Episode 114: Profitable Mistakes with Josh Patrick

Beans, coffee, and biscuit and a little.

Piece of fat back.

And when you listen to this show, that's what you're getting. You're getting the back fat of the podcasting industry into your ears. That's right. This is the Profit first podcast, episode 114. And this is Josh grunting. Yes.

Can you believe it? I love it.

Tremendous. Transferring to Mike Michalowicz.

We just heard you go bloop and you were gone.

Third time's a charm.

Talk about podcastus interruptus. Well, that's what happens when technology doesn't cooperate, Josh.

You know, the reason there was the podcast interrupt us was because you didn't bark and. And grunt loudly enough.

So he was barking.

It was awesome. Well, I need. I need to close my door if we're gonna bark again. So hold on.

Oh, do that. Yeah, close your door. Yeah, of course we're gonna bark again. Of course we're gonna bark again. So close your door.

The whole house or wherever he is, the office is, they're right outside the door going, what the hell's going on?

Did you just hear his door close, Chris? I sort of, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, let's do this. Come on. Oh, come on, John.

There he.

That is menacing.

Oh.

Reminding me of episode 100. Welcome to the show, everyone. My name's Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording, and.

This is Mike Michalowitz. And just so we're 100% clear, you are listening to episode 114. I am the author of Profit first and a relatively new book, it's new to you if you don't have it yet, called Surge. Pick it up at Amazon now. And I'm joined in studio by my colleague, Christina Buldock. Hello, and you are listening to the Profit First. Profit first podcast. This is the episode where Epper showed episode where we discuss all things profitability related, the alpha and the omega. And today. Well, today's a special one because we're saying why your problems are very profitable for you, why your mistakes are your advantage.

Wow. There you have it. That's right. We interview a great guest, and then Mike and Christina and I give our takeaways as well. And you can find our show anywhere you hear a podcast, literally. Itunes, Stitcher, Tunein Radio, Google Play, you name it. That's it.

You name it.

And our website, profit first podcast.com. you can go there. You can comment on any of these posts. You can ask questions. A lot of times we talk about a certain subject, and you might want to go to the post and make a comment or ask a question. He'll actually answer you. This show. I love this show because it's all about profit. You know, revenue might be green grass, but profit is.

It's a kick in the ass.

He is on fire.

On fire. I. I actually. I stepped on you. I so excited to say that. I didn't even finish your sentence, but. Oh, Josh, you know, before we get you started, I don't know if the volume is loud enough. Can you just push your headset a little bit closer into your ear, Josh?

I. I could probably.

Yeah, just try because. No, serious, we're getting a little bit of feedback. Push it in.

Oh, okay.

Push your closer.

Yeah, well, it's about as close as getting.

Josh, he's messing with me.

All right, we're good. We're good. I got my whip in. All right, Josh, you can, man.

You're person. I just are a mean person. That's all there is.

Listen, man, I'm trying to get you pumped for this show because we got some crazy profitability stuff to talk about. But before we do that, Josh, you just hang tight. Chris, I want to know, my brother, what you've been up to.

You know, I've been on YouTube. I'm sure if you're listening to this and Mike, you know, you go on YouTube and you. You search for one video, and then you end up watching videos for, like, an hour, and you end up watching, like, crazy videos. Anyway, I found this guy in the. The Senate. I think. I think he's. His name is Trey Gowdy. He's a Republican from South Carolina, and he's, like, questioning people in Congress. This guy is my new favorite. Oh, my goodness. And I'm not even a Republican or Democrat. I don't care. But he's. He's a lawyer. He's like. He used to be a prosecutor. The way he asks questions and breaks things down, it's phenomenal. I mean, do you enjoy that, Mike?

I. I don't say anything about politics, so I do have my interests, but I found that there is no winning ever. Talking about politics, my father's like, hey, I hope you're voting in this upcoming election. First of all, Dad, I voted in, like, the last, like, 30 elections, but thank you. And he's like, I hope you're voting for Ba Ba Ba. I'm like, oh, geez, Here we go. Here we go. Who are you voting for, Michael? And I'm like, I don't even want to go there, and whatever, But I'm.

