The Critical Error Most Managers Make by Not Setting the Bar High Enough with Tom Safford

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind, where we get real world insights on winning from people who have accomplished amazing things. I'm your host, Larry Wydell, and let's get going. I'm here with Tom Sanford, and we're having fun talking about winning. Thanks for sharing, Tom.

Absolutely. I am happy to. I mean, winning is a state of mind. Winning is an attitude. And as long as you're able to get your mind around that concept, then I think anybody can be successful. We just happen to be fortunate enough to be willing to do the work and be in the right vehicle to.

Make it all happen and talk now about as you. Eventually you came up. When did you engage with your dad and get involved in his business and what he was doing, you know, because he went into different businesses along the way.

Yeah, went in different businesses along the way. So one of the I was probably in my mid teens, so, yeah, my brother was probably 18 and my sister 16. And I do have a little sister eight years younger. So she came on a little bit later. So there's four of us. But in the process, in my teens, dad used to in his company run incentive trips, and on those incentive trips would be all the great people who qualified for those trips. So we got to go on all those trips. We got to really see the world through the eyes of those trips. And then dad and mom made it a habit and said, okay, we're going over a week early or two weeks early, depending on how old we were, and we're going to see the world for a couple of weeks before we have to. We have to spend time with our people for a week. But I really got to spend time around adults and we understood how to talk and we understood through conversations with them how they thought and things that they did in order to make differences in their life. And at the end of the day, I agreed 100% with the saying that success has formed the habit of doing things that failures don't want to do. And we got to be around such successes that in the process of dad was finance chair of some presidential campaigns and wondering whether at one time he was going to run for president. And we kind of all talked him out of that one because we had no interest in the White House. And that was a different White House than all the things that are going on now in the world. But we just said to ourselves, that's really where I got to see and be around dad in business. And then from there it kind of evolved into kind of what our new business Became. So there was no real blip. It was just like, okay. And dad retired. And then he said, okay, now here's what I'm going to do. I'm 46. Here's what I'm going to do. But I'd love to have you and your older brother jump on board and do something with. My older sister didn't have any interest. My younger sister was 10, so she couldn't do it. And then we all just kind of said, hey, let's. Let's link up and see if we can make this thing work. And doggone it if it didn't work.

Yeah. And so Bob Jr. Is the older brother.

Yeah, he's the oldest. Yep.

Does he lord it over you or he.

He tries to, because that's what the role of an older brother is. So I accept it and I get him back in spades on other things. So it's all good.

Yeah. I haven't talked to him a long time. Next time you talk to him, tell him to ask him to give me a call.

I will. I definitely will.

Yeah. I'd love, love to catch up with him. But as you were getting involved now, so it's one thing for if you got involved, but to move involved. Your father, it's a pretty serious character and pretty advanced in his leadership and intentions and expectations and I mean, he's kind of like a fine, highly developed Elon Musk type robot leader. You're very organized about everything. You know, he's. He was a funny guy in the sense that, you know, if you. I'd hear people go up to me say, hey, Bob, I really enjoyed your talk, you know, at the convention or, you know, one of your tapes or something like that, or I really enjoyed that video you did. And he would say, oh, really? What part.

Yeah, yeah.

And what part about that did you really like? Why did that resonate with you? I mean, you can never have a casual, superficial type conversation with him on anything. And it, you know, it goes into say, you know, that saying. That illustrates a saying I heard early in my career I've never forgot. You know, you got to be specific to be dynamic. And he was very specific on everything. He's really a role model. You know, you just learn from seeing him an answer in action and seeing how he respond in just casual conversations, you know.

Yeah. And he was. And he was fabulous at that, which was obviously also a great thing to learn. But I think maybe the biggest leadership skill he learned through the whole process before he be, you know, before we all got into business together was he learned the art of delegation. And one of the things my dad was fabulous at is to understand where he was an expert and where he need to hire lieutenants or other people to be experts in areas that he knew he wasn't good at or he didn't want to be good at, or knew didn't give him the highest chance of making money by him being good at that. So, you know, so, so part of that fell on my brother and myself and, and my mother in order to do that. But because of it, Larry, the expectation level was high. So what, you know, so one of the things I think unfortunately in our world today is the bar isn't set high enough by most managers. It's, it's set in order to reach quotas, it's set in order to reach specific corporate goals, but it's not. The expectation of how good it could be is not there. And my dad was fabulous at setting a high bar and he was also fabulous at letting us know if we didn't hit that bar, you know, what kind of, what the repercussions were. You know, not that it was anything, you know, too, too terrible, but you know, it's a little bit tricky as, you know, being in business, you know, with your sons and with your, with your dad. And in a process there, sometimes it's tough to differentiate between is my dad upset with me? And so once we got through that juggle and really understood that balance, you know, I could take direction a little bit easier when I understood it wasn't about me, it was about, you know, as a son, it was about something that I needed to get better at. And, and then simply we got better because that was the expectation.

