Personal Notes: Speed of Decisions and Stakeholders

Alright, so yet another episode here. Personal notes. Just things I'm thinking about going through my businesses. First thing is speed. And something that I think I would say I, you know, and most entrepreneurs tend to find pride in is the ability to move quickly. And I do believe that is true. However, when you have an organization of other individuals, whether it be partners, other owners, employees, managers, etc. You have to really take a more calculated approach. And the stereotype is, well, I don't want to be this big bureaucracy that moves really slow, etc. There's usually a pretty good reason why they're big and they're usually very successful big conglomerates is that they did take things slower and were more calculated with things and they really thought through all aspects of, of the decision and the stakeholders and how it would affect each stakeholder. So you have frontline team members, you have new team members, you have established team members, people that have tenor, you have managers that are going to have input, you have third party outside the internal organization like vendors, customers. These are all stakeholders in the business. And if we think of only the people with equity in the business as stakeholders, I think we failed to.

Understand the ramifications of our decisions. Raising prices, yes, it affects your customers, it also affects your employees because now the level of expectation on them is higher from the customer. By raising your prices, it doesn't just affect your customers and your employees, it's going to affect the owners. Because now whoever has equity is going to have a larger distribution that can create other ripple down effects. For, for myself with Augusta Lawn Care, it's a little, it's a, I would say difficult or hard, just different because with a franchise you have individuals that are owners but don't have any equity in the franchisor. And so treating them as owners is important. That being said, they are typically going to default to wanting things faster and they are typically, they typically don't think about the other 150 locations, for example, with Augusta, and the ramifications of decisions on their business. And the reason I bring this up, and it's no slight to anyone, this is just, this is common for any of us to not think about the whole instead of how it affects us. So for example, taxes going up, most of us think about what it's going to do to us, right. In a tax bill or like when there was COVID 19 relief coming out from the government, everyone wanted to know what was in it for me. Right? And that's, that's very normal. That's like instinctual behavior to Take care of and defend oneself. However, when it comes to Augusta, for example, I have initiatives that we're trying to work on during the technology and some went really fast at the exact, literally within an hour. It was last night, someone posted about, hey, this should be done faster. This should all be done way faster. At the exact same moment, someone else DM'd me and said, hey, we still haven't caught up on this other one. I don't know if we're gonna have time.

We're kind of running behind.

I don't wanna be left behind. Do I need to do this now? Like basically saying like, hey, can we slow down a little bit? So the question is, who is right and who's wrong?

Neither.

Every single stakeholder is gonna have a different perspective of the speed at which decisions should be made because they're in different frames. And the person that whose business is going very well right now, things are well organized and well run, might not actually default to being chaster. They might actually be like, hey, I like it this way. This is going well. Let's not put any bumps in the road. Things are going fine. And so they're going to be more inclined to say, let's not make all these changes. Let's slow things down because I enjoy this. While the same token, someone else is very successful, could be like, hey, the reason I got here is I'm moving really fast. I want to keep going.

I have money, I have a little.

Bit of time and money to burn because things are going well. I have manager, I have resources, both money and team members. I can deploy towards making these changes and improving the business more. And they're gonna typically be more of a growth kind of mindset in terms of like growing the business. Whereas the first example, someone is more profit mode. And it's like, hey, like, let's keep doing this. Let's not mess anything up. So they're more risk adverse. Whereas the second one is more growth oriented.

Then you have someone who's struggling in.

Their business, okay, you have again, two different ways that someone's gonna look at it. Someone who's struggling in their business, first off, could be saying, great, this is exactly what I needed because it's gonna fix everything. So like, can we please get this.

Done faster so I can reduce the.

Pain that I'm of my business not doing well. At the same token, someone who is struggling in their business could have the same initiative looking at it and they could be like, hey, hey, slow down. Like, I'm struggling as is and I'M not making any money. And adding this new thing is only.

Going to add more complication, more cost.