Not Talking about politics. I'm talking about questions, like when it comes to, like, did you turn over all your emails? And like, when the politicians lie, he's the one who's there, like, saying, well, no, that's not what you said. And this. And he brings it back to the fundamentals. The way he dismantles lies is. Is.

I love Masterful.

I do love that. I do love that people place.

Yeah.

People. Keep people honest. But I don't even want to talk politics.

So what are you bros and Christina been up to?

Dude? Here's the deal, Christina. On Saturday, I spent six hours running cable in this house through a cement wall. So I never drilled cement before. That's a pain in the ass. I got this cable around. I had to do three Home Depot runs, drilling holes, filling foam sealant, but it works. So I now have Internet on my back porch, which means now I can watch my football games out there. So I'm jazzed about it.

You're jazzed.

That's awesome. And actually, Barry was there watching you and your wife do all this work. Barry, what did you hear there?

And they were cussing up a storm. Profanity is left. Profanity is right.

Really? Is that it, Barry? What else?

Every second word was a hip word. Yes, I know, Michael. I know. No, I'm like, this is so much fun. Yeah, yeah. Profanities. I was dropping profanities everywhere.

Profanities.

You know who make this show possible, Christina?

That would be our corporate partners.

Yeah. And you know who they are?

I do.

Give me. Give me a couple of their names.

Receipt, bank.

Oh, my God.

Great.

So good. Next diva.

Yeah, I love them.

Fund. Dara.

Fundera. Yes, sorry.

Fundera. And fund box.

And fund box. Yeah, those. Those places they say profanity's left, they say profanity's right. That is the Profanity Kings.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Now they're wonderful. We'll talk about them in a little bit. And I really want to get in the habit of dropping in their name somehow during our interviews, because that way our wonderful listeners can't avoid hearing our name dropping. His name is Josh Patrick, and he's a booze hound. How do I know that?

Oh, we met up in here.

You are just so mean.

Back in your hole. So Josh and I were in Annapolis. We. We go to this retreat together. We. We rent this house, and we're. We're hanging out, talking. Josh is an author, and we rent a house, and I start making my famous margaritas.

Wait, was this a book retreat or Was this just Josh, like.

No, no, no. Not just me and Josh. It was like.

It was romantic weekend getaway.

Yeah, well, it was. There you go. It was me and Josh. No, this is. This was about 20 of us. And I start making my margaritas. I'm like, josh, do you want one? He's like, yeah, he. He let. He sipped a little bit to. To acquiesce to my pressure, but he really resisted. Then he looks at me, and he stares me deadpan in the face. He goes, you know, the more mistakes you make, the more profitable you are. And I'm like, what the f. Josh, let me ask you right now. Why would you ever say such a ridiculous thing?

Well, I often say ridiculous things. That's just one of them.

Okay, but why that?

But. But the reality is you're going to make mistakes. And whether you like it or not, they're going to happen. So you have two choices. You can pretend you don't make mistakes, which means you're. You're destined to make the same mistake over and over and over and over again. By the way, I did that for the first six or seven years I was in business. Or you can embrace the mistakes and ask yourself a very simple question. You know what that question is? No, what is it? What did you learn, genius?

Okay.

It's a magical question. You know, the fact is, we're going to make mistakes. Here's the real issue. It isn't so much that you as the owner, are going to make mistakes. The real issue is the people in your company are going to make mistakes. And you have two things you can do there. You can ask them that wonderful, magical question, what did you learn? And what are we going to do differently next time? Or you can say, you're a schmuck. What do you think you're doing? You're not supposed to be making mistakes. You're supposed to do it right the first time, every time. And don't ever tell me you made a mistake again. Now, if I choose choice 2, what do you think's gonna happen?

We're gonna hate you. You're gonna think you're a big jerk and. A little bit. Yeah. And you got a drinking problem.

That could be, too. That's one. One thing is, they are definitely going to think you're a jerk. And they're going to say, what a jackass to work for.

Okay.

The second thing that's going to happen. What are they going to do the next time they make a mistake?

