Episode 105 - Escape the Chaos: How to Transform Your Business!
#105 | Scott Beebe | My Business On Purpose | Escape the Chaos: How to Transform Your Business!
In this episode of The Curious Builder, hosted by Mark Williams, Scott Beebe from Business on Purpose shares valuable insights on the importance of systems and coaching in business. Scott discusses how predictable systems and a solid coaching framework can help business owners manage effectively and avoid chaos, allowing room for creativity and personal connection. Whether you're looking to streamline operations or prepare your business for sale, Scott's expertise offers a roadmap to achieve your goals while maintaining balance and avoiding burnout.
Listen to the full episode:
About Scott Beebe
Scott Beebe founded Business On Purpose because he saw there was a need to help business owners who were weighed down by chaos to have a clear vision when it comes to the success and future of their business. He created the Business On Purpose Roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working IN their business and help them get their lives back.
Resources:
Find My Business On Purpose’s Website here
Follow My Business On Purpose on Instagram here
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Scott Beebe 00:08
where the coach can bring real value is a coach a they've got a system that they follow. The system's been leveraged. It's been used. There's good, you know, accountability around it, and that sort of thing you've got the time to be able to implement into it. Now, what happens is, when you're walking through the predictability of the system, you can also make time for the nuance of the situational things. And so a lot of times when people hear system, they go, Oh, I'm not a robot. I don't want to hire a robot. I want to hire a human being. You're like, no, no, you're getting both. What you're getting is you're getting a system that's been proven keeps us on a path that's what we call RPM. So we've got those three things there, and what that does is it anchors us to be able to handle the situational things that come up, so we can go down that detour, but not get so far off that now I'm following you, and you're no longer following me. Today on the podcast, we had Scott Beebe from business on purpose, and fasten your seat belt if you want to rework your business and get it ready to sell, you're going to find out all kinds of coaching tips that you need to really create a structure around your business and grab your pen. Or listen to this a couple times, because there's more quotes in here than a than a quote book that you had in college for your intro papers. Without further ado, here is Scott Beebe. Welcome to here's builder Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host today, we have a very special guest. Scott Beebe from business on purpose, South Carolina, North Carolina, South Carolina. Man, all right, well as a year ago, as our year anniversary podcast, because I met you a year ago at my first builder 20. You You are lucky enough to be a part of the squirrel squad, or whatever our team nickname is for 20 builders on the loose. And I was really impressed at you, yourself, at your team, and I know we're bringing you back again this year for our builder 20 meetings, and I wanted to bring you on talk about talk shop. Talk about why, as business owners, we need a coach and kind of go through your thought process and all the things. So yeah, I guess, like any normal interview, why don't we start with a little bit of your history. How'd you get to where you're at now? Yeah, pretty non linear blueprint. That's my favorite kind. Unless you're building a house you'd like it to be linear. We tell people all the time that it's kind of the start of a bad joke. Actually, my wife and I last night watched a Nate bargat special. If you're not into his, he is so funny, hilarious, and I love his dry humor, but, but my start is a bit like a Nate bar Godsey joke, a little bit in that I was a telemarketer, I was a theology student, I was a pastor and a drug salesman, and so you kind of merge all that together. Imagine all those walking to a bar. So I can't that's, that's a joke. Well, how does that joke end? By the way, me
Speaker 1 02:41
being a business coach, but you know, the back end of the joke is this, and something you and I were just talking about, and people ask, we'll get questions periodically about, how do you get into business coaching and all that stuff. And we say business coaches are a lot like marketers and Gypsies. The barrier to entry very low. No certification required, right? And so the challenge is, when somebody says, Oh, your business coach, in their mind, they're going, Oh, you're a business coach, and what they really think is, you're a life coach, or you're a basically, you're a counselor, right? And and so we just hit it up front. We're like, Yep, we've got the same level of credibility or certification as a gypsy and a marketing agency, you're
Scott Beebe 03:23
like a camp counselor. You're like, you sent your kids away to a camp counselor. And as you get older, you're like, wait a minute, I just sent my kids with this 22 year old for a week in the woods. That's right,
Speaker 1 03:34
yeah, my kids are those counselors. By the way, they're the ones that you send them off to. And so one of the things that we do, we don't even fight the certification thing now, we just are like, Yeah, we, we, you've got to understand our chops. I've only been asked about our certification twice, two times. Both were by other business coaches. By the way, no, no client has ever asked for our certifications or anything like that. And so that's sort of how the story ends. I'm giving you the very end of it. But somewhere in the middle, Ashley and I been married almost 27 years now. I got three kids at the state of this podcast, 2321 and 20 and graduated from seminary. So I did undergrad at South Carolina, did seminary out in Texas, graduated there in oh one. And I had been working in businesses, telemarketer, went and started in drug sales with Pfizer for a couple years. Was having this crisis of faith and belief and conviction, all that stuff was trying to merge work and mission together. You know, faith based background, all that. But, you know, working at Pfizer, and how do these two things merge? So I had a buddy asked if I'd come on staff at a church out in Texas. So we moved from Augusta out back to Texas. Did that for about five, six years, both on staff, and then we also planted a church that was part of their strategy was go, start church from scratch. So sort of my first entrepreneurial experience, but a little different than than for profit. Liked about 20% of that work, of the pastoring work, I loved researching love, studying love, preparing love, teaching every other part of it was like, Ah, just you know, if you got a lot of problems, I had one lady tell me she was sleeping on. Husband with five different guys, it was like, just stop doing that. Like, I don't know what else to tell you, you know. And so I couldn't that's true story, by the way. And then after that, I went back to work for Pfizer for a number of years, and just sort of let myself be okay being in enterprise work. We were doing some stuff around the world with submissions agencies at the time, and that was super fun. And then about 2013 was asked if I could come on staff, full time with the actually NGO that we were working with. And so I took about a year to deliberate on that. 2012 and then 2013 and up doing that. So I did that for a couple years. Got a PhD in how to deal with a board, a nonprofit board, but that's a whole unique experience. And in February of 2015 eight of the nine board members resigned on the spot because of some things that they saw going long story.