So what area did you come into the business and do? And so right off the bat, right.

Off the bat you said, you know, prospecting is the lifeblood of any business. And that was my dad's strength. Everything else, every other part of our business, whether it was operations, whether it's licensing, whether it's, whether it's training, all other aspects fell under my brother and myself. So dad just kept focused on that section and my brother and I took care of the rest. Whether it was through things that we did personally or people that we hired to train to do it. And it worked out to be wonderful because we could really have that three headed monster going about the business. Everybody could work at their strength.

Well, and so people understand when you make a sale, there's, you got to process the sale, you got to deliver the product and all that stuff, the salesperson is not the ideal person to be doing that. You know, you need to turn that over to somebody else. Attention to detail and, you know, product specs and, you know, slowing your mind down to actually look at it and make sure everything's in place and all of that, you just can't. You know, I found early on when I started Tom, I came out of construction and that was what my degree was in. And So I spent four years building 100 houses in north side of Atlanta. And I was Mr. D2. I was the guy, I was the guy who built them. And if that family moved in, I knew for a fact that housewife was from the other side of the country. She didn't know anybody, she had no friends. And when she went in that house, she was going to look at every single square inch, look for flaws. And I would get calls in the middle of the night, behind the refrigerator, there's a quarter inch scrap of wallpaper and it's like, what are you doing behind the refrigerator? And then me calling, screaming about stuff like that. And so I knew that for my own sanity, I had to get things as close to perfect as possible. And so you, you become, when you're in that role, you can do that. And I'm sure, you know, you applied yourself and you got really good at noticing the details, what was missing, what, what was out of place, this, that and the other. But you can't be a salesperson at the same time, you know, like.

Well, I mean, yeah, I'll argue with you a touch on that one in that we really kind of divided up our day. And so our, our day was kind of home office stuff during your normal working hours.

Right.

And in our business, training people, training people at night.

Right.

So that, that's how we differentiated the two. So I had to get my full time job done at night and had to get the second full in the daytime. I had to get my second full time job done at night, which wrapped around the whole wrapper of here's what you're doing. And so those long days of both sides of the equation, they just become normal. And so working hard is not an issue. It's just something that I became accustomed to doing.

Yeah. And if I'd been around Tom at that time, I might have had a conversation with your dad and told him he's being unreasonable, giving unreasonable expectations. Because once I, when I was in construction, if I walked into a room, I could instantly notice if something was 1/4 inch out of level. You know, a Door, a window, whatever like that. If, you know, if there was, you know, sheetrock patches that need to be done, you know, the painting was incomplete. You just, you know, you do it all day long, one house, right. You develop those things. But I had to make the const. For my own sanity when I left that business, I had to make the decision, go to a soft focus on details. Because when you walk into a restaurant to have dinner, you don't want to be noticing how poor the construction is and all of those kind of things. You'll never enjoy your dinner. And so I had to make a specific decision. And when I went up there and pioneered North Carolina, I found it was all the difference in the world once I hired even a part time secretary that I could offload some of those details because it was hard to be the cheerleader. A lot of sales is focusing on success stories, how this can change your life, the benefits of this, that and the other, and the happy side of what this is going to do for you and getting people to get that picture. If you're going and if you got. Yep. But there's dirt on the floor underneath that desk. You know that in your mind. You know, I got to get back and sweep that up later. It does take the bloom off your presentation, you know, you did. I mean, you guys were young and you learned all that stuff. I tell you what, your dad probably didn't realize how lucky he was to have you.

Well, I think he did later on, right? The glory of age and the glory of wisdom is the glory of age is its wisdom. And so I think he did at that point. But you know, as we were going through it, you know, again, it's that high level expectation. So he knew what he knew and knew what he didn't want to know. And so, I mean, it worked out fine for, worked out fine for all of us. But one of the advantages we did have coming in was the fact that since he had done well in life before, you know, starting, you know, our current business, then we had a full staff right from the get go. We had, we not only had a, you know, full admin, we had two, two other full time people to process the work as well as my brother and myself. So in that aspect, came in and said, listen, we're not here just to make some money. We're here to build a business. And what do you need to build the business? You need infrastructure. Okay, we've got a building, we've got, you know, a place that we can, that we can hold our Meetings and do our business, but we need to have a back office. So we generated one right from the get go. None of us really knew what we were doing. We stumbled forward, we submitted stuff, it would come back wrong, we'd submit it again, and we learned. And through that process of learning, failing and learning, but failing forward, as John Maxwell says, through that process, we all got to be pretty doggone good. And that's what we taught to others. And so when you have a distribution system where everybody has gotten a pretty high level of training, you can move some pretty good product through a distribution system like that and everybody does well.

