RLO Training

North America's most influential and leading provider and developer of auto shop management and sales training among the automotive service industry. The best automotive service providers seek-out RLO Training to become even better than they already are with proven increases in employee performance, profitability, and customer satisfaction and loyalty. RLO Training 1400 Talbot Road S., Ste 200 Renton, WA, 98055 | 800.755.0988 | Fax: [phone] . Grab a copy of our current workshop catalogue here: https://jmp.sh/S8NVMxS and be sure to peruse our web site!

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The X Factor – The Characteristics of a Successful Business Owner

We are often asked, “What are some of the characteristics of existing Bottom-Line Impact Group members and what makes them successful business owners?”

There are many factors that we come up with: entrepreneurial, driven, smart, hard-working, detail oriented, and successful, but of course, these can likely describe many business owners out there.

What Makes Our Group Members Different?

What makes our members seek out counsel from others? Meet with their peers in-person and communicate throughout the year? What makes them stay with the Bottom-Line Impact Groups for three, five, ten, fifteen years, or longer? And more importantly, what makes them some of the most successful leaders in the industry?

What is the X Factor?

Hungry: It goes beyond being driven and trying to make as much money as possible. Our most successful members are hungry for knowledge – they seek out ways to improve their lives and businesses by constantly seeking out and consuming educational and networking opportunities. They are voracious readers, listen to podcasts, and attend networking/educational events. We even have members that, when on vacation, will seek out another Group member in that area, just to grab a cup of coffee and learn more about their business.

Creative: These members are always looking for new and better ways to not only serve their customers, but to market their businesses as well. They are constantly looking through our members’ websites, videos, marketing materials, portfolios, etc. We see cutting edge ideas and shop owners who are always willing to try something new. 

Altruistic: An inherited part of the Bottom-Line Impact Group experience is the process of providing feedback and helping other businesses in your Group. It’s not a surprise that many of our most successful members are leaders in their respective Groups, actively providing feedback, taking the time to review financial data, and offering suggestions on ways their group members can improve.

Going further, we see these same members very active in giving back to their communities, whether it is through their church, chamber of commerce, or various charities and organizations.

Client-facing: As our members grow their respective businesses, they are typically very passionate about their client’s satisfaction and that client’s ability to provide a positive reference. That focus on client satisfaction never goes away, and becomes the foundation many of our members will base their success on.

Quality-focused: Going hand-in-hand with the client satisfaction mentioned above, the focus on quality work and overall experience for the client is a very common trait among the most successful Group members. A main aspect of providing quality is a focus on building a solid team of employees, from the managers to the service advisors, to the technicians, and everyone in-between.

Do you have the X-Factor?

Hopefully by giving you a glimpse into the process we use to find Bottom-Line Impact Group members, and the characteristics we see among our members, we have helped you identify areas in your business that can be developed further or focused on in 2019 and beyond. Does anything in particular resonate with you? Please post in the comments!

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Maintaining a Strong Company Culture as You Grow

Company culture — we talk about it frequently in our posts. It’s an important factor in attracting new employees, and in keeping your existing staff happy and productive.

A good company culture encourages growth, and especially in a growth spurt, the culture will change, so it’s important to understand how to keep those changes positive.

It’s become such a part of business-speak, it’s easy to blow past just what a company’s culture really is. It should come out of your mission statement, your values, your systems, and business practices. You may even have crafted a statement about what your culture is. But defining it doesn’t really tell you everything. You have to look at your people to see it in action, and as the business owner, you have to look hard at yourself too.

From the top

As an entrepreneur, your company had a culture even when it was just you at the beginning. As you added one or two employees, it became something else, almost by accident. If that happened, take control now. Define your core values, and create systems and practices that reinforce them, from customer service to internal interactions. Your culture is lived by everyone in the company, and affects how they interact with others — inside the company staff, as well as with customers.

A strong and positive culture depends on every employee understanding your company’s mission and vision. Your employees will look to you to model those values. If it’s not authentic, they’ll know. If you say, for example, that you value a healthy work/life balance, but don’t demonstrate that yourself, you’re sending a bad message. If you — as the boss — do take time off, but are stingy or openly resentful about others doing so, it’s an even worse message.