Scott Beebe 05:47
Did they coordinate that? Where that all was like a hap that happened, like coordinated it had been about
Speaker 1 05:51
a four month sort of sequence of emergency meetings because there was some stuff going on that that I'd shown them. Hey, we need to fix this. But it wasn't getting communicated clearly in the channels it was supposed to and so when it finally came out, eight of the nine board members that day decided they would, they would resign. They actually called me in and they said, Hey, this is the pickle we're in. What do we do? I was like, well, you can either cut off the funding to all these projects we have going on with it. One of them was an orphanage. So, like, the answer to that was no, couldn't do that. Or you guys can live with it, or you can resign, but if you resign, I'm going to ask that you, like, dissolve my role and see if you can give me a runway or something, because I'm not going to be able to continue on. And so that afternoon, I was 39 married, three kids, and I did not have a job, the way that we joke, though, Mark is my wife was a public school teacher, so don't worry about us, because we were, you know, raking in the cash with that public school salary. And that was a Friday, I called Two of my buddies on a Monday, I told him I was going to start a business coaching and advisory firm. They knew me. They knew a little bit about what was going on. It's really not more complicated than this. And both of them were like, Yeah, you know, we're cheering you on. And I was like, well, actually, I want both of you to hire me. And they were like, Okay, well, what are you going to coach us on? You've never run a business. And said, well, we need to work through your vision, your long term vision, mission, values of the organization. And they were cool with that. I built a full day workshop, ran them both through it, and one of the guys still a client today, by the way, will turn 10 next month, in three weeks, actually, and he told me, he said, This is the most clarity I've ever had after we spent a whole day together around this, and I had a methodology for it. It's most clarity I've ever had. What do we do now? And I said, Well, I think we start meeting every week. And he goes, I'm in how much So Mark, I literally just made up a number. And he knows this. He knows this whole story. And I've been meeting together ever since, and now we've got a team of 11 full time professionals, and we serve, as of today, this recording, we serve 115 clients around the country. So about 89% are contractors or contracting support, architects, civils, designers, that sort of thing. Yeah, that was going
Scott Beebe 07:56
to be a fascinating story. There's a lot to dive into there. One of them, I guess maybe I'll start there the pastor kind of thing. I guess I only can relate to this. I'm curious if it relates at all. So I coached cross country running for a decade when things were slow, like 2009 I had actually wanted to be a assistant, like a teacher, like in Minnesota. Anyway, you need a teaching license when, when things were really slow, building wise, I'm like, Oh, I always wanted to work with kids anyway, where I'm going with this? I didn't realize how much I loved coaching until I started doing I always knew I liked being around kids. I liked education, but it was more just like perseverance, hard work, those types of things. I had no idea that 10 years after that, so now I would be the podcast and the collectives, and a lot of what I do now is a form of education. I guess I feel less that I personally am educating people, but more getting people together to educate themselves. And I'm curious, from the pastor sent side of things as you became a business coach, and as you because a lot of the things that, because I've seen you share a lot of what you share a lot of it's not rocket science. In fact, I would argue almost none of it is a lot of it is either accountability. Hear about people that they hire a personal trainer to help you get in shape, and guess what? They tell you to don't eat as much, run more, sleep better, and you'll lose weight and you'll get fitter, and all those things are true, by the way, but sometimes you need someone else to hold you accountable, and by you paying them, you're holding yourself accountable to your own checkbook. Is that accurate? A little bit in terms of coaching too, because a lot of things that you tell us to do, we're like, it's not like this some revelation that comes down and is, ah, harps are being played. And we're like, man, if we had only known that a lot of it is probably very simple, but it's just then doing it and doing it in a structured way. Is that, is that accurate?
Speaker 1 09:36
Totally fair. A late mentor of mine, Dan Miller, he used to say, people come for the content, but they stay for the connection. So for instance, people hear me, or one of our coaches teaching like you that where you first heard me, and you'll go, ah. And to your point, not a lot of It's Rocket Science, like, Wait, ideal weekly schedule, time blocking, all this stuff. I'm being a little bit using a little hyperbole, but. But the reality is that most still hear us and be like, oh yeah. And so really, what it is is it's not novel. It just jars you. It sobers you. So you're sobering to that reality. And you said you were a cross country coach. My son's a collegiate runner, so he's grown up in this world that you coached in. And so my son, he eats well, he sleeps well, and he runs a lot, and that's the key to the whole thing. And so what's the value of a coach? Well, if his coach wasn't there, he wouldn't eat well, he wouldn't sleep well, and he wouldn't run a lot. And so the same is true for a business. Now I will say the one uniqueness in a business, and it's not unique. This is true in cross country, running. It's true in football. It's true. And backgammon, whatever, there are techniques, there are certain things that a coach can bring in the moment, once they see and align with that particular person, they see their style, and they go, oh, there's a couple things we can adjust and we can tweak those gives fractions of a second where we usually find an owner, though, Mark, they don't need the little shaves. They need wholesale shift at this point. And then we can start shaving some things down. A lot of people we meet, they actually need an ER doc. We need to put them on the table, do a little emergency surgery, because some of them are bleeding cash. They're bleeding a variety of different things. We'll get them sort of stable, and then we'll start to rehab and work on those shave off things that you talk about, but yeah, most people come for the content, but they stay for the connection, or better terms. They stay for the accountability. One
Scott Beebe 11:28
thing that I have, I think I've mentioned this too before. I've only worked we had a fractional CEO a year and a half ago, and it was super helpful for about four months and but I was unprepared for the amount of work that I needed to do myself. And I think part of it was is I thought, oh, man, this is great. She'll come in, and she's great, very talented. Jordan is her name, and she came in. And it was also at a very vulnerable time at the company, we had a few people turn over, so she ended up basically my HR department helping me hire while I'm in the middle. So it worked out really well that she was there, but it also sort of distracted from what she was there for, as like, I need this is like an immediate er fire. I need to solve this problem, because this key person left. It was our controller, and until we had that fixed, it was, you know, all hands on deck. But where I'm going with this is, I told her, as professional advice, back to her, is, if I was to do this again, and I've said this before on the podcast is, I wish there would be like, a 30 day window before you start with a coach, where I would say, like, Hey, we're gonna start whatever our sequence is, bi weekly, weekly, once a month, whatever you guys like to do. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I need to go forward three, four months on my schedule and block out time to actually work on what you're going to tell me to do, because the problem that I had as the recipient of this fractional CEO was, Oh, great. We'd have these meetings and tons of ideas, lots of stuff for me to work on. I had no I had I didn't. I didn't have any time to actually implement any of the things. To this day, a year and a half later, I still have not. I'm sure I've implemented sometimes the knowledge rattles around, and I think if I was to look back, maybe I'm being too hard on myself. I'm sure some things have made their way in, because it makes it it's in your psyche. But my my best advice now would be to actually block out the time, not only to to receive the council, but to have time to work on, you know, if his EOS work on the rock or work on the thing, do you find? I mean, do you how do you coach people through that? Am I? Am I unique in that? Or is that a pretty common story?
Speaker 1 13:24
No, not unique at all. I think there's actually two angles on this. One is the angle you're discussing, and that's the amount of time. It's ultimately a question we ask. We actually ask six major questions when we're first meeting somebody. The second is, what you want? Like, what? What do you want? Most people never stop to answer that question. In fact, if you stopped now and just thought about that question, you could spend an hour on that question. What do you really that's the why, right? The why? Yeah, it's it can fund the why. It can uncover the why. Once, once you find what you want, that can sometimes be powerful enough to be the why. But ultimately, for instance, what I wanted was to be able to take my wife to Morocco. That still didn't answer the why. Why did I want to do that? And so, but so it helped me, kind of, we have a tool called the why drill, literally a why. And we drill down to try to find what's way down in the earth's core of this understanding what we're doing. We literally just taught leaders on it a couple weeks ago. So we do that. But the So, what do you want? Second question, what are the roadblocks keeping you from that? Because if you want it, there's something keeping it could be your own, apathy, a variety of things. Third question is, if, if you don't do anything different, just like you've confessed, right? But last year, you really hadn't done much different, just kind of keep doing the same thing. What does life look like in three years if you just keep doing what you're doing? People are like, Oh, number one response to that question, by the way, is divorced. Literally. I'm not making that up. That's usually what people say, is, if I keep doing what I'm doing, I'm going to be divorced. And we're like, is that not powerful enough to get you moving to do something? But then this fourth question lends to what you were talking about, and that is, how much are you willing to invest? Everybody thinks we're asking about money, and we're not. We're asking. About time. And so what we'll tell them is, how many hours per week will you provide yourself to pull through what it is that we're having you to do? Number one response to that question, whatever it takes. We're like, it's not good enough. We're not going to let you get away with that. So we're already coaching through the initial conversation, and so we will require them to give us a number of hours. Now, we've got a range of number of hours that we have, that we have set, that we know exactly what you're going to need to do every single week to do that. So that's one side of it is the is the hours per week, but you're dead on. I wouldn't say you need to look out three months. I think you need to look out this week and go, do you have that number of hours this week to be able to do it? I mean, like side of it, I was positive
Scott Beebe 15:40
there for a second. The one thing I would say about that, and maybe I'm, I don't know if it's I can. I guess all I can do is speak for myself. Well, next week, the week we're recording, this is the week before IBS, and so I know next week is international builder show. I'll be back for a few days, and then I'm taking my daughter. So like, right now I'm, like, a month out, maybe a month and a half, because I have responsibilities and so that I've set, and I also try to keep boundaries and some other things like that. You say one week, and you're like, man, unless it's, I guess just prioritizing, right? My favorite quote of 24 is boundaries create freedom, and by creating really efficient boundaries, it does create freedom, but it does make hard to add new things into your kind of solar system, because you have to prioritize your family. You have to prioritize your now, your physical health and things like that. Otherwise, you can't show up in your business. And then it's your existing clients. We always talk about wanting, or when I say, most business owners are talking or motivated by sales, and we want more and more and more and more, but more and more and more your point, if your ship is sinking, going faster doesn't actually help. You No, you got a bunch of holes in your ship. Sales does
Speaker 1 16:43
not solve everything. Even the URL tells you that it's a cute phrase, it's just not true. What sales does is it exacerbates what already exists. So if you got a healthy business, sales will exacerbate the health of that business, just like marriage. That's what marriage does. If you've got a chaotic business, sales will exacerbate the chaos in the in the business. So sales doesn't solve everything. Sales exacerbates what already exist.