Not going to tell it, hide it.

Not going to Report it.

They're going to hide it. And when you hide a mistake, the thing that happens is my. My favorite. One of my favorite stupid sayings gets into play. Bad news doesn't get better with age. But if someone's afraid to tell you they made a mistake because, A, you're going to yell at them, and two, they're absolutely convinced you're going to get fired, there's another thing that happens. People don't trust you because, you know, what is trust? Part one of the four pieces of trust is intimacy. And intimacy doesn't mean I want to hug you and give you a kiss. It means I care about you as a person. And when I'm yelling at you because you made a mistake, do you think there's any way in the world the person you're yelling at is going to think you care about him?

No, of course not.

Of course not. So there's really the whole thing about mistakes. Mistakes are really these magical gifts. Do you ever hear of a guy named Buckminster Fuller?

I have. Isn't he the Tony Robbins predecessor?

Well, it's actually, he's way before Tony Robbins. I mean, he's the guy that invented the geodesic dome.

Oh, now that. That really helped clarify things. What the hell is that?

The geodesic dome. Remember the Astrodome in Houston?

Yes, I did.

That's a geodesic dome.

Oh, so it's a structure.

It's a structure built out of triangles. And Fuller would say, the only stable structure in the world is a triangle. But that's not important in this particular conversation. What is important is Fuller said had two things about mistakes. The first is, you don't learn less. And the second is, mistakes are learning opportunities. Now, I first heard about this in 1984. I'm really old, by the way. And I sat there and said, and this was my stage when I was screaming at people every day because they made mistakes and they had to be idiots because they made mistakes, obviously. And the only thing that happened was people were hiding mistakes. Our company was not running very well. People will be unhappy. Customers will get unhappy. And my way for dealing that was, hey, you're an idiot. You made a mistake, and I'm going to yell at you. Well, after I thought about Fuller's comments, I was, you know, at this New Age seminar, which everybody did in the early 80s, and it was actually the predecessor to Tony Robbins at this seminar, because this was the seminar Tony was discovered at. I heard this stuff. Any rate, I'm sitting there saying, huh, Mistakes are Learning opportunities. How can I apply that to myself? Because clearly my company was not working well. And when I went back to my company, I started experimenting with that. And as a result, you've got people saying, well, this is different. This is weird. I'm not being yelled at. And when I ask somebody a question, what do you learn? Guess what happens? What did they have to do? They had to answer the question, right?

So they may not have thought about the learning opportunity until you posed that question.

Absolutely.

Let me ask you this, Josh. First of all, you say you're old. You're not too old to bark at the beginning of a radio show, which is pretty amazing.

I'm also not too old to see over 90 Grateful Dead concerts, but that's a different story.

Oh, my God, that's impressive.

Oh, so you don't drink, but you do something else?

And I do drink. I drink wine. Not your margaritas. That's all.

Are you a cabernet guy or Merlot or.

I am a red wine guy in all sorts of flavors in different situations.

Okay. Oh, good. That's a true, true wine connoisseur. Here's a question for you. If. If I allow mistakes to happen, Josh, aren't I empowering those mistakes? Am I telling people, hey, what'd you learn from the mistake? And they say, well, I should never do that again. And now, Mike, that's a great.

That's a great point. I should never do that again is the worst answer you could possibly let somebody give you.

Okay?

Because what have you learned from I should not do that again?

Nothing.

Right? So you got to get and say, what did you learn? Now they're going to start off, I don't know. I said, well, if you did know, what would it be?

Okay?

Or why don't you pretend you know what you learned? So if you're pretending what you know you learned, tell me that. And I gotta tell you when they pretend, or if you say if I don't know you're allowing them to stand belief, you allow them to suspend the self talk that we all go through about, I'm a bad person, I made a mistake, I can't do that again. I'll get fired if I do it again. Well, none of that's useful. That's just like, you know, the seven stages of denial. So let's stop the seven stages and go right to the answer. What did you learn? And when you, you know, it took me a while. It took me about a year to train people, but it got to be really fast at first, it's a slow process because you got to go through this peeling the onion. But once people realize that you're not going to yell at them, you're not going to fire them, and you say, what'd you learn? They tell you what they learned because it's part of how you. The fabric of how a company works.