A healthy company culture is tied to values, but also to goals and objectives. As you grow, you’ll find it helpful to to refine and detail those goals and objectives to each department. Celebrate the wins — not only the big milestones, but smaller ones too.

Growth & change

Clear communication is always a key component of a healthy company and a positive culture, but it gets harder as you grow. You can’t be everywhere at once, and most people are focused on their part of the whole process.

Have weekly meetings for the entire company, with brief updates from each department (even if it’s a one-person department) on their activities and objectives for the time period. Seems like a simple step, but it makes a huge difference. Otherwise, everyone’s operating in a vacuum. The larger you get, the more important the regular communication of progress and goals as a company becomes.

Make sure you explain how all the different activities tie together. If a new marketing initiative is bringing in new customers, let your service advisors and techs know that they’ll be busy soon.

Trim as needed

You may also find that as your company gets bigger and your culture changes, some of your employees aren’t growing along with you. Put in the effort to get them up to speed with the changes. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to fire them for the good of the company. This can be extremely difficult if it’s a longtime employee, but a grumbling old-timer can quickly turn new employees sour, or send them out the door for a better fit at a different company.

If you’re in growth mode, you know how hard it’s been to get there. Creating or resetting a strong culture to live your core values, and demonstrating them to your employees, will help you find — and keep — great people who want to do great work. 

What About You?

What are some ways you and your company have maintained, or changed, company culture as your company grew and became more successful over the years? We would love to hear some success stories out there! Use the comments section below to provide some feedback.

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New Year’s Resolutions and What To Do Next

This week, I want to talk about New Year’s resolutions, and what to do next. First of all, forget about New Year's resolutions. They don't work. Don't waste your time. Setting goals is very different from setting New Year's resolutions, and of course, we talk about how to set goals all the time on this blog. But anyway, Happy New Year and welcome to 2019. I hope you're already off to a fast start.

This year, I encourage you, every 90 days, to sit down and make commitments to yourselves. Ideally, we encourage you to do this in a peer group situation, so that your peers can hold you accountable. Ask yourself: "What am I going to do in the next 90 days?" One of the things that we always recommend you do is something we call a CLEANUP. I think this is a really, amazingly valuable tool. 

For me, this cleanup is usually regarding some kind of a physical mess. I tend to be pretty neat and anal about stuff in my office. But every 90 days, I sit there and go, "What do I really need to clean up?" It isn’t usually anything big, like the relationship with my spouse. It’s more like, "The garage is a mess. Every time I go to get in my car, it just creeps me out, and I have a mental block about it. I just feel bad every time I leave the garage." I'll say, "Okay, I'm going to go clean up the garage." It’s always something practical, or physical like that, it seems like. But it could be anything that you think is blocking you, or holding you back psychologically.

Maybe your office is a mess, and you've got magazines from 10 years ago clogging up the top of your desk. Maybe you've got a personnel problem in your organization, that's been troublesome for some time that you know in your heart you need to clean up, but you’ve kind of let it go. Maybe that's getting you down. Maybe there's a family relationship. Or maybe there is an issue with your marriage. Maybe there's an issue with a sibling, or a son or daughter, that you need to clean up.

Maybe you want to clean yourself up, physically speaking. Nutrition, exercise, rest and relaxation, recharging, getting away from the business, taking more time off. That's a cleanup that I think a lot of people could benefit from.

Succession is always on people's minds, too. Remember, there's two kinds. Most people focus on ownership succession, "Who's going to own the company when I die?" There's a much more important component, and that's management succession, "Who is going to run the company? Not when I die necessarily, but next year, five years from now, 10 years from now?" Because we're all going to be different people. Obviously, we can't be the number one MVP for our entire careers. Eventually, we have to age into retirement. Think about cleaning up your succession plan. 

Train your future leaders. Your business is going to be different five years from now than it is today, and 10 years, and 15. What do they need to know to run a different business in a different future? There again, maybe we have blind spots that we don't see. But if we send them to classes, or training, or put them into a network with other young people, maybe they'll see things that we don't, and they'll be ahead of that curve.