Scott Beebe 17:08
We should go back to what you're letting you had your six, I think you're right. Yeah,
Speaker 1 17:12
well, you had the angle that you brought of the time in that particular week. And that's it's a both in you. Of course, you're looking out 369, 12 months, but you're also looking at this week, because too many people get in the habit of going, Okay, I'll get that. Okay, I'll get that done in three months, and then they burn three months and they go, Okay, I'll get that done in three months, and you never get to the thing. And so you do need to look near term. But here's where I got this advice from a guy in my mastermind. About nine and a half years ago. I was just doing one off coaching with any clients I could work with, and I was sort of building it as I went. So the first two to three years, I was grabbing stuff that I was coaching on, and I really I was reading as much as I could, but I didn't really see a program I'd read E Myth years and years ago, which was a great awareness of the problem, but did not help solve the problem. And so from 15 to 18, I was building my own system of how to solve that entrepreneurial problem that people find themselves in. And so what I realized I had a guy tell me, he said, You need to put your thing, these things that you're coaching these guys on, in like a four step system. And I was like, just like, make it up. He's like, Yeah, just make it up. And so what I did is I took all the stuff that I had been coaching on. I was like, All right, if I could, if I could categorize these things and start to put them in. And so at first it was four steps to business freedom, and I kind of put some stuff there. Then it was the four systems of business, marketing, sales, ops, admin, and I was like, but that's not all encompassing. That's just the systems of the business, and not the business itself. And we have finally landed on a spot years into this now, and now it's full scale. It's the four cornerstones of every business purpose, people process profits. Just happen to be peace, because I was a pastor at once, and that's what you have to do as a pastor. Put them all in the same letter, purpose, people process profit. So those four elements are then have got the tools underneath. And then one of those the process is marketing, sales, ops, admin. The reason I'm telling you that is because you've got time on this end that you mentioned, and that's one way that that coaches do not serve a client, is by being upfront with them with how much time is going to be required to your point. But the other is not having a guided system or a pathway for the client to follow. So if, what happens if I come in as a coach and go, Hey, Mark, what ails you today? Well, guess what Mark's going to do? What ails him today is not going to ail him next week. Next week. You're going to have some new ailment next week, and then you'll have some new and all I'm doing is following your ailments. Instead of going, Hey, Mark, I've been down this road hundreds of times, right as a guide to other people, so I want you to follow me. There will be moments that we take detours, that are unique situations to your scenario, and in those moments, I will evaluate as your guide whether or not we go off course for a minute, and then we're going to come right back on course. Too many coaching and advisory firms do not have a system or a some sort of platform for the client to follow where they can invest that time, so there's a repetitious methodology to it. And. And instead, the coach just follows the client wherever they want to go. Guess what? The client's in chaos. That's why they hired the coach.
Scott Beebe 20:14
This episode is brought to you by adaptive. For over two years now, I've been using adaptive. It's an incredible game changer. It's AI technology based. It helps you with Bill Pay and as a builder, there's very few things that Angular subs more than not being paid on time. Well, those days are gone. Not only do you know exactly where you are, but you can pay people through your ACH channels, making draws extremely quick with one click of a button, which used to take hours, my office staff is now able to generate a draw to the bank or to the client in literally seconds. The thing that I appreciate the most about adaptive is their ability to keep changing. We've given them three or four feedbacks on things that we need as builders, and within just a few months those they're rolling those things out. This is saving us hours per week and days per month in terms of our efficiency. If you're looking to upgrade your business, I'd highly recommend adaptive. You can reach out to them@adaptive.com or listen to the curious builder podcast episode 15 or episode 80, where we dive into their origin story. I also think that you're dealing with a lot of type A people, right, talking about all business 100% and so they're used to drive. They're used to driving the ship they're used to. You can't be a wallflower. You cannot. You have to be able to say, call a spade a spade. I mean, we need accountability. And I think it takes unique personality to create structure they're being hired, and then to remind them like this only works when it's a partnership. Oddly enough, it seems like most relationships, or most analogies, for me, come down to marriage, because, like, marriage only works because both of you want to make it work. I used to always say good marriages are hard. Bad marriages must be terrible, because it takes a lot of work. And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm just saying relationships take work. And I, you know, going back to more of a sales side, I think in order to be a good partner, or sorry, to have a good partner, I think you need to be a good partner. I think if you want a good brand partner, you have to be a good brand partner. It's a in someone, one time said about marriage, and I'm still working on this one, but it's not 5050, it's 100% 100% and I thought that was a really interesting perspective. It's probably good for me to rethink about that, maybe a little bit for my own personal life as well. But, you know, and I know we're talking in business terms, but I think, like, if you're I think if you've reached out to a coach and you're asking for help, you've already probably done the number one thing, I need help. And I've often argued that that's probably the most underused word in the English language, or forget every language, frankly, because there, whether it's our ego, whether it's sometimes Self confidence is good, but sometimes self confidence can be bad. And really, at what point do we say I need help and you can't be the best at everything. I mean, that's not possible unless you're MacGyver. MacGyver is good at everything. Yeah, he was also fabricated, but, yeah, well, you know, whatever, if you don't have MacGyver, then you got Scott Beebe and his team anyway. Walk us through people that that you've seen reach out to you what are usually some leading indicators of why someone hires a coach. And maybe I'll preface this with saying, of like, I've been in this for 20 years, looking back, I'm like, man, it sure would have been nice to have a team early on, of a CPA, a financial planner, your banker, lawyer and a coach. And often, in my experience, at least, looking around, and I don't think it's just me, but like, the coach is the last one you're gonna do taxes. You have to do you have to see PA. So that kind of has to happen. If you're going to have contracts drawn, you have to have a lawyer, or at least have some legal counsel. You're borrowing money at some point. So you all these other ones you sort of like have to have encountered. So it's natural that those are first in your experience. Now, having done this for 10 years, where do you see business owners, and maybe not just construction owners, but if that's fine, if it is too but like, where are you seeing the maturation prod process where someone is like, hey, I need a coach now. Like, yeah, why? Why does that seem later than I would like it to be? Now, in hindsight, man, I really wish I would have done that in year four, not year 20.