Well, let me throw a not so hypothetical at you. We have a challenge here with some billing issues, and they got missed. And the, you know, I go, christine, what'd you learn? Well, I didn't even know I was responsible. Talk with Ryan's like, well, I don't have time for it. And I go, to me, I'm saying, I thought it was off my plate. So what about the kind of, the passing the buck? And that's, I'm not even saying it's happening with ill intent.

Right.

But there's, there's a lack of clarity. Does that, does that be resolved first or what happens in that situation?

Well, that fits in. There's another piece with that which is telling the truth, which is you have to be personally responsible. Okay, so here's the thing. I used to have these posters all over my vending company and 90 employees. At one point in a food service vending company, I had, I had these posters all over the company in the. There was a three words on it. It was responsibility with a line below it. And then there was lay blame and justify below the line. So if you say, gee, it wasn't my fault, I don't know what was done. It was, Mike, it was your fault. You didn't tell me to do it. Right. What am I doing there?

Yeah, you're passing the buck again.

Right. I'm blaming you for my problem, for my mistake. So instead I'm going to say, you know, that's below the line behavior. Let's try this again. What happened here? Well, I don't know. And I didn't mean well and yada, yada. So he said, well, if you were going to fix this, what would you do? And typically, and this goes back to, you know, the early quality control guys, Deming and Duran, and what they would often say is, stop blaming the people and look at your system. I'm going to say, 95% of the time when I have a problem, it's not the person that's the problem, it's the system that's the problem. And you need to fix the system. I mean, if you're going to create a sustainable business or have one that's profitable, you better have good systems in there, and those systems have to be tweaked on a regular basis. And when the systems don't work, you get mistakes. So mistakes are the starting point. It's not the endpoint. So you gotta understand that a mistake is not the great thing. Yeah, you wanna celebrate mistakes. You wanna let people make mistakes, you wanna learn from mistakes, but more importantly, you wanna fix the systems that cause the mistakes.

Now, aren't you encouraging mistakes? Like if you celebrate mistakes. I remember Sara Blakely. She's the founder of Spanx. She goes, you know, my father said that every morning or every evening before I went to bed, he'd say, how many mistakes did you make today? Encouraging mistakes. Now, I know she's a super success story, but aren't you encouraging people just to keep effing up and effing up?

No, because nobody wants to make mistakes, but they happen. I mean, the fact is, whether I want to make a mistake or I don't make a mistake, I'm going to make mistakes.

Okay.

And, you know, if I'm working on, say, an innovation process, how many times have you done something new where you got it right the first time?

Yeah. Very, very never.

Well, what is that?

A mistake.

Right.

Hey, both are rubbing my face. God damn it.

By the way, all mistakes aren't negative. I've had some mistakes that have been incredibly positive. I'll tell you a story. Back when I was in the vending business, it would take us somewhere between eight and 10 weeks to train a route driver. We'd send them out the first day, they spend 16 hours on the route. Half the time they come back and quit. Now that's a pretty bad outcome. One day I happened to have a vending bank, a full vending bank set up in our warehouse, and somebody said, why don't we train the new guy on the vending bank in the warehouse? And we did. Instead of 10 weeks of training, it took us two weeks to train him. He went out instead of 16 hours, he did the route in 10 hours the first day. And he came back happy. Now, that was a mistake, but it happened to been a mistake that made us an awful lot of money.

Yeah, I gotcha. Now, when someone makes a mistake, how do you or who do you empower to fix it? Is the person who made the mistake. You say you go fix it, or do you, as the manager or owner of the business, go and fix it?

I will say, I mean, for me, my belief is managers are there to serve the people that work for them. My job as a manager is to make the people who work for me have an easier time at work. So it depends. Sometimes it's something I have to fix. But the vast majority of the time you say, what would you do to fix this? And they'll tell you, say, okay, go do it. Have fun.

Okay, then here's the big question. You said this translates to profitability. I don't necessarily see that yet. How does making mistakes translate to profitability?