Maybe your cleanup involves coming to grips with the fact that your son, or your daughter, or your niece, or your nephew, doesn't have what it takes, and they're not going to be able to take over the family business. That's a cleanup. If you come to that realization, and in your heart of hearts, you know that that's the case, then the cleanup is, "Okay, what do I do about it? How do I go out and find talented young people that do have what it takes?" That's an important cleanup in your family business.

Give some attention to decisions that you've tabled. You've heard me talk about how often, business owners, especially those in partnerships, decide not to decide. When there are controversial or challenging decisions that they face, they just say, "You know what, we're gonna table it." Look, quit doing that. Decide to decide. Deciding not to decide is not a decision - it's just a waste of everybody's time and emotion. Move on with these things, and clean them up.

Clean up your compensation plans. People are always asking, "How do I incentivize my employees to do more of this and less of that?" Think about what your employees want, how to get them to stick around, etc. Clean up your company culture. 

You can't do more than a handful of things at a time, no matter how good of a multi-tasker you are. As you rise in your business organization, you can do less and less things really well. If you are the CEO, you might really need to focus on one to three things at a time. Maybe that's your clean up, just cleaning up your schedule. Cleaning up the number of things that you're involved in, the number of decisions you have to make, the number of things you delegate. You'll feel better.

Now all that said, just pick one item for each cleanup you do. Pick one item in your life that's troubling you, and bogging you down mentally. Resolve that for the next 90 days, you're going to clean it up. So what's the first thing you do? You schedule it. You schedule time to clean this thing up - whether it's for you, for your house, for you business, etc. For you maybe, it's firing a troublesome employee you should've fired three years ago. Schedule it. Put it on the calendar. Just get it done. You won't believe, psychologically, what a lift you get. It’s really quite amazing. 

Take this cleanup advice. It makes a huge difference in your life. Just knock out these things, and you'll be surprised. We put all this emotional energy into worrying about how nasty our garage is. Then once you get it cleaned up, which takes half a day, you go, "Oh gosh, that wasn't so bad." It's a great mental benefit, and it won't be as bad as you think it is. 

What do you plan to clean up first? We’d love to hear your responses in the comments. 

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Happy New Year! We’ll be back Thursday with more posts. 

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Year-End Review

Another year is ending but before we go, it is time to stop and take advantage of the two opportunities that transition brings.

First, we need to review the past year and evaluate our performance. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to take a little extra time and review the past decade. That will be challenging if you are anything like me and can hardly remember what you did last hour let alone over the course of the last 10 years. But looking back gives us so much perspective from which we can then look forward. We can learn much from that exercise. It can be a significant help in putting together a course of change, an opportunity to tweak things just a bit, or a validation that we should continue doing what we did this year into next year.

Here are some potential questions to ask:

What big things happened? Did they happen because you made a knowing, concerted effort to make them happen? Or did they just happen?

What good things happened?

What bad things happened?

What was your biggest triumph?

What was the smartest decision you made?

What one word best sums up and describes your experience?

What was the greatest lesson you learned?

What was the most powerful service you performed?

What is your biggest piece of unfinished business?

What are you most happy about completing?

Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life?

What was the biggest risk you took?

What was the biggest surprise?

What important relationship improved the most?

What else do you need to do or say to be complete?

What lessons did you learn from these things?

Our second opportunity is to create a course for the new year. We get a fresh start, a chance to begin all over again. It is a chance to make a difference in the direction we’re headed in, and ultimately our success.

Consider these questions about the coming year:

Do you want to have more time?

Do you want to go places? With whom? In what fashion?

Do you want to read more?

Do you want to learn new skills?

Do you want to spend more time with certain people?

Do you want to run a race? Climb a mountain? Learn a new language?

What kind of person do you want to be?

Who do you want to meet?

How much money do you want to be able to give away?

What would you like to be your biggest triumph?

What advice would you like to give yourself?

What is the major effort you are planning to make in order to improve your financial results?

What would you be most happy about completing?

What major indulgence are you willing to experience?

What would you most like to change about yourself?