Speaker 1 23:57
Well, you've articulated well. So imagine this metaphor when you're building something, typically, in any municipality, you have to hire a civil to some degree, like you've got to bring civil engineering or some sort of land planning or whatever, in order to get in there legally, you cannot go forward without doing those things. In most cases, at least going through permitting offices. All that the permitting offices of a municipality will never go out of business. As long as people are wanting to build they have to be used. Coaches and advisors are not that way. CPAs are fundamentally that way. You don't legally have to use them, but in many cases, you kind of do. Lawyers are that way. In a lot of cases. And then there's descending order to insurance. You have to use it. You got to have insurance advisors, tax strategies, you don't have to use them, but if you want to avoid paying the lump sum of what you have to pay, you got to use those So kind of in descending order the advisors that you're mentioning, there's some sort of compulsion to sort of have to use them, either legally or just efficiently, and that sort of thing. Coaching and advising usually tends to fall more on the emotional needs side, rather than. The tactical needs side. And so what I'm going to do, Mark is I'm going to give you phrases. The reason I can give you these phrases off the top of my head is because they're not on the top of my head. Our vision story is about eight pages long, and in the client section of our vision story. So this tells our entire team what clients we're looking for. We have taken direct phrases from clients that come to us and why they come to us. And so we've got a whole list of phrases, and these are the phrases they use people call out to us when they are tired of throwing Hail Marys all day, tired of having the wrong people on the bus, tired of feeling like more money is going out the back door than is coming in the front door, tired of seeing net income numbers but no cash, tired of doing it the way we've always done it, tired of dealing with people who don't want to work anymore, tired of chasing checks, tired of feeling reactive all the time instead of proactive. We asked one guy, how do you define chaos? And this was his literal response. I wrote it down, Monday through Friday. That was his definition of chaos. We've had others say, I'm tired of being chickens, running around with our head cut off, tired of not having a life outside of business, tired of traveling with my wife to Bermuda just to change work locations. Think about that one that's a powerful statement, tired of being jaded and burnt, tired of doing it all myself. And so when you start to think about all this stuff, sorry, Mark, just had a call come in. It's never coming on my computer before, hopefully net it out. Edit that. All right, so you have all of these things. Those are why people call us. Is because they have that feeling. They have that sense about themselves, of I'm tired of doing all of this, and so there's an exasperation in what I called an emotional need at that point.
Scott Beebe 26:41
Where would you say the continuum is of time in that? And I know it's different for every person, but what would be some averages of time? Like, I've been in business for X number of years, and this is when people start looking at that. Is it like when, obviously what you're quoting is signs of burnout? Or what? Forget signs of burnout, like of burnout, of past burnout. And I know we all process things differently and have different coping mechanisms, but I guess just for what the sake of the question is, is like, what are the average time in that like, how long are most of your clients been in business before they hire you?
Speaker 1 27:15
Yeah, so again, we've got a 26 point ideal client checklist, and on there, we were very particular that we don't work with people who have been in business less than two years. Now you look at two years and be like that didn't seem like a long time. Well, the chaos continuum is totally independent on on the person you're dealing with. Some people are knee deep in chaos two years in. Some people don't get exasperated by the chaos until they're 15 years in. And so it really has to do with your Chaos tolerance at that point to see how long you can endure it, or, better yet, how long your family can endure it before they start to implode and call you out with that sort of thing. The folks who are a little bit more chaos intolerant, they'll call us much earlier in the process, because they'll realize the value of it. The folks that are more chaos tolerant. We've got a guy that just this is crazy. Just met him for the first time the other day. He's in the oil and gas business, and he's 74 years old, the oldest client we've got by far. And they reached out at 74 and he was like, I'm tired of it. Now, part of it is like, I got to do something different, like, This is killing me, but I'm tired of it. And so it really does depend. It's more dependent on your Chaos tolerance than time necessarily.
Scott Beebe 28:23
No, that's helpful. I think one thing that I want to touch base at the end of the episode is, I know you do like not estate planning, but basically exit strategy. And I'd like to save maybe the last 10 minutes to talk about that. What is where I want to go with this? I think what I love about it is people are self aware enough to ask for help. I love that that seems to be step one how? I guess maybe the first question is, how do people typically find a coach? Is it, in this case, I've met you in person, or it would have been a referral. I would have asked my builder 20 group, and I would have said, Hey, I'm looking for a coach, and I get called on by a lot of coaches, a lot of Eos coaches. In particular, I know Minnesota has a think, I think we have more implementers than maybe anywhere else in the country. I don't know why that is, if the author was originally from Minnesota, someone had mentioned that, and I don't think you do Eos, strictly for those not familiar with Eos, you could maybe explain it just briefly. But is it usually word of mouth, like referrals, like where would be your strongest source of where people reach out to
Speaker 1 29:20
you? Yeah. So same for us. Our business started in South Carolina, so the we've got a bulk of clients from the state of South Carolina and surrounding areas Georgia, that sort of thing. So be very, very similar to an EOS to build to sell to. You know, there's a lot of us in this space, and it actually should encourage all of us that are in this space, even though we're in competition. It encourages all of us that there's a need. There's a need for all of us here. Same reason you've got multiple custom builders in one town, right? Not one can handle it all, or can work with every client that's there. And we all have sort of a different niche of client that we work with as well. So for us, it's three to 100 employees. Clients have been in business at least two years. We have two rules. You have to do everything we ask you to do. Number one. And number two, you have to have more money coming in than is going out. That's a problem that's very, very hard for a coach and advisor to be able to solve, but there are two primary lead channels for any coach and advisory firm. Number one, you fit on is direct referral, word of mouth. Now there's also an assumption with direct referral, word of mouth, and it's just magic. Just happens. No no no for the marketing hacks out there, you can absolutely work a process for how to develop word of mouth. So for instance, we can go to all of our past clients and proactively reach out to them periodically and go, Hey, do you know anybody? Or are you yourself interested in coming back into the fold that's nurturing word of mouth when we do those sorts of things. And so number two, though, is direct education. That very thing mark that you said you're good at, you'd like to do, getting in front of people and educating them. We've got a phrase internally. It says marketing is coaching or vice versa. Coaching is marketing. When I show up and coach a group of people and coach my brains off, I don't show up to your 20 club and start marketing from the beginning. In fact, theoretically, I never market because I'm not allowed to, and I don't want to. I came into that room to deliver as much value as I can possibly deliver, and at any 20 club or anything else, if you ever hear some sort of marketing message from me, it's because I've been directly asked by the members themselves. That's it outside of that, I am coaching my brains off. But the good news is, is that when you coach your brains off, all of a sudden, your marketing people go, Wow, that could be really helpful. And so that is probably the second most powerful channel, is either some sort of form of education and really just getting in front of people. Now we could talk paid ads and all that kind of stuff, but what we've learned in our experience, if you're not willing to spend about five figures a month in paid ads, it's probably not a good strategy for whoever's going to dive into it, from a coaching
Scott Beebe 31:46
standpoint. Yeah, interesting. The I heard some that are recently, I'm going to butcher his quote. I get that second half right, but it was like, basically, there's only two effective ways to get people's attention to amazing like, wow them, or educate them. And I think, to your point, very much in line with what you were saying that the education, I think that's probably why you see, I mean, if you look on Instagram in particular, whoever would have thought you would have seen so many builders, myself included mike up, talking about House, talking about stuff that we know but you like, well, most people know this stuff, but no, most people don't know this stuff. And I think there's a high level of curiosity that social media really helps deliver very well. And I think you look at like interior designers, their profiles are massive because it's very relatable. And whether you're gonna remodel or design your kitchen remodel or a bathroom or a whole house or whatever, everyone can relate to that. Not everyone can relate to building a new home or even remodeling on a and so it's interesting how there's a lot of cons to social media, but one of the positives is it's made everyone teachers, and I think I'm not smart enough to know what algorithm does what, but if you're passionate about what you do and you're willing to educate, people will find you that want your content, and now all of a sudden, you've made yourself a valuable resource. You are, whether you wanted to admit it or not, you've become a coach just because people are listening to what you're saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1 33:04
