times where, you know, we'll have professionals, we'll have accountants, we'll have whoever that's looking at the numbers going, you know what, you should not focus on that type of clientele. But my gut tells me we need to focus on that kind of clientele. And sometimes that's actually led us to new markets, it's led us to an entirely new group of people that we can help, or it's led us to an entirely new set of, you know, corporate clients or organizations that we can help. And so, you know, I can even use yourself as an example. You've been a great referral source for us. And, you know, especially in the financial planning industry, you know, there's so many firms out there that say oh, well, you need to, you know, you need to focus on clients that have a certain amount of money before you work with them. Well, I can tell you our top 10 clients that we have right now, eight of them. If we had minimums and just followed, you know, followed what the industry says and, you know, only work with people with a certain amount of money, eight of those 10 wouldn't have even become clients in the first place.

Pretty sure you just told me I'm in your top 10 list. That's not right.

But you've referred a great amount of people to us. And so I use that as an example because there's like these industry standards out there say you're supposed to do it this certain way. But I know you guys do this at Rocket Media. There's a lot of things you don't do like the rest of the industry. I got to imagine that's partly because you've trusted your gut as well.

I got a design background. Right. So when you're in the design world, your decisions that you're making on, you know, on design work doesn't come from usually logical places. It's coming from your gut, from what you feel or what you're seeing that is in the right perspective. And so having that background, I think that's kind of how I've grown the business in many ways, where I've made those kind of decisions on what I feel think is right.

Yeah.

Probably has haunted me a couple times where I didn't use facts to record that, but that's just kind of how I operate. Right. And so I think that's not wrong. It's just that, that some people have that type of intuition and some people have different types. I would guess you're more analytical in your decisions just because of who you are and where you are and things. I'm not. I'm very much more. What's the word? Non analytical in how I think about things. And that's just how I process stuff. So that's an interesting perspective for sure.

Yeah, you mentioned something there. And I think this is another thing that goes into it, especially knowing that probably the majority of the people listening to this are entrepreneurs or business owners. And as we have this conversation around gut instinct, there is an aspect of it, though, when it comes to what I consider calculated risk. Right. Because every business owner takes risk. Some things are going to work out, some things don't. Some things go according to plan, and lots of things don't go according to plan. But I think when I mention calculated risk I don't necessarily always mean the numbers or the analytical part of it, but it's almost like the thoughtfulness that you've gone through to come up with the decision that you've made.

And.

And that's not always numbers. There's. There's numbers that might go into it, but some of it comes from various other aspects of, you know, learning from people that have been there before. You know, I know you've used mentors. I know that you. You're part of groups where you can collaborate with other CEOs in a similar industry. And that shared experience, that shared expertise, I actually think plays into someone's intuition and plays into calculate taking calculated risks when you can learn from what others have done.

Yeah, absolutely. It's all part of who you've become over a period of time, for sure. Those influences. Next question. How do you stop chasing those squirrels? Because that's part of this. Yes. No, process, I think, is that you get a lot of these opportunities that come across your table, and they. They smell or sound really interesting sometimes, and you have to make some really hard decisions on will I pursue that or not? You and I, in these particular positions as owners, we have that opportunity to chase a lot of squirrels.

Yeah.

And. And I know I do.

Yeah. And I actually can say, I'm sure people on the outside looking in would look at us and other business owners and go, man, they're like, all over the place. They're doing this and they're doing that, and they've got this going on, they've got that going on. And here's what I'll share with you. And this took me a while to figure out, but it actually goes back to a comment that made earlier. One of the first things that I measure it against is our values and behaviors. So we have a set of organizational values and behaviors that we actually have purposefully, not shared publicly. Because our belief is if we're living those out, those are the words and phrases that people use to describe us anyway. But when those squirrels come up, when those opportunities come up, when something looks really pretty and shiny and we think we want to go after it, the first thing I measure it against is our values and behaviors. Does it fit those? And if it does, the next thing I measured against is, does it help us advance where we're already determined that we've wanted to go? And that's where when we've got, you know, quarterly strategies, one year strategies, three year strategies, if it doesn't fit in there, then we've got to have a really compelling reason as to why we're going to add it in.

We could probably dig deeper into that at some point. Another one of these recordings where we talk a little bit about how you actually do those measurements and what do the functions look like, because I think, you know, when I hear you say that, I understand how that works myself, but there might be some people might find value in understanding how you actually do that process, you know.

Oh, yeah.

But that could be another time for another talk.

That'd be fun.

All right, so let's recap real quick then. So how important is a yes?

Yeah, yeses are important. Because let's think of it this way. If you never say yes, you're not going to get anywhere.

That's right.

So you got to say yes to a few things. But then, just as you mentioned earlier, it's also valuable to understand what do you say no to?

That's right. And so I was the last one. What does saying no do for you? It frees you up. It lets you stay focused. It lets you stay in line with who you at least put your plan to be.

Right.

It doesn't mean you have to always stay that course, but at least keeps your guide rails up so you know where. Where you're kind of straight in. Right.

Yeah. And here's one thing that I'll add on that that I think is powerful people for people to, especially entrepreneurs to remember is you don't always have to say no, but you can say not yet. Right. If it's something that you like, you get really excited about and you want to say yes so bad, but you can just tell it's not the right time or just tell yourself not yet. And then that way you don't feel like you're just saying no and letting it go.

Yeah, no, I can relate to that. Just listening to the debate we heard on the presidential debate here. Just what last night or the night before made me go, okay, I think I'm gonna run for president someday. Not yet. I could do better than that. Right. I've met a lot of people worthy in that.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, there's lots of examples I think we run into. And that's extreme, of course. But yeah, having. Having a good focus on that would be. Is important.

Yeah. So lay out those priorities. When you lay out the priorities, it makes it easier to say yes and say no and really determine which way you're going to go.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

All right. Good talk today.

I know another fun one. I enjoy doing it thanks for letting us share a few ideas with everybody listening.

Thanks JW Yep.

Thank you for listening to Shorts and Suits. Your hosts are Ben Kaultman of Rocket Media, a digital marketing agency, and J.W. rayhans of Rayhans Financial, a financial investment advisory firm. For more information, go to shortsandsuits.com if you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on itunes. Subscribe to our tribe and learn more@shortsandsuits.com.