And a learning curve for me that I don't want to endure right now.

So there's literally just in that just.

One stakeholder, which in this case would be another owner inside of Augusta Nation. There are literally four different perspectives based.

Upon where they're at, just basing on.

Where they're at with their business growth and success.

You have a hundred of the variables in terms of family, where they're at physically, whether in their career overall, all these other factors. And so one thing that I've been.

Learning is it is better to default when you look at the whole to.

Towards going a little bit slower as you add more stakeholders.

Because when you look at the downstream.

Effects of going too fast, the downside consequences outweigh the downside consequences of going.

Just a little bit too slow.

Because when you go too fast, you can make mistakes and mistakes are going to be remembered a lot longer and more impactful than a delay. So for example, if I know there's something really, really good for an owner.

Of Augusta Nation or the whole of Augusta Nation, someone waiting an extra three to four months because of that decision, that will likely be forgotten in the grand scheme of a five or ten year.

Stint with Augusta or longer like that, three months will be forgotten.

What will be remembered is that rollout and how well it went and then them attributing the success increase of their business to that decision will be remembered. What will also be remembered though is you roll out too quickly and it's not done well and then they actually what is good for them in terms of that change in the business they they tend to shy away from because it is something that was rolled out incorrectly, was rolled out somewhat hastily, etc. So let's bring this home.

So last year we had instant price.

Quote forms that we put on our website. And on these forms essentially a customer can immediately get a price for mowing and they can determine the price they're mowing based upon the size of a picture. Like a picture, it shows pictures of different houses like hey, small, medium, large. You click on the one that is.

Most attributable to your size of property.

And you get a price immediately. We have other things we're working on in terms of then adding the ability once they've done that to then get upsells, which would then upsell them into things like property cleanups, fertilization, weed control, and a host of other different options for their property. That would be in addition to the accepted mowing estimates. So that's something that we are testing.

Over the next couple of months at.

My locations and then going to roll out. I could literally roll it out tomorrow, probably next week. I could roll it out next week to all of Augusta Nation. That was what the old Michael would have done. The reason I'm not is because when we rolled out the initial instant quote forms, we had a great adoption, great rollout.

Command center was able to get it.

Inside the systems and utilize it and do it well because we rolled it out over the course of several months. We tested at my locations for a few months, then we rolled it out slowly to all of Augusta Nation. And of three or four months, everyone's inside. So that's why we're. I'm tending to go slower, especially when you have, you know, what is it going to be like 70, 60, 70 people working at command center. Like, I've got to train all of them. 38 new people already are coming. There's me more than 40 coming in new to command center this coming spring. They all will have to be retrained in the middle of the spring rush on these initiatives. So adding upsells to instant quote forms first thing, next thing is. And the part that we are kind of slowing down is the fact that on instant price for door hangers, when someone gets the price, like they write.

Down on the door hanger what the.

Price of the mowing is right now, the customer has to fill out via a Sharpie or a pencil or a pen, their address, their name, their phone number, etc. The problem with that is a lot of times it's basically illegible. And if it rains, you could potentially have smeared ink all over that page. And so that leads to a lot of. Not a lot, but it leads to a. A non 0 number of estimates not actually getting the customer because they wrote down the wrong email address. It's illegible. You can't read it. You don't know if that says an AT sign or is that another digit, like all this sort of thing. And so we want to eliminate that by having where a QR code. They scan QR code and that already locks in their price. And then they just would type in their additional address, phone number, name, etc. This would lead to much more accuracy at command center. It would lead to customers not calling and saying, I didn't get my estimate. And then we go back and we realize they put their address incorrectly or they put their email address incorrectly. They Put their phone number incorrectly or just completely. You can't read it. Like, people's writing is just continually getting worse. And so that initiative I could probably roll out in a week or two. However, same thing. I have to first off, test it at my locations, then refine the process at command center so that there is at least a 99% accuracy, an efficiency rating, and then I need to roll it out slowly to the locations to.