What are you looking forward to learning?

What do you think your biggest risk will be?

What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore?

What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that?

Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving?

What one word would you like to have as your theme?

The key is to stop long enough to do some meaningful reflection and review of how the year really was in 2018. Did you achieve your goals? Did you accomplish all you had intended? If not, what were the blockers? Put down on paper your evaluation – you won’t remember it if you don’t. And put down on paper your plan for next year. Share it with your spouse, your employees, and others that need to be part of holding you accountable. It likely won’t be accomplished if you don’t share it broadly for accountability.

One of the most valuable things we can get from the past is lessons we learn, often the hard way. But if we don’t record them we often have to learn them over and over and there is no sense in that. So create a place to store those year-end evaluations and reflections, and review the learnings often. If you had a business plan for the year – that is the place to start. Which things were you successful with and which came up a bit short. That is important as you chart the course for the new year. If you had a leadership or life plan, you need to do the same with those. Make sure you evaluate how you did in comparison to the goals you set and write what you learned. Have the blockers been removed yet, or do you need to find a way around them? There is so much you can learn by just stopping and evaluating.

And ultimately, the question is how did last year impact my legacy plan? Was I intentional in what I did? Did I make any progress toward what I want to leave behind? Our legacy will happen whether we plan it and work towards that plan or not. The question really is – do you want to control what your legacy looks like or are you content to just let it happen and not care about the result? We need to do a much better job of being intentional about legacy, and what we leave behind for those that will come after us.

You have an opportunity to chart a new year ahead. But before you do, make sure you stop and learn all you can from the past. We should never dwell on where we have been. But we certainly should not ignore the value of what we can learn from the past either. Much of what happens is based on how well you prepare and plan. Then it comes down to EXECUTION! I wish you success in 2019!

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Merry Christmas everyone! We’re closed through the 26th, but we’ll be back on Thursday with more posts!

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When is Enough Enough?

Today I'm going to talk about a pressing question that some of our more successful clients have, and that question is simple: When is enough enough? 

Basically, these people started out with small shops, and they were motivated, and innovative, and all these things. Today, they've really succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. If their 60-year-old selves could talk to their 30-year-old selves, the 30-year-old would never believe the kind of success the 60-year-olds have achieved.

But now, they have this existential question: "When is enough enough? Is my business big enough? Is it successful enough? Do I personally have enough wealth as an entrepreneur? When is enough enough?" They look around, and they compare themselves to their friendly competitors. They compare themselves to other people in their communities that also own businesses, and they see they have it pretty good.

Of course, there are many business owners out there that don’t take vacations because it seems like when they’re out of the office, nothing gets done. So they just can’t get away from their business. Most business owners probably dream of reaching a point where they have more freedom from the business, and luckily, I think many of our clients have reached that point. But these clients who see that they have it pretty good, they tend to wonder - when is enough enough? When is it enough wealth? What is enough company success? What is enough of an impact in the community? Etc.

After talking through it with a bunch of entrepreneurs, I have the answer. So when is enough enough? The answer is ‘Never.’ It's never enough. It's not a greed thing, it's not a raw ambition thing, it's because the people that are really successful in their field are better operators. That's what it comes down to. They're better operators of their businesses than the competition. They're either more efficient, or they're better at attracting talent, or they're more innovative, or something, but some combination of factors makes them better operators.

At this point in their lives, they're not trying to grow because of greed, or ambition, or a desire to have a bigger footprint, or a desire to be bigger than the competition, or anything like that. They just want to be improving at all times. They have a thirst for excellence. When they see something wrong in their business, they want to fix it. When they see an opportunity, they want to take advantage of it. It's just this entrepreneurial flame that never extinguishes in the hearts and souls of these entrepreneurs.

So, when is enough enough? Never. These people are never satisfied with the status quo, and really, we should bless them and thank them, because they provide such a wonderful example to the rest of us. These people are humble, they're grateful, they're thankful, they really are just some of the greatest, most caring and generous and wonderful people you could imagine. But somewhere inside them, they have a thirst for knowledge. They have a thirst for innovation. They have a thirst for improvement.