What was your biggest challenge early on, helping your dad in an area that fell to you, what was the biggest challenge? If you look back in that, that.

Era, I think for me personally the biggest challenge was not meeting expectation or having the expectation level maybe change from what the original order was. That became a little bit of a challenge to me. And you know, it's really hard to.

Say, talk about that, go ahead.

Well, you know, it's hard to say in a family business. I don't care if you're in a restaurant, I don't care, you know, if you're building houses.

Hey, we both loved Bob. He's gone now. You can be honest, okay? We're looking at the facts of the situation so people can learn. And, and you know, if we don't bring these things out, people are not going to learn and they're going to make the same, inadvertently wind up making the same mistakes. Not meaning to, you see what I'm saying? Because Bob would have never done anything to upset you or to harm you if he knew about it.

Correct.

That anything Bob did wrong was not, was with, was, was. He was, like you said, blind spot. He was just blind to it, you know.

Right. Yeah. Nothing, nothing malicious ever. But through the process, what I really came to find out was there was usually something. Whenever dad would get upset and he got upset. I mean, we weren't perfect, so he got upset. But typically the thing that he was upset about was never us. It was really either something that was going on in his life already, something that already happened during his day. And this was just the last little thing to pull it out. Right. You know, he would blow up. And so I learned a great principle that I've since taught to the kids is even though there's times where he would blow up and he would get mad, what I learned is don't pay attention to the blow up part of it. Usually in there is a lesson that I could learn. So take the. Take 100% of the conversation. If 98% of it doesn't have anything to do with you and had everything to do with what was going on with him that day, focus on the 2% where I could get better. And so that became a strength of ours. And then as I got older and dad got older and we became more partners than anything else, my brother had left our business at that point, and we, big dad and I became partners then I was able to. I don't want to say talk back, but I was able to tell him what I thought without really ever worrying about the, you know, the repercussions. So, I mean, that's. That's evolution. That's good.

And the thing is that it allows you basically, you know, you hear so much Tom, about emotional intelligence, basically holding your. Holding your, Your, Your head, even when all the. The shock and all bombs are going off of unpredictable nightmares that just come out of nowhere. You're in the middle of it, like, how did I get into this? And it usually happens. Those of y' all who think that you don't know what I'm talking about, wait till you have another kid or a grandkid. It might be a while since your kids were that young. But all you gotta do is get around some young kids. And they seem to be creators. They serve to keep us educated. I'm dealing with those kind of things.

But we used to call it hip. Exactly. Right?

Yeah. In a business, you have kids, young employees, inexperienced employees do some of the most outrageous things, but they just don't know, you know. And so can you think of one of those things where that first came through to you, that the blow up. And you said, wait a minute, what's the lesson here?

Yeah, you know, I can't think of this specific thing, but one of the. But one of the great principles my father taught us was you can't expect what you don't inspect. And so he. He always was inspecting what we were doing again, because the high expectation level, and we were expecting the standards out of ourselves. And so I don't remember the incidents, but I do remember one time he came out of his office, mattered and mattered in hell, and. And he yipped off about something. And for whatever reason, I had the sense at that time in my. In time of my life not to yip back. And I said, dad, come with me. And so we walked right back into his office and I said, dad, I can tell your day didn't start the way you normally like it to start. Would you like to talk about it? And then his. His shoulders just sagged and he was like, boy, are you right? And then he, then he started that. We started to have a conversation. And, you know, life has frustrations, and when you're married, it has frustrations. And that frustration level came to the office. And I was the first one that was close enough in order to take the hit. And I understood that kind of brought home the point. That one wasn't about me. There was something about him. And you get to the basics of it. But without conversation with. Without the ability to talk about that stuff, then businesses can falter, businesses can fester, families go the complete opposite way of each other, and then life doesn't turn out the way you want it to. And I was brought up under the concept of, you have complete control of the way life turns out. You have no idea what God's schedule for it is, but you've got complete control over what you got complete control of. So be in control of it and get after it. That was just a. That was a huge principle for me.

As someone who knows your family for a long time and the personnel involved, I can guess what led to that incident.

Yes. Yes. I'm sure you've got a pretty good idea.

I've got a pretty good idea. Okay. But great insight and a great specific. It's great how mentally organized you are about all of these things. And you have to be to run a business, Tom, because eventually we're all going to be passing our businesses on to somebody else and. Or they're going to evaporate. And so you got to be thinking about that. And Bob did a great job in passing that on to you at some point. I got a whole lot more questions for you, but I'm going to say that for the next episode. Thanks for sharing. That wraps up this episode. Consider leaving a rating and review if you like what you heard. In addition, I have a free video for you, and it contains my best insights from 20 years of running my own business and also coaching Million Dollar Ear. You'll find it at whitelowinning. Com Webinar. Thanks for listening and do it big.