Because you get a better company that runs in a better manner. When people aren't afraid to make mistakes, they're going to take more chances. And if they are afraid to make mistakes, they're gonna do things and go outside their comfort zone. They'll ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Oh, I like that.

Oh, I gotcha.

What can you do as an employee, kind of reversing this a little bit? And I'm not saying that we have this problem here, by the way.

But you're not. Admit or deny or deny.

No, you do have the problem there, because everybody does.

But no, as an employee, if I know that I make a mistake, how do you kind of turn the tables around and your manager to be more accepting to that and to be able to be comfortable to go to your manager and say, hey, I made this mistake. I'm sorry. But how do you get them to be understanding of that rather than being the jerk?

That's a good one.

It's a great question. And sometimes it's just being brave. And it also depends on the culture of the company. I mean, you know, for example, at Google, they love mistakes because they make them all the time. They kind of celebrate them, actually. So at Google, you're not going to be afraid that you're going to get fired by volunteering. You made a mistake. There are other companies which are just downright mean, nasty places to work. And you got to protect yourself in that particular situation. First, I say, go find a better place to work. But the second is, if you happen to be stuck in that place, don't put yourself in a position to be assassinated. There's no good in that. But if you have somebody you're working with or working for who is a good listener and really wants to do this, you can have a conversation about mistakes in general. I mean, that's what I probably would do. If you've never done before, say, let's talk about mistakes. And you talk to Mike and you say, mike, let's have a conversation about mistakes. You know, I make them. I know I make them. And we're not Handling them very well. Could we talk about a better way of handling them now? Mike's a pretty reasonable guy, and my guess is he'd say, sure, let's talk about it. And Mike might even learn something from the conversation.

Right?

Well, one thing's for sure, Mike, that the fact that you guys use the nextiva phone system, I think just using nextiva just cuts down on a lot of those mistakes and errors around the whole phone system.

Yeah, we've measured it. We've had a 73% mistake reduction ever since our Nextiva integration.

Exactly that number.

Sorry, everybody.

By the way, I'm a nextiva customer and it's a great.

Are you seriously?

Yeah, we've been using it for a couple of years now, and they're a great company.

Wow.

Do they make mistakes, you think?

I would assume they do because they keep releasing new software about every two weeks.

I wonder. Okay, so. So, well, there, there's a question for you. The release of something new, if, if we make a mistake here, does that always indicate that there's needs to be made an improvement or sometimes can just be a human F up and the person screwed it up?

Well, it's always possible, but it, and it happened to me. It really depends. You're familiar with Jim Collins, Right person. Okay, well, if someone, He's a booze hound too.

Just let that be.

Oh, is he?

Okay, well then, then I assume, I.

Assume now he's never coming on this show.

Yeah, so, so you know, Collins talks about right person, right seat. So if it's a. If somebody's screwing up on a regular basis and they're a good cultural fit for your company, they're probably in the wrong job, or if they're technically good at doing it, but they're difficult to get along with, they're probably the wrong person for your company. So you got to take a look and say, okay, if it's a person issue and it's not a systematic issue. And again, I want to emphasize the vast majority of the time, if you change the system, you solve the problem. So if you. But there are cases where it didn't happen. I mean, When I had 90 employees, there was always one or two people that was spending an inordinate amount of time on because they were just screw ups. And no matter what we did, they remained screw ups. And I would always try to fix them and it never worked. But eventually I had to have them go away. So if it is a person problem, figure it out. Have them go someplace else where they'll be Happier and bring somebody in that fits better with your company. If it's a job issue, you have to find do you have another job that this person could do? In a small company, the answer is often no. So if the answer is no, then you need to find a way that you can humanely move them to someplace where they're going to be successful. And that gives you the opportunity to hire the right person for the position.

Yeah, I had someone take that to an extreme, Josh, and say that you never hire the wrong person. They're always in the wrong seat. Is that true, though?

No, that's not true at all. I mean, there are some parts.

Sometimes a person can just stink.

Sometimes they're not a good fit for your company.