See where it breaks.

And I need to see what potentially someone could do because I know it's going to happen. I know it's like this is what I think is going to happen with upsells, for example. I think when it gets into other locations, they're going to want to be like, well, why can't the upsells be done instantly as well? And there's going to open up a whole nother bag of worms. Like, well, I want fertilizer to be instant quote. I want mowing to be instant quote, but I don't want property cleanups. I don't want paver, patio and all these other things to be instant quotes. Well, you got this very much of a branching mechanism. And I've learned that when you have initiatives, as soon as things start to branch, which means giving too many options and then creating variability, the systems get stressed massively. There's a big reason why we had to pull the band aid off this, this winter and switch back to all one CRM on copilot versus allowing what we have in the past, which was three different CRMs. It meant so many, like immediately, just by doing that, you tripled the amount of time it takes to train people. You triple the amount of human air, you trip the amount of possible mistakes that could be made in the process. Although the process is the same, you. You inherently triple everything because every single thing inside the software looks slightly differently. Even though you're using the same process. The, the customer notes are the office notes in a different one, which are the profile notes on a different account. Like, these are all little things that you just add variability to and just start to compound the amount of mistakes being made. And so when it comes to speed, as you add more stakeholders, I do recommend slowing down. I think the way to prevent stagnation as the company gets very, very large and you have thousands. And then if you go like to a public company, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of stakeholders.

The way to prevent, I believe getting away from preventing stagnation is ensuring that people have autonomy to make decisions. And so if you have a head of a department that they can make decisions without having to go all the way up the chain. Because, typ, the further up you go to chain, the more meetings there are, the more bureaucracy there is and the less independent thought. Then it just becomes a matter of leadership and a matter of hiring the right people to be able to trust them to actually go do decisions and make decisions, enforce decisions, make calls without you actually getting involved. And so I believe that, like, that's kind of the trajectory of growing a business. Making sure you can still move quickly, but not making stakeholders so frustrated. You're always gonna make people frustrated. Whether you go too slow, too fast, or just right in your mind, it'll always be too fast or too slow for some portion of your stakeholders.

And as you increase the number of.

Stakeholders you have, you will always make somebody mad. The same thing is true with Copilot. There are people that are like, hey, I want this feature. I need it like right now. Like, if you could just do this, I would get into the software and.

They want it immediately.

While at the exact same moment in time, you have people saying, let's stop doing features and let's just focus on refinements and improving the features that we do have and like, bug fix it, etc. And so, like, as a leader, you have to determine, like, where's that balance? Because there is no right or wrong. Every single decision you make is going to be right or wrong to some population of the stakeholders involved. And as you add more users, as you add more team members and employees, as you add more other founders, owners, partners, general managers, etc. Add more locations to what you might be doing inside of Augusta Nation, you are going to have more stakeholders. And because of that, you are going to have to get somewhat comfortable with the fact that regardless of the speed of decision making that you make, people will judge it. And it is unfortunately your responsibility to determine what that speed is and live with the downside effects of that decision. You will never make 100% of people happy in any decision you make. And if, let's say, you say, well, 1%, 2% of people of stakeholders are unhappy, okay, fantastic. That's fine as long as you have.

Two or three employees.

Because guess what? 99% of time, you know, stats are.

On your side, you're going to be okay. But when you have 2, 3, 4, 500 people now that are stakeholders in the business that have employees and then.

Their families, and then people have equity in the company and all these other things, now that 1, 2% starts to.

Become a population size that can get loud.

And so there is no right or wrong.

It is a matter of what speed.

Are you willing to work with, what.

Can you, hopefully for the greater good of the company, long term, meeting its goals, actually innovating, but then also balancing out the fact that there are so many different variables that come into play.

Is something that I am still learning, I am still trying to balance out.

I have not perfected, but it's something that I wanted to share with all of you.

I love you all and I hope.

You have a fantastic day.