yeah, yeah. It's one of those things, you know, we've got to balance all this. I think it was Herbert Simon who said a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention. And so while the benefit of all of this has been a massive increase in education, us being able to do a lot of things for ourselves. Frankly, the YouTube culture, that sort of thing. Shoot, we took an entire used kitchen delivery van and built a camper van out of it, based on YouTube. And a lot of hard work over about eight months, because we're not contractors, and yet, at the same time, we've got to be super careful, because a wealth of information does breed a poverty of attention, and attention is the one asset that we can't remit. It's irrevocable. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that time you just can't get back. And so we've got to have, it's not a balance. Maybe a rhythm. Is probably a better term for that, to where we are looking to learn. We're looking to grow. Where the coach can bring real value is a coach, a they've got a system that they follow. The system's been leveraged. It's been used. There's good, you know, accountability around it, and that sort of thing you've got the time to be able to implement into it. Now, what happens is, when you're walking through the predictability of the system, I like that word predictability. I think there's health in that you can also make time for the nuance of the situational things. And so a lot of times when people hear system, they go, Oh, I'm not a robot. I don't want to hire a robot. I want to hire a human being. You're like, no, no, you're getting both. What you're getting is you're getting a system that's been proven keeps us on a path that's what we call rpm. You've heard me talk about that repetition, predictability and meaning, so we've got those three things there, and what that does is it anchors us to be able to handle the situational things that come up, so we can go down that detour, but not get so far off that now I'm following you, and you're no longer following me, because that's why I hired me in the first place to guide you down this path. I can get you on some detours, no problem, because there's a lot to learn there, both for you and me, but we're going to get right back on the path and keep going down that path, just
Scott Beebe 34:50
the thing of this podcast. And obviously we'll have everything in the show notes so people can reach out to you, to hire you as a coach or to get to that intake. But for those listening, we always try to have like, three takeaways. It. Usually people are talking about their business, and we're not going to talk about specifically, I guess, right now we're talking about how to run businesses, and your knowledge on that. We're not going to, I guess, dive deep on how you personally run the business. Of you know, business on purpose, although I do love the name, by the way, it's very, very intentional of what it is. But I guess my question is, for those listening, if they were to do three things this week. What would those three things be? How would it make a difference? And how much time this should they allocate over the next month to work on the three things you're going to tell us? I have an idea where you're going with this, but I'm kind of curious, in your own words, to say it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1 35:35
think there's multiple thing. I mean, there's multiple directions I can go. We subscribe to Gary Keller's one thing Id, I'm going to take your three and then I'm going to give an optional one. So let me Gary Keller asked that great question, what's the one thing that by doing that one thing makes everything else easier or unnecessary? So if you could start with three. So for instance, to run a business, it takes about 30 tools to run a business, vision, mission, values, org chart, job roles, yeah, all that stuff, right? Takes those tools to run a product. In your case, home building or a podcast or whatever, to run a product. It takes 100 500 900 processes to be able to do that. And so when, when we think about all this stuff, we've got to think through it in terms of tools to run the business processes to run the product. So let me start with the tools to run the business. I am convinced, and I've been convinced of this for about nine years now, the very first place to start go back to that simple question, what do you want? Is a defined, articulated vision story. This is not a sentence, this is not a paragraph, this is multiple pages in multiple categories. So for instance, how far out is the vision? Category number one, term, what does your family and freedom look like by that date out there? Category number two, category number three, what do your financials look like? So what you want to pull out of the business so that you can do the things that you said you wanted to do with your family and your own freedom your time. Dan Sullivan calls them freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom or relationship and freedom of something else, purpose, I think it is and so, but we got to have resources to be able to have those options, right? So we go time, duration, family, freedom. Because why are we building this business? If not for that, the finances, then we get into the business. Start thinking through, what is the what does the product look like? What is the team in? Lest your mind goes well, the products building homes. Are you building $300,000 homes? You're being $3 million homes. You build them $30 million homes. Those are very different marketing outreaches, very different people that you'll hire all those things. So to sit down, you asked about time, a solid hour to an hour and a half to sit down, no distractions, no phones, no nothing, just to sit down and articulate. What do I want from for my family and freedom, the finances, the team, the client, the product and the culture of this business? Well, Scott, I need more framework. No, no. Just go, like, write it. So there's number one. That's a first option, a second option. So that was a tool to run the business, a second tool to run the business that you could sit down with is really just to sit down and go, What am I currently doing in my in my role, like when I think about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we call it a delegation roadmap. Dan Sullivan calls it a unique ability. There's a bunch of people that have these different tools. And that's the thing. Whether you're going with Dan Sullivan Strategic Coach, you're going Eos, you're going Built to Sell, you're going bop whatever. It doesn't matter. We've all got really good tools that are there. Some of us integrate those tools a little bit differently. The question is not about the tool. The question is, will you use it? It's not does it work? It's same question we get all the time about software. Hey Scott, we'll get it next week at IBS that you mentioned. Hey Scott, is it builder? Trend? Is a job. Trend is what you know, what our response is, whichever one you'll use. That's the best software for you. It's whichever. It's about the implementation. Edison said vision without implementation is hallucination. So we've got to be able to implement the things that we use. So the second tool, I would say, is what we call a delegation roadmap. It's a really fancy name for this, right? Every task that you do during your role during the week, and I mean everything. If you're setting up podcast microphones, write it down. If you're taking out the trash, write it down if you're still making bank runs, write it down. Not the big stuff, all of it you
Scott Beebe 39:23
This episode is brought to you by Pella Northland. For 20 years, I've been using Pella windows, and I couldn't be happier to call them as a business partner, a trade partner, and someone that really supports us in our quality builds. You know, we use wood windows and doors on every single one of our homes, and 98% of every home that I've ever built has been a Pella window. I've gotten to know their team here, locally as well as nationally, and the way that they support us as a craftsman, as well as they support our homeowners with their lifelong guarantee. It's actually been a game changer for me. So when people ask me who I use, I recommend Pella. If you want to hear more about Pella story, you can listen to episode one, where Ian interview Peter. Ian and Ed from Pella Northline about their journey into the pellet ownership
Speaker 1 40:05
vision. Story number one, delegation roadmap. Number two, I'm going to come back to the process roadmap here in a minute, but that delegation is a list, and you should have no less than 50 to 60 tasks on that list, because there's a lot you do you don't think about and so we're getting you to think about it, and then we rank them a variety of ways, one, two and three. Which one only can you do those? Get the ones. There should not be many of those, maybe more than five. Number two is you thought you were the only one that could do it, but, yeah, you could delegate it. And number three is you should have delegated this long time ago. You just didn't. If you can just start there and rank those, you will start to call your list down, focus in on those ones and a select few twos and start to delegate, not abdicate, but delegate the rest of those. So that's a brain dump exercise, right? Number one, Vision story. Number two, delegation, roadmap. Number three, both those first two were tools to work on the business. Now I'm going to give you processes to run the product. Number three is what we call a master process roadmap, again, fancy name. All you need is a sheet of paper, four columns. Column number one, marketing, number two, sales, number three, operations, number four, administration. That's all you got to write. And then below each one of them set a time, or for about 15 minutes, and just brain dump. What is every process that happens in marketing, website, podcast interviews, realtor, outreach, architect, outreach, whatever it might be. Okay now, what's every process in the sales Well, Scott, is that estimating. I don't care where you put it, just put it down somewhere. And so we get to estimating, we get to project pass off, we get to the sales Deck, the conversion script, all that stuff. Then we get to operation. This one's going to be a big one for most of your listeners, obviously, because of the business that you're in. And so we go in operations, we go t poll, placement, we go electrical, walk how to do a can light, like all of this stuff. And you can get as macro or as micro as you want to, but just brain dump everything. And if your question is, do I put that down? Yes, just put it down for now, because what you're trying to do is get all of these hundreds of things out of your head. Because one of the key questions we ask ourselves is, what happens to the business, if something happens to you, and if you don't have this stuff out of your head, captured? That's a good word, because it could be documented on paper. It could be a video. It could be whatever, captured in some sort of recorded format. And guess what? What happens your business? Something happens to you is not a story that you want to know about. And so we got to be able to do that. So three things, but what I would challenge mark is just pick one for now. Keep the other two on the back burner. Pick one and over the next one to two weeks, go to your calendar what you were talking about earlier. Set that time out there, go to your calendar, block the time and say, come hell or high water. The phone goes away. The email goes off. Believe it or not, you can actually, that's legal in this country. You can actually turn your email off. It's no problem. You're not going to die if you do that. And then you turn off any other distractions, close your door, tell everybody else, I am not available. I am in the dental chair, metaphorically, I've got somebody's fist down my throat. You cannot talk to me right now. And you go and you sit down and just do the work. Do the work, what Seth Godin calls ship. It just ship. Well, it's not perfect ship. It just get it out.