Right.

I mean, you know, when we hire people, we break it down into three areas. Can do, which are technical skills, will do, which is are they willing to do the activities the job requires, and fit, which is do they fit into the company?

What does that mean? Fit mean fit in like it means.

Yeah. What. What does it take to fit into your company? What does somebody have to exhibit as values and as traits?

I see. So, yeah, cultural fit.

Yes, yes, cultural fit. Cultural fit will do. If you read Geno Wickman, he. He calls a right seat. Gwc gets it, wants it, and can do the job. And then there's. There's cultural fit.

Gino Wickman, booze hound.

So is everybody a booze my hound in your world?

Well, it's because I am a little.

I was gonna say he's projecting.

I'm projecting only on weekends now. And actually I'm not even that much. I just like, I talk, Josh. I talk such a big game, but I don't play it. It's like my proudest.

It would fit in with your headbanger background.

Very true, Mr. Deadhead. All right, Josh, so the final question I have for you is again, with profitability. If you focus on mistakes versus focus on improving what's working, perhaps, is there a distinct advantage of focusing on mistakes to improve profitability? Is this the panacea to profitability?

Well, it's one of them. By the way, focusing on what works also is really important. Okay. No, if you can focus on.

So this isn't an exclusionary focus?

No, no, absolutely not. It's in all the above. I mean, here's the deal. The deal is people are going to make mistakes. And innovation is a mistake ridden, sloppy process. So if you do, if you're doing innovation work and you have a mantra, fail fast, fail cheap, which is What I do, I try small experiments, knowing most of them won't work. Some of them actually do work. And when they do work, that's a good thing. So you build on that. That's called appreciative inquiry.

I like that. Josh, where can people learn more about you and your business?

Well, they can go to Ask Josh Patrick. It's www.askjoshpatrick.com. i've got videos. My podcast lives here, which you're on this week. I've got blogs I've written, there are ebooks you can download. In fact, if you are interested in getting our free audio cd. It's a one hour cd, of course, called Success to Sustainability. If you text sustainable to 44222, you're going to be taken to a signup sheet and we'll send the CD out to you. And it's free.

So give me that number one more time. I can text Sustainable to what number? 422-244-2222. And you can get Josh's literature there. Josh, thanks so much for joining us for this episode.

Hey, thanks so much. This was really fun.

It was fun. Your grunts were awesome.

They were great.

He's actually, I think Chris, Josh is the winner of best grunting. First time ever.

Barking, barking. Actually growling.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Barry. So in a second, we're going to discuss what we learned and in house, we're going to share kind of a recap of what we learned from Josh. But before we do that, I want to thank our corporate partners to make this show possible. Josh is a user of Nextiva. We're a user of Nextiva. The question is, are you? Check out Nextiva.com to pick them up. Of course, Receipt bank is our other sponsor. That adds to the efficiency of a great phone system. They are a tool to scan in your receipts and automatically sync it up to your accounting system. It's no more shoeboxes, let me tell you that. Full of receipts, now it's automated. And then Fundera is a source to fund loans. One stop shop for loans. We actually had Meredith on our other show, gmap grow my accounting practice, and she shared some details about that. And last but certainly not least is Fundbox, which if you've invoices due to you and people aren't paying, don't wait for your bookkeeper. Say, oh, I made a mistake.

I forgot to collect that money.

Call Fundbox. They'll release the funds to you immediately. And then your bookkeeper can say, oh, I made a mistake. I'm Sorry, I didn't collect it. And then you can fix that problem.

I was gonna say, you know how Josh said that, you know, he asks after. After a mistake is made, he asks, what did you learn? And then he asks, how can you fix it? Well, our corporate partners are the fixes to a lot of problems.

Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point.

Right?

Could you imagine, like your says, oh, my God, I totally forgot to book your travels to this event. And then you're like, I have a solution, though. Let's call next tifa. Wow. Yeah. And then you think, okay, what the hell are they gonna do? I don't know. They're just a great company.

They're the fix.

Christina, what'd you learn in today's episode?