Just because they're profitable, it doesn’t mean they sit still. They want their employees to be happy, they want morale to be terrific, they want great customer satisfaction, and they want everything in the business to be perfect. They're demanding of themselves and others, of course, but they're never satisfied, and that's the secret to being a successful entrepreneur over long periods of time.

So when is enough enough? Never.

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Why Does Consulting Work?

This week I want to talk about why consulting works. Consulting isn't a perfect business. It doesn't work every time, and goodness knows, nobody knows better than we do that consultants have a very poor reputation. But applied correctly and done right, consulting does allow a lot of businesses to really make improvements. So, why is that? And I think I have a really simple answer.

Think about it this way. Say I’ve put on some weight. I’m doing the same amount of exercise and eating the same, already going to the gym and trying to take care of myself, but the weight is piling up and I don’t really have an answer for that. So I go to a personal trainer, they whip me into shape and it doesn't take very long at all. Now, could I have done these kinds of workouts with that level of intensity on my own? Yeah. I could have, but I didn't. Because I needed a coach to really drive me to a new level of performance. And, this is key, I was paying them, so I never missed a workout. I was paying them, so I showed up on time and I did what they said, and they coached me on nutrition and all this other stuff, so it worked. And if you think on it, personal trainers are consultants.

We’ve had coaching clients tell us that we didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know. But, they said, the difference is, I was paying you for it and I wanted to get value for my money, so I took your recommendations. Now, they may not need us any more than I need the personal trainer, but because they were paying us money, they sat up and took notice, and implemented the recommendations that we had made. People want value for their money, and that's why consulting works. That's why coaching works. That's why hiring a personal trainer works. Money talks.

So, when somebody in their company says things need to change, we need to do this, or we need to do that, you can gauge their seriousness and their intentionality based on if they're willing to invest time and money in training, IT and systems, succession planning, strategic planning, etc. If they are not willing to invest time and money, they're not serious about the change. And, if you are willing to invest time and money, having a coach can drive you to a higher level of performance than you could have achieved on your own. That's why consulting works. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this! 

Interested in learning more about our coaching program? Call RLO Training today at 800-755-0988. 

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5 Keys to Strategic Planning for Your Business

It’s that time of year again — when we look back to see what worked and what didn’t for your business, the good decisions made, and others you’d change. Did this year bring the success you’ve been building toward, or was it a challenging year that fell short of your goals?  

But it’s also time to look forward. To figure out where you’re headed, and move you closer to your long-term goals. For this, we look to strategic planning.

Strategic planning is the process organizations use to clarify the long-term direction of their companies, define a company’s mission and vision, set priorities, align the team, allocate resources, and translate those goals for the future into projects and budgets that can are implemented in the short term. It defines the work in the coming year that will get your organization to your destination in the years to come.

These are the five keys to good strategic planning to do now.

1: Involve the Whole Team

Schedule your strategic planning event at a time when your whole team can attend. Involving the whole team improves the process by having more input, broader discussions, and a better understanding of the process when it’s time for implementation.  

2: The Right Setting

Get out of your office. Hold the meeting off-site, at a location that’s comfortable and, if possible, inspirational. Participants need to be able to focus; get away from distractions but also be in a place that inspires creative thought. You don’t have to go far, but you do want to get out of your own space.

3: Set Your Destination

You can’t get to your destination if you don’t have a map. Start by defining where the company is going. Pick a point in the future (three or five years) and describe in detail your vision for the company:

Your revenue goals

The type of projects you’ll be doing

What your role as the owner will be

How the company structure will change to meet the revenue goals

Be sure to get good input from everyone. The clearer you can paint that picture, the better the entire process will go.

4: The Current State: SWOT & KPI

Describe in detail where the business is now. Start with a SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Look at this at both the company and department level. Talk about processes and areas for improvement. Make that conversation about processes, not people. Then, define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you’ll all use to measure operational improvement and the distance to your goals.

5: Budget and Plan for the Coming Year

Finally, the goal of this meeting is to leave the process with an operating plan and a budget for the coming year. Set priorities for the team, detailing what role each member will play in the company’s success and how performance will be measured. Make a commitment to keep the team updated regularly throughout the year and avoid chasing new ideas and new projects that take the team away from the core mission.  