Scott Beebe 43:15
There was a we had. I've mentioned this so many times. You're gonna love this. His name's Caleb McDonald. He's up out of Toronto, Canada. I've met him at a contractor coalition about two three years ago, and once a month, he takes a train to a different part of Toronto. He dresses a little bit different. He for the sake of the story, I don't know if this part is true, turns off his phone, but he basically just goes to a different coffee shop, but completely outside the norm, and he spends the day working on the business, and I have blocked it out on my calendar. I have yet to do it. It's so this is the problem. The step one is knowing what to do. Step two is doing what it is. Inevitably, we make an excuse. The client just flew in out of town. They said, I have two days to meet. That's one of those days I was supposed to be planning. I'm like, I got to meet with this client. It's not really an option to fly in and option to fly in. And so, like, I get that. But the problem is, like, in the four months that I've been talking about this, I've yet to do it once. And so it is to your point, the best process is the one that you'll do. So maybe the one day is too big. Maybe I need to take two hours. It's a half a day. So I think, yes, sometimes I know for myself, I tend to get a little grandiose with ideas. Let's do the whole thing. And a lot of times I heard a great quote by Jerry Joe, no, sorry, it was Charlie Munger. I heard it today on the on a founder's podcast, and it was, never underestimate the person that overestimates himself. And I thought that was really funny, ironic. Because yes, if you have too high of a self, if you think of yourself too highly, like it's prone to failure, but like a lot of entrepreneurs, think too highly, and they do great things. And so I just thought it was a really oxymoronic quote. So it's really got me thinking. But anyway, all these analogies, and I just love analogies. You'd be fascinating to talk to for a couple days, because the amount of quotes you've got locked in your brain, I would just want to be writing them down, because there's like, Oh, that's a good one. Oh, that's a good one. But anyway, to your point, I guess for the audience, do something you can. Do. And I'm a huge fan of getting rid of distraction. I actually bought a focus clock the other day, and I have mixed results using it. But I'm trying. I think a lot of it's just practice. I think, how do you get better at something? I guess just try it. Just keep doing it. And so for me, I set this little timer 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and I'm trying to email less. And it's, I've mixed results with it. I'm trying. And so part of it is just, I'll give
Speaker 1 45:21
you one little hack on this. It's actually really helpful, and you might, you might already be doing this internally, but this would be good for anybody listening. One way to massively cut down on email is to cut out all internal email, meaning between your team, whoa, how we're going to communicate, Slack, Google Chat. There's a variety of different off email tools that you can get to that actually do a really good job of threading together communication. So for instance, for me to get an email from one of our team members is really bizarre, like super bizarre, because everything and if one breaks through, somebody emails me on email, guess what? I respond on Slack. I respond to their email on Slack. And so to take your internal team, move them to a separate communication section. Could be really, really helpful, and a good start in helping to start clean up your email so then you can deal with the outsource people. I know a
Scott Beebe 46:11
lot of people love it. I've always thought of more tech companies or bigger companies. We use builder trends, so we're communicating there. I let my PMS, and a lot of those, we're interfacing with the client, obviously, for instance, if I'm emailing the client, I'm attaching the PM, the architect, the designer. So it's like multiple people need to be on that. That's certainly not, I assume, Slack. But I guess one of the kickbacks I would, I would imagine people would say, myself included, is, how many things can we monitor? You've got text, you've got Instagram, you've got LinkedIn, you got slack. People start revolting against all these different technology stacks. How would you answer that question? Because I'm not disagreeing with you, but how do you get buy in from your team? Because you've already got all these other things they're checking, and to them, you're asking them to check one more new thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1 46:51
so I look at it a little bit differently, in that I'm not asking you to add something, although you will be what I'm trying to do is break your attention from the thing that's destroying you. On average, we spend three to four hours a day on email. It's destroying us. And actually, if you go back and look, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did an essay on Napoleon Bonaparte. This is fascinating case study, and they found out. And you know, Napoleon, like he's a little bit more important than you and I. He was running a whole country, trying to take over other countries. So I think we could all agree that he had a more powerful position than we do, and what he did is he would get mail correspondence just like we get email. He'd get mail back in the day, and he directed his assistant not to open the mail for three weeks until after it came in. So he got a piece of mail today, no do not open it for three weeks. And he said he was amazed at the amount of issues that had resolved themselves by the time his assistant had even opened it, which means he didn't even have to look at it for the first case. And I'm gonna give you another one. This is good Peter Drucker. Like we can't argue with Peter Drucker. And so it's Peter Drucker, the great father of modern management. I mean, read all these great books in the 90s and and all this stuff. So Peter Drucker comes and and he's asked by another author, Hey, can I interview you that you're, you're, uh, super creative, and how you come up with things? I mean, he wrote, he wrote the books on management, and can I interview about creativity? And here was Drucker's response. He said, I'm sorry. I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions while I'm told I'm creative, I don't really know what that means. Peter Drucker is brilliant, by the way. I'm told I'm creative, I don't really know what that means. I just keep on plotting. I hope that you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours. What's the takeaway? We're not that important, but we sit on email and all of these other channels like like the world is depending on us. Now, the reality is, if you only had one hour a day where your email was even accessible, guess what? You'd get it all done. It's Parkinson's Law. Work expands the time allotted. If you allot six hours a day for email, you'll take it. If you allot one hour a day for email, you'll take it. If you allot 15 minutes a day for email, you'll take it. And so email, we have a saying internally, well externally too, that email is from the devil. We sort of believe that being true, the reality is we're using email for far more than it was ever intended. Always intended to do is take something we meant to mail by the mail, but we could digitize it and just send it to you. It was never intended to be a direct messaging, a workflow process on a modern day Asana, nothing like that. And so we've got to be really, really careful of how we do that. Interesting.
Scott Beebe 49:42
I mean, I feel like we should, honestly, if you'd be open to it. Do you think you could do a whole podcast just on how to stop doing emails?