This reminded me, I'm gonna geek out a little bit here. Of a quote that Walt Disney said. And he said, around here, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading new paths. And based off of that quote by Walt Disney, they created a movie called MEATH Robinsons. And that reminds me so much of this situation, because in that movie, they. He's an inventor, and they celebrate failure because failure makes you keep moving forward to success. And that's what reminded me of this, is it's okay to make mistakes. You don't encourage them. Well, in a way that you do, though, because it finds the chink in the armor to where you fix it, and then it brings you to be more excited, successful.

Oh, nice. Well, I'll continue the geek stream with movies. Star wars, if you go. If you type in Star wars movie mistakes, they're littered with mistakes. Actually, the original Star wars, one of my favorite mistakes is one of the stormtroopers is walking following Darth Vader and hits his head on a low beam.

I think I've seen those.

Yeah. And it's hysterical. Here's the power. They could have spent millions of dollars, I'm sure, fixing that. Or they could have said, no one's really going to notice, but it will invoke intrigue. So there's now legend behind this. And if you're a fan, you live beyond the movie.

You're checking out their mistakes because it's a learning experience.

Yeah.

Love it.

I think it's kind of cute. So mine was can do it, will do it and fits into the company. That's a great evaluating parameter. And I think our next interview, we're going to really. And as we evaluate our own team here. Use those considerations. Chris, what did you learn?

Well, I like when he said that mistakes are the starting point because he said they're gonna happen anyway, so you're gonna have to deal with it anyway. It's like death, frankly. I mean, you're gonna die, so you have to deal with that. I mean, you can't not deal with that either mentally or spiritually, whatever. So mistakes are the starting point. And it, you know, by. Like you said, Christina, it exposes the areas where you need help. And if you have a slick and classy and more elegant way to handle the mistakes, you can just quit. You can fix them and move much more smoothly toward. Toward the goal. So I like that.

It also avoids your employees being a robot, because another thing that stuck out to me was he said the worst answer that you can accept from an employee is, I shouldn't do it again. Because that's your automatic response. You automatically just want to defend yourself and say, you know what I'm saying? The butt. Like, you don't. You can't really explain sometimes why the mistake happened. It just happens. But by asking that question of what did you learn? And by really wanting to know what they learned, it causes them to stop and actually think about how they can make it better rather than just saying they're going to do it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right, we got to get the hell out of here. I got a little family emergency that just popped up, so I got to rock and roll. While we're doing this live podcast, Chris, where can people learn more about what we're doing?

Yeah, profit first podcast dot com. Go to that website, profit first podcast dot com. All our episodes are there. You can comment on these. So we want to know, what did you learn from this interview? What did you learn? Seriously, how does it apply to your business? Go ahead to the site, find this post, episode 114, and go ahead and type in your comment or question for Mike or Josh. And of course, you can hear us every. Anywhere you hear a podcast. You can also give us a rating or a review. That actually helps us a lot. So this has been great. I really appreciate Josh Patrick being our guest. Mike and Christina, this has been great. And of course, well, Profit First Professionals, I'll just go ahead and say it out loud. Should we have a little silence after that, please?

We should.

All right, let me say it.

Okay.

Profit First Professionals. Yes.

And there's the sign, the moment of silence. Here's the real quick skinny on Profit First Professionals. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now we are a organization of accounting, bookkeeping and coaching professionals who've mastered Profit First, a book I've written, understand all the nuances, and they can make your business more profitable. They can guide you to profitability. Take a real quick step. Go to propfirstprofessionals.com, step one, step two. Click on find. You can click on any button, but come on Find.

Click on Find.

Click them all. Click on the find button. We will hook you up with someone that can help guide you to the highest degrees of profitability. You need an accountant, bookkeeper, or coach anyway. You might as well have someone that has the additional skill set of driving profitability in your business.

That's right. I mean, Profit first is tremendous and Profitable first professionals are there to help all of us. So go to there. Profit first professionals dot com. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Christina. Thank you to Obi Ron and the Hawaiian lumberjack in the background over there. And of course, thanks to our guest. So we'll see you next time. Take care, everybody. Shoot that girl, Sam.