Follow these five steps to set your course, make strategic decisions, identify priorities, define roles, establish a budget, and build morale. If you do this well, you might just be setting the stage for the coming year to be the year you have been waiting for.

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Find Email Annoying? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t

A lot of business owners I speak with say they’re annoyed by email, and hesitate to send it to their prospects or clients so they don’t get annoyed too.

I’m pushing back on this.

Email is only annoying when it’s not relevant (helpful, entertaining, interesting). I’d argue that all marketing is that way — not just email!

So, if you’re not doing email because it bugs you, or if you are sending email but doubt its effectiveness, read on! 

Email is Direct and Personal

Email is still one of the best ways to get directly in front of your audience. Everyone checks their email, and nearly 25% of people open emails within an hour of receiving them.

It’s also extremely personal. You can personalize your subject line, your introduction, and you can even customize other pieces of information you might already know about your prospect such as last name, phone number, or even the type of remodeling project they are interested in.

You’re Not Annoying if You’re Helpful

I don’t know about you, but depending on who sends them, there are some emails I open every single time and read all the way through. But there are some that I delete right away. Why?

Those email senders have trained me to do so. If an email has content I like, I’ll read it all. I’ll click every link. I’ll spend time with it. I’ll enjoy it.

If the email has content that’s irrelevant to me — my life or my work — I delete it. I may not even take the time to unsubscribe, just delete it and move on with my day.

Every email you send is training your audience to open your next email or to delete your next email. You’re training them how to respond.

So I encourage you to think about the really good emails you get. Let’s send more email like that!

Send Lots of Email

If you’re sending great email, you can’t send enough of it. Each email that genuinely gets opened and read is another touch point for your brand. And if your content is really great, your audience will love it. They’ll also come to know, like, and trust you — which is essential in marketing and sales.

At our company, we send one email every week or so. Not all of it resonates with everyone, but we strive to make each email helpful, educational, or entertaining. I know we’re on the right track when I get a call from someone who says they’ve been getting our emails for a while and they finally decided to reach out.

The same will happen for you if you’re consistent, and you add value.

How to Get Started

“But… I don’t know what to write about!”

The easiest way to get started is to answer questions. People that have never been into your shop before (even people who have), have lots of questions.  LOTS!

How much will this cost? (you can give rough ranges of certain services)

How do I keep my car running great between services? (give tips and tutorials)

How often should I come in for service?

Coupons are also great

The list goes on and on. And if someone is trying to be a good car owner, and you’re answering their questions, then you’re building trust. This is how you’ll beat a lot of your competitors. They may not even contact your competitors because you’ve been helping them every step of the way.

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Why Doesn’t Every Business Leader Have an Administrative Assistant?

I have a question for you this week: Why doesn't every business leader have a terrific administrative assistant? I honestly don’t understand this. We coordinate over 20 peer group meetings a year, and it’s amazing how difficult it often is in order to prepare ourselves and the group for their upcoming meetings. We get late paperwork, incomplete stuff, etc. Or even some people that don't send us things at all, without constant reminders.

We have people calling it the last minute and say, what airport, what city are we going to be in, what's the hotel accommodation? There’s a lot of disorganization. I mean, our clients are super successful and yet they're still booking their own airfare. They're still booking their own hotels. They're still collating their basic financial information that anybody could collate for them.

On the other hand, we can always tell which of our clients have administrative assistants. Everything that comes from them is always super organized. It's correct the first time we get it. There are no mistakes. There's no omission of information. It's all there. Administrative assistants handle all those details for the shop owners. Things are quick and complete, and having everything done efficiently takes all of the worry and anxiety and additional tasks off those shop owners’ plates. It frees up their time to do things that are going to benefit the business.