Speaker 1 49:50
Yeah, I would. I would waylay that tool if I could. Yes, I
Scott Beebe 49:55
would love to bring you on and actually talk about that, about, like, steps of how to and honestly. To Self Help for myself. I have found in other things, like, right now, we have two out of state clients, and they're big projects, interviewing architects. And first of all, I love interviewing architects. I love interviewing designers. I get way more enjoyment. Like, who likes to sit there and write emails? I think we feel like we have to, I think. And I in one of these old quotes that I recycle a lot, which is one of the best ways to get less email is to email less send less email. Yeah, and so into your that Napoleon story is epic three weeks, but it's interesting because I'm sure a lot of business owners would like to think of themselves as good communicators. I know I do, and I prioritize good communication, so it is frustrating when you email people and you never hear back from them again. I find it very irritating, frankly, and so I feel like, for me, it's a little bit of hypocrisy if I'm expecting people to answer me, but I don't answer them. And you mentioned you're a telemarketer. I was in sales. I had a job for one year between college and my what I do now, and I cold called 100 people. So I have a kind of a soft spot in my heart for people that call me. I usually will call them back, or now I finally set up templates in my email where, and I don't want to be disrespectful, I understand that I have to get this probably a me thing, like I, I just have such a complex I'm i People have asked me a question, I feel like I owe them a response. I understand that I don't owe them a response, and I know that's probably a personal thing, and yet. So I kind of have hybrid approached it, which I have a template, which I can in three seconds, hit a reply button. It sends them back a message. Actually, I have my template. You'll love this. I'm going to resell them the cell so they reach out to me, saying, Hey, I'd love to be your roofer, and I'll send them a sale saying, like, we're really happy with our roofer, by the way. Do you know we have a podcast called The Curious builder, if you'd like to tune in. Here's the link. I'm being serious with it, and they usually say, Oh, thanks. That's great, and that's fine. I don't know. How do you undo this communication cycle? Because I agree with you, we spend too much time on it, and yet I feel, how do you get rid of the hypocritical feeling that we expect other people to answer us, but we don't answer them? Yeah,
Speaker 1 52:00
yeah, yeah, no. It doesn't mean you don't answer them. What it does mean is you retrain people as to what your priority of answering is. For instance, for me, if somebody wants a response from me, the fastest way to get to me is to get to me. Let's talk face to face. Now, some people go, Well, that's not realistic. I go, Okay, that's fair, but that, I'm just telling you, that's number one is, is, if we see each other at IBS, we see each other at a 20 club, we see like, that's the fastest way to get insight, response, whatever. If you want that from me and vice versa, I think if I want that from you, that's, that's the same. All right, so there's number one. Number two, fastest way is you get to my wife or one of our key team members and and in business or in life, or my kids, like in business or in life. Second, fastest way to me, outside of directly to me, is through these people that I deeply, deeply care about. Third, if you want to get to me, then you find those technologies that are closest to me. Email is not closest to me, text message is closest to me. And the longer you get to know me, the longer you realize Scott's a texter. We all have that. We know that about people, right? I could ask you about your sister's husband, and you could go, nope, not a texture, not an email or phone caller, right? We categorized all these. They're all 100% and so when we start to look at that, we go, okay, but we treat everybody as if they should respond to email. But there's a definition of email, I think Cal Newport put this out. Email is my agenda for your day. So why would I do that? Why would I go into email to find out what you want me to do? The reality is, I feel like I've got a calling in my work. I've got a calling from the God who created me to liberate owners from chaos, to make time for what matters most. There have been other people have callings. A guy named Bezalel, 3500 years ago, had a calling to be a craftsman, to make to make these tents and all of these beautiful, wonderful things. It literally says the Spirit of God was in him to create and to craft things. So we all have a unique placement in what we're being called to do. What I what I cannot do is I cannot tolerate people who don't have a calling and are just stringing throughout their day to chaotically get in front of the calling that I feel like I have. Because if you do that, then what's happening is you're getting in the way of this. So I'll give you an example next week. I speak a couple times at international builder show, if I had slaved myself to your agenda email all these other things, then I would not be prepared. So when I show up and there's 40 people in a room, or 150 people in a room, or another 80 people in the room, or whatever, now I have robbed a cumulative two to 300 people of the prior work that goes into their time and attention that they invested in. And so when I'm sitting down working on my talks, people go, Well, Scott, you're not in a meeting. I'm not. I've got 200 people sitting in front of me now. They're not in front of me right now, but they're going to be, and I've got to be ready for that. So yes, you see me here with nobody in front of me, but I am in a meeting at this point. And so it's starting to reframe what work looks like and what. Meetings look like, and what productivity looks like. And so you can have open block hours, and I've got some of those when I'm in the office, but our office in South Carolina, I don't even have a desk in it. Why? It's because I can't get anything done there when I'm up there. It's the Hey, can I pick your brain? And as much as I want my brain to be picked, I'm now robbing other people what I've committed to. And the good news is, is people will go, hey, well, when do your team get to pick your brain? Monday at four, Tuesday at eight, Friday at 10. We have three set times every single week where, if somebody needs something from me, from Thomas, from Ashley, from Jesse, whatever, there's our place. What I like
Scott Beebe 55:39
about that? I suspect that your team is what you said 11 people. Yeah. If Ashley has a question Bob or mark, that question is you're using a team approach to teach multiple people. It's a force multiplier. Now, multiple questions and people sometimes ask questions that they didn't someone else will ask a question that they didn't know they have, but it sort of is the answer to the one that they thought that Oh. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, I like that three
Speaker 1 56:01
remember, Ian said, save it for three weeks. Why? Is because, naturally it gets solved. And so if my answer, this is another key element. Mark, when people pick my brain about something, what I'm giving them is an answer, not necessarily the answer that, as the owner of the business, for a long time, I thought it was the answer, I guess, yeah, it's kind of, yeah, it's my business, and sort of the answer. And and then we started doing coaches meetings, started that years ago, and finally had somebody who appreciates me and loves me enough to tell me the truth, and goes, Hey, can you stop talking so much in these meetings? And I was like, Yeah, but like, I'm a wealth of knowledge. And they're like, No, you're an interruption, is what you are. And so I would sit back in these meetings and guess what? The the information, the insight that they brought, I was like, I've never, I've never seen that. See our meeting on Monday at four is our coaches meeting. It's where our coaches all get together in a round table every week, 50 times a year, and they talk about their clients behind their back. That's, that's the whole point of it is so that we can get together and go, Hey, I ran into this situation. How would you guys handle that? This is how I handled it. But how you how would you guys and so we're going in the more I started listening instead of interjecting, the more I started learning from it. And so being able to position ourselves when I remove my access, I'm actually not robbing other people of developing their acumen at that point. Now, can you remove it too much? Of course you can, but that's where predictability comes in. And we go, Hey, these are the places where, if you need my access, ask for it. But outside of this, let's be really, really careful about hey, can I pick your brain? Not just for me, everybody, everybody that we've got to be careful with that
Scott Beebe 57:37
interesting. Well, there I got 1000 more questions, but we'll have to save that for another time. We're almost out. One of the things that I said we'd talk a little bit about it. There's a Ian, I know you don't agree with this, so that's why I'm gonna let you defend it. A lot of people say that you can't sell custom home companies. It's too messy, it's too unpredictable. And I think, I guess I already know the answer it a little bit because I heard you speak on it. Give us the counter to that. Why is that a common thing that people think and then tell us how to fix that? Because it was a eye opening experience for me. Two Three years ago, we rebounded the company, and I looked very deeply into changing the name of my company. I wish I had not named it Mark Williams Custom Homes, because it's my name. But then I realized, like, you could name it anything you want, doesn't make it more sellable or less sellable. Turns out you got to have a process. And, you know, I guess the classic line is, if, if, if you leave your business for a month and it can't run, you don't have a business. You have a job. Yeah, and I, right now I have a job and but at least now I know I have a job, and now I'm really excited. Before I always was kind of, I didn't want to scale, because I don't, you know, want to, quote, get big, or any of those things, but ultimately you want to buy back your time, you and so that I'm very interested in, I just didn't realize that the way to get there was to put systems in place. So anyway, with that in mind, how does somebody, let's say, in my shoes, how do you lay out the future so your business is sellable? Because it, I know, like today, right now, there's 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. And I don't know what percentage of the of the country's ownership is in those 10,000 but I would suspect a lot. And I heard, I heard some crazy stat that only, like one out of 10 or one out of 15, businesses actually get sold. The rest just shut down. And you think about this man, 20, 3040, years, however, God, long. You got blessed to work here, it is kind of discouraging to think that you'd put that much time into something and it's not worth anything because you didn't make it worth anything. It may have been worth a lot to you. So I know we're leaving very little time to on a very important topic here, but what are the steps that people need to take so that their business is sellable, so that what they've done. And I'm less personally concerned about legacy. I'm more concerned about like, this is an asset, like, I've created a brand. Why can't I sell it? And why is that out there? Yeah,
