Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome friends, to the Total profit podcast. I'm T2. I'm here with Tommy P.
And today we're going to be talking about the fires in your business.
Putting out fires all the time. If you are the one. If you're putting out fires all the time, chances are you're the arsonist. If you feel like every day is damage control, maybe it's not the crew, the market, or bad luck. All right, Maybe it's your systems or your lack of them.
So let's talk about how to stop setting your own business on fire all the time.
Tommy, why. Why do so many business owners end up constantly in that firefighter mode?
[00:00:48] Speaker B: That's a great question. It's. Sometimes you wonder if they thrive on the chaos or, or if they not even aware of it. But again, we keep preaching on this common theme, this backbone of your organization.
There's no clear systems in place, no playbooks. Everything is a one of till the next time you do it, and then it's another one off. So having these systems repeatable, having a reference library for your employees to go back to and refer to it is going to free up your time.
I mean, if you have a good set of standard operating procedures that people can reference to and trust, it'll be mind blowing.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: That seat of the pants kind of leadership is very frustrating for your team. When the owner has become the only source of all the decisions to be made, that's actually a problem. All right, you need to hear me when I say these fires don't start themselves.
You cannot lead well if you are always in response mode.
And those emergencies usually come from unmade decisions or ignored patterns or that lack of systems that you mentioned. So we, yeah, we've got to put some, some correction in place there.
It's not always intentional.
What are some of the ways that business owners kind of accidentally create that chaos? I don't think anybody truly wants their business to be run that way. They want a well oiled machine. So what are some of the ways that they're kind of unintentionally sabotaging themselves?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Well, I think they get into the. They convince themselves that documenting a process or refusing to document a process because it's faster to just do it myself is the biggest trap in our businesses today.
The, the minute you can hand off some of this information, you will have so much time to do other things that will be better for your company.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: You can't change your priorities either. Sometimes that happens often.
Gosh, I'm not really thinking of a good example right now, but, but changing your priorities like midweek or even midday, that often creates a tremendous amount of chaos.
Kind of start your day intentionally. Stephen Covey says, You know, sharpen the saw, right? Start your day intentionally with the end in mind.
What are three things that I need to accomplish today? Not necessarily looking at your calendar and your to do list and your meetings that you, that you have to hold, but what are three things that I need to accomplish today?
And, and stick to those priorities. Right.
Managing exceptions constantly. So many one offs, you know, just this one time we'll do it this way and it just, it just, that's not a good way to run the business. So you've got to catch yourself and develop some self awareness around it. So how do you know if you are the arsonist in your business?
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Well, for a minute visualized a owner coming in to a job and everybody's looking at the door and you show up, they're waiting on you to make a decision and you're always rushing in. You rarely plan anything. It's a constant reaction, reaction, reaction. And over time it's going to be so obvious to your people that it's going to be a distraction.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: I'm so militant about my calendar and I know that that's my type, a kind of personality bubbling to the surface. But my calendar, it's flexible, it's got flex in it. But every single thing that I need to do, I've got time blocked out for it. I am absolutely a planner and I can tell you without question, you can get a lot more accomplished when you're organized that way. Just throw it on the calendar and if you don't have time for it today, it's really easy to move over to tomorrow if your day gets away from you. Just yesterday I had a long list of things I needed to do.
I spent four hours fighting and wrestling with my printer. My printer decided to quit working and that really wrench in your day.
And so yeah, anyway. But if you know some other red flags, if you know that you're the arsonist like Tommy said, if the same issues keep popping up just with different people or different jobs, if you're dealing with the same issues all the time, it might be you.
I feel like Jeff Foxworthy right now. How do you know you might be an arsonist if, if everybody's always waiting on you, if everybody's always waiting on you, then it might be you. All right? And if you're always rushing, rarely planning, etc.
So let's, let's, let's transition from that.
How do you actually, before we get to that, what is the difference between reacting and leading? It sounds obvious, but dive a little deeper.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: It sounds obvious, but people still get consumed by it.
So reacting is letting the day run you. You don't have a plan, you know, back to T2's calendar that's laid out in different colors, task oriented.
That's. That's not you. You're letting the day just consume you and pull you in every which direction. Where if you're leading, you're setting the direction, there's a rhythm to it, there's a pace people can accept, there's plans, there's outcomes. Again, the accountabilities, it's just so the fires don't have a place to start to begin with.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: It's helpful to identify your, your top recurring fires. Maybe just three. Like what are three issues that you're constantly dealing with in a very reactive mode. And then go back and create a system or a playbook for each one of those and then train your team to run it so that you're not constantly extinguishing those fires.
Those systems are just really, really important.
What are some.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Sounds like a T2 challenge in the making.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: It will be in a second.
What are some small changes that can start to reverse some of that chaos? What are some of the. Just some small moves that business owners can make to, to turn the ship?
[00:07:35] Speaker B: I think a tool that's been around for eternity is the checklist.
And no matter how much we electronically, you know, impact our life, we always have a checklist that we can relentlessly cross something off that's been completed or articulated or know that it isn't complete and we need to reprioritize it to get it done. So that's, that's a big one. So. And how you communicate that to your team is, is the other part of that.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: And that feels, I don't know, it feels good to me to be able to check some of those things off the list. I, you know, I feel like I've accomplished something. Right, but communicating to your team. So daily huddles. I, I'm not a huge fan of email communications. It is good to follow up a daily huddle or a meeting. And a daily huddle needs to be 15 minutes. Right. It doesn't have to be this big, big complex, you know, daily meeting every day at 7:30 just to sort of get ahead of the problems that you as a business owner are anticipating and, and because they're out there and they happen. But yeah, daily huddle Communication. You can use that email as a follow up or a recap and then block time each week to, to just fix one recurring issue.
Stop with the patches, stop with the, you know, the band aids on things. Let's fix it, let's fix the issue every week. Just, just grab one and let's get on top of it.
Let's talk about our software a little bit. How does performance margin help owners kind of break that cycle and get out of that cycle?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. Performance margin software brings out your costs at, at, at your break even points.
So anything above is, is your profit. So when you start eating away at your estimates above, above where your costs are, you're pulling your, your profits away from your company.
And the, the foreman piece of performance margin software allows you to go back and look at the actuals and see, I bid it for 10 hours and it took me 12 hours. Why was that? So there's a troubleshooting component to that, but it brings it out and it, it really puts it on the bottom line so it makes problems visible early so they don't become fires.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Right. And it gives a lot of really good structure to your bidding, your scheduling, your tracking, your training, etc, and ultimately the goal that we have for you is that we want to free those, you, you know, you as a business owner. We want to free you up from being that sole source of truth.
So again, just performance margin becomes your business's fire alarm, if you will. Okay. That real time data will flag issues really early. We've got templates that help you standardize a level of excellence in your company and it gives the owner a lot of visibility without micromanaging your team and frustrating them.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: So it's a tool that lives outside of your accounting software that the owner can rely on.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: And know what's going back into your accounting software.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: So I alluded to this earlier. Tommy made fun of me. But I want you to list your top three recurring fires for this month. So give me three things that, that, that you deal with on a regular basis that make you force you into reactive mode and is, is really slowing you down. All right, Pick one. Just pick one. Build a checklist around it. Train your team and stop solving it over and over and over again. Stop solving it over and over and over again. Start running the business and stop reacting to it.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: Okay, Just remember we're talking about this because we've been there, we've all done this, we've all been there. But, but at the end of the day, take her cool.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Don't get too excited. It's all under control.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: It's gonna be fine.