So why don't all successful business leaders have an administrative assistant? I think there are several answers:

The first thing is thrift. Most business leaders tend to be thrifty to the point of being skinflints, it seems. They just can’t fathom the extravagance of a $35k or $40k per year employee on the payroll

Many family business leaders overestimate their ability to manage details. Some of the most disorganized, harebrained people I've ever seen, if you say, "You know, you really need help with your organization," their first response is "What? I'm organized." I suppose it probably takes an organized person to spot a disorganized person. But then again, as an administrative professional myself, I'm pretty organized, and when I see disorganization it kind of makes my head spin. So, I think people really overestimate their ability to handle all the details and tasks that they have to deal with in the course of a day.

And then the third reason I think most people don't have administrative assistants is because they’ve never had one in the past. It’s the old “we’ve always done it this way” answer. Dad never had one. Granddad never had one. So why does this generation need the extravagance of administrative assistants?

So here's a challenge for you: Why not try it? Create a job description for an administrative assistant. Suppose you hired an administrative assistant for three months or six months. What's the real cost of trying this experiment? Let's say the person cost you $3,000 a month, even $4,000 a month. Well, for three months, in 90 days you're going to know whether it works or not. Guess what? You just blew $9,000 if it's a bad experiment, maybe $12,000, and a little of your time.

Because look - most of you have wasted a whole lot more money than that on projects before. So, you know, it's really not that great of a risk for you. If you can free up your mental time and energy and delegate all these details about managing your day to day life, think about how much time you would free up for the benefit of your business, and just as importantly, for the benefit of your family. Maybe you could get home for dinner. That's not so bad.

So, try the administrative assistant experiment. Let me know how it turns out. I'll be looking forward to hearing your comments.

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How To Immediately Become A Better Leader

Here’s a quick tip to address how to immediately become a better leader:

Something that we notice about business leaders compared to non-business leaders is that business leaders talk all the time. But if you want to be a better leader immediately, and you want to get more results out of your people and out of your organization, you have to shut up and listen sometimes. 

Listen to the people who work with and for you. Go around to everybody in your shop - management, service advisors, sales, parts, techs, etc - it doesn’t matter what position they are. Start asking them questions and listening to them. Because guess what? The people that are actually doing all the jobs at your shop will have all kinds of great ideas for making improvements.

When you ask questions and listen to the other people in your shop, each of those people will actually have the power to make little things happen. And those little things quickly add up into big things. 

Implement their ideas, utilize their different points of view. They are seeing things that you’ve probably never noticed, and by using their perspective, you can really turn your business around and make huge improvements. 

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How To Improve Morale In Your Business

In your typical small business model, the owners or senior executives make all the decisions, and the second tier of key employees and everyone else just goes along with it like good boys and girls. But this is a perverse way of thinking, because although that top tier is making all the decisions, it’s everyone else that has to live with them. Keeping your employees down like that is a great way to have a low morale in your business. 

The best way to improve morale in your business is to have everybody in the business - management, key employees, etc., providing feedback from the very outset, so you can really shape win-win solutions. You can even extend that to every member of your organization - reach out by having a company-wide meeting, or a suggestions box, or something like that, so that you can hear all the ideas and points of view. 

The top-down, old-fashioned command and control really just doesn't work. You’ll find that morale will go up dramatically in your business once you ask the people that actually work there what they think, and what they care about, and how they would change things. Ask them what would they do to help improve this business and the way you do things, and how you take care of your customers.

One of the things that employees really want is an open and trusting culture. So if a couple senior executives or just the sole business owners are making all the decisions, what does that tell your employees about how much you really trust them? Aren't you saying in that instance, is they're just pawns to move around the chess board, and they exist at your pleasure, and they do what you say and nothing else? What if you open it up? And what if you get ideas and creativity bubbling up from the bottom of your organization? If two heads is better than one, then aren't 200 heads even better?

I'm not saying they have to make every decision on your behalf, and I'm certainly not saying that you abdicate your stewardship responsibility for your business. What I am saying, though, is open it up, get ideas from the bottom. Morale will go up in your organization and you'd be surprised how many terrific ideas your people are waiting to put on your doorstep.

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If Everyone Is Responsible, No One Is

Often, when you have multiple people working together, some important things can wind up being overlooked or forgotten. This happens a lot in small businesses, because people will say that it's everybody's responsibility to do marketing and business development, or it's everybody's responsibility to be looking after safety, or it's everybody's responsibility to make sure we're managing our finances. But that thought process is so wrong.