Speaker 1 59:54
you mentioned two adjectives earlier. One was messy. I forget the other one. You were talking about a messy. Business, maybe the other one's something like a chaotic business. And a lot of businesses are missing chaotic. You can sell any business, any business. Why? Because if somebody buys it, technically you sell it, just like real estate, right? And the old phrase of, how much is your house worth? Whatever the other person will buy it, pay for it. Well, the same is true for your business. Well, I should demand a four times multiple, yeah, by standards, by Zillow, your house should sell for 800 grand. But if somebody's not going to buy it for that, then it's not worth that same it is same exact principle it is for business is you could have your EBITDA numbers, you look at at industry multiples that you can just find online for the most part, and you can make an assessment based on your net income. Now you got to have recast financials and all this stuff. I want all this stuff. I won't go into all that, but the reality is, the reason a business typically doesn't sell in the custom home building business is not because it's named Mark Williams custom homes. It's because the business is fully dependent on Mark Williams. And so I used to work for a company called Pfizer. What was that? Charles Pfizer? That thing has grown to a multi billion dollar company. That guy's been dead for 100 years. And so I don't care what you name the business, what I care about is that the business can run without Charles Pfizer. And so 2023, I got done speaking at a build Expo in Houston, Texas, in June, June 30, I think it was. I got off the little stage. One big, 100 people, something like that. Got off the stage. Off the stage. I had a bag right over here. My wife was right over there with her bag. Brandon, one of our coaches, was there. He was meeting everybody and saying hello, and following up and doing all that kind of stuff. And I went into the bath, janky, dirty bathroom, got changed, and I met my wife, AL We waved at Brandon, and we went to the airport, and I got to the airport, June 30, I h, I A, H, and got my phone, and I remember turning around my wife. I said, All right, I'm about to turn it all off. I deleted my email, I deleted my slack, and I turned off my cell service. For 31 days, no access to me. Now, my wife had her phone on, so we taught our kids and all that kind of stuff, but no access
Scott Beebe 1:01:59
to me. This is the only challenge. Is this the Morocco trip? No, that
Speaker 1 1:02:03
just happened two weeks ago. This was two years ago, so this is the first big time we did it. This was 31 days, and the only charge to the team was try to grow the business by one client while I'm gone, if you can just grow the business by one client. And so we lost a couple, gained a few, and they grew the business by one client. Fast forward, we left for about two weeks last year. Same thing, no cell service that I just got back last week. At the time of this recording, my wife and I went to Morocco for two weeks, same deal. Deleted everything, no cell service. Did call a couple of our team members just to, like, show them what we were doing, because we're friends, like, hey, my gosh, there's camel. This thing's amazing. And so we're over there doing it. Got back. They had grown the business by four clients in the two weeks that I was gone. And so they have now proven to me, and it's a challenge for them. I got back, and one of our guys was, like, we talked to each other that while you were gone, we were going to grow this thing like they take it as a personal challenge. At that point, Jesse one of our longest term team members. She's been with me almost since the beginning. She said, I want you to leave every year, because it just restokes this ownership that we've got in there that you can do this. And so it's not that you can't sell a business, it's that you can't sell a job. And so if you've got a business, that means everything's outside of your head. It's documented, it's captured. Other people are running it, and they might be running it like you, but they might be running it like them too. That's okay, because they evolve in that but it's running and the mission is being accomplished. We can sell that business, whether you're in custom homes, you're an ice cream shop, you're a hotel, it doesn't matter what you are. The business we cannot sell is where everything's bottled up in Mark Williams head, and we can't get it out why? I don't want to buy you. When I buy your business, I don't want you hanging around for five years and mark you don't want to hang around for five years because guess who your boss is going to be, and you're not going to like him at that point. And so that's not a sellable asset. And if you sell on an earn out, they're going to put sales figures on you for the five years of earn out that you got to be there. That is going to make your life miserable for those next five years, and you're going to wonder, why did I do this in the first place? And so the reality is, if you can just start working, and people ask, how long does it take? Something, on average, if you give yourself about a year and a half to two and a half years, somewhere in that range, can take a business from just running out of Mark's head into a full scale, not a full self managing company like Dan, Dan Sullivan talks about, but it's far more self managing than it was a full self managing company is, I'm not here at all, and that's what we call a legacy business.
Scott Beebe 1:04:33
How often would be so let's just say you have two, two business strategies. One is to help people to me, they kind of go hand in hand, like, Could I really sell the business without working with business on purpose to get all these systems in place? First of all, my question is, how often do people call you and say, You know what, Scott, I'd love to sell my business in three years. How do I get there? And then, how often, let's say, somebody like myself, where I'd say, you know, hey, I want to improve. This, I'm not looking at selling anytime soon, but I want that down the road at some point. What's your percent split on those two questions?
Speaker 1 1:05:11
I'd say probably it's got to be 55th I'm stumped that much. It's got to be a
Scott Beebe 1:05:15
5050, that's pretty high. That's all okay, that's a lot higher than I would have thought it for the for the exit strategy,
Speaker 1 1:05:20
I think more importantly, Mark, the question that people get is they come with an Exit Planning question, and they honestly just don't know what they're asking. That's usually what we get.
Scott Beebe 1:05:28
Because you really, am I wrong? You have to do both. Exit Strategy, really, is the first strategy. Building, yeah, building, building the structures and the teams and the accountability and the vision story and all that stuff. And a lot of us have a lot of it in our head. I think the magic here, and I think a lot of us, I know, like, sometimes my team has rebuild, like guys, we just need to write it all out. And some of their comments are like, why we don't really want to read it? And so it's in so trying to figure out a way to systemize it in a way that everyone else is going to adopt it. And I know, and we don't have time. We're out of time now, but to talk about the culture calendar and some of that stuff anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1 1:06:00
yeah. Well, it usually, what we tell people, if you're looking to exit your business at any time, eight to 10 years is a good runway that gives you plenty of time to systematize the thing. Gives you plenty of time to asset protect. Remember, there's a whole nother layer of asset protection and all that stuff that you kind of got to get into with those advisors that you talked to earlier. And then there's the actual sell and the due diligence. That can usually be one to two years, if you go through it, due diligence, loans, usually six to 12 months based on what you want to do. But we're also seeing a lot of people start to ESOP, or at least consider an ESOP an employee stock ownership plan. And that's a really interesting take. If you start to do we have no time to talk about that, because that's a very elongated discussion. But the reality is, it's a great way to incentivize the people on the team to take chips off the table for the owner, but still get me maintain control of the owner so they can maintain the vision where the company's going. We'll
Scott Beebe 1:06:50
bring you back on maybe third or fourth quarter, because I think two things. One is, I want to talk a lot about email and how that process would look like to actual, actually do that. And then the second would be, we can talk ESOP. So I'll make a note. I'll see you next week at IBS, and by the time this airs, it will have already passed. Thanks again for coming on while everything on the show notes, yeah, not like always. I enjoy our time together. And thanks for tuning in to curious builder podcast. Thanks for tuning in to curious builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor, share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in. You.
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