It’s great to have team spirit, but look - somebody specific in your organization needs to be responsible for these important things, like safety, business development, finances, whatever it happens to be. If someone is not specifically accountable and responsible for those activities in your business, nobody is. 

Important facets of your business like these should be assigned to an individual person. It’s great to share the responsibilities - assigning one person to safety, one person to finances, etc. But each area should have one person in charge, so that that person can ensure that what needs to be accomplished is actually being accomplished. That way, nobody thinks that someone else is taking care it, and nothing gets overlooked.

My point is this. People crave clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability, and if you as the leaders of your business are not providing that structure and clarity in your organization, and you're just expecting everybody to do what it takes and get it done, you're missing things. Somebody has to be responsible, and if everybody's responsible, no one is.

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Happy Thanksgiving! We’ll be back on Monday with another post. 

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Your Top Problem Isn’t What, It Is “Who”

Many of our clients think they have a super innate gift for hiring, and they don't. Worse, they don't have a process for hiring. They treat recruiting and hiring as a necessary evil. But for most of you, you're at a stage in your business careers now where it's not about managing tasks anymore. It's not about managing what to do, it's managing who. Most of you have reached an inflection point in your companies where it's all about the people. 

Of course, I’m sure none of you got into business because you said, "Hey, I can't wait to go manage people." You always say, "Gosh, if I don't have to manage people, my life would be perfect." But that's not reality, is it? You have to have a system for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding your people and you have to devote more and more of your executive time to the care and feeding of those people.

To help you with this, we recommend a book called "Who" by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It has a terrific blueprint for how to hire. It has scripted questions that you shouldn't even change a comma or a syllable or anything on; you should use this script exclusively. It talks about the importance of getting the right culture, the right fit for the people on your team. It talks about the mistake that people make of getting really good technicians on the team that don't fit very well with the culture and some of the ramifications thereof. It talks about how to do proper telephone interviews as a screening tool. It talks about how to ask a simple, open-ended question when you kind of get stuck and your candidate is talking too much. ("Tell me more about ...") 

It talks about how to actually get references from your candidates that are meaningful, which I think is a terrific thing. Too often, I find references to be useless, because nobody ever gives any legitimate, solid, doable, actionable information, so why waste the time calling the references. But this book has terrific methodology for how to do it right.

Make your people your top priority. In this book, it says that after a certain point in the life of your business, 50% of the CEO's time ought to be devoted to people. People throughout your business - getting new people, the right people, the culturally fit people, and getting them on your team. I agree a thousand percent that should be the case. 

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Are Small Business Leaders Successful Because They Are Nice, or Nice Because They Are Successful?

This week I want to address a chicken and egg type question - are small business leaders so nice because they're super successful, or are they super successful because they're so nice? 

In my experience, it always seems to happen this way - small business owners will see somebody in need, and they leap to offer assistance. They are extremely kind and generous.

If you look at the statistics for charitable giving, you’ll see the same thing. Small business leaders are always generous with their time and their treasure. This is true in churches, charitable organizations, and other local organizations, etc. 

And yet, there's this stereotype out there that business owners are just rampaging mad men, slave drivers who demand the most from their employees and all this other stuff, and though I'm sure there are people out there like that, it has not been my experience. The business owners we deal with just seem to be among the very kindest people you can imagine.

So, our theory is this. Our theory is that they're not nice because they've been so successful in their careers, these are really genuinely good hearted nice people. And that's been a launching pad for their careers. In a small business, I really don't think that you can get ahead if you're one of these rampaging bullying, yelling, screaming, and such types of people. I think it really does take somebody with a big heart to attract the right kind of people to them, both in their employees and their lifetime customers.

And I think that's what our people have. So my theory is they're not nice because they're successful, they're successful because they're super nice people. I'd love to hear your own theories about that. Let me know in the comments if this has been your experience as well, and if you have any specific stories about a time when a small business owner gave you a hand, please share them here, too!