Today’s Guest on the Winning Teams Podcast is Josh Patrick, from Vermont.  Josh is a serial entrepreneur who spends most of his time thinking and writing about how to create great and sustainable businesses. His mission is to help private business owners create a better life.  His book, “Sustainable” is a fable about creating an economically and personally sustainable business.

At age 7 Josh was selling candy bars to kids on the street corner.  By 26 he was running his own business and managed to grow it into a successful business employing 90 staff.  Josh tells us how he made every business mistake along the way, having absolutely no business training whatsoever.  “Sustainable” is a culmination of lessons he’s learnt from himself and clients he’s coached over the years, so instead of writing a “how to” book, he decided to write it as a parable.

In this interview Josh talks about his lead character, John Aardvark, a man who, from the outside looks like he’s got a very successful business but when you look inside the business you find out that he is burnt out and stuck.  The reason John is burnt out and stuck is because he really has not learned how to do the five things of sustainability that we talk about in the book which are;

have a clear set of values for your business and yourself

the owner becomes operationally irrelevant when they are not in the day to day operation of the business

the business has a recurring revenue stream or sales process

the employees know what they need to do for excellence and customers know what they are going to get on a predictable basis and

the business is making enough money so that the four areas of profit are covered which is lifestyle from the owner, an emergency fund for the business, capital to grow the business and enough cash to fund a retirement plan for the owner of the business because this particular business will not get John to retirement by itself.

It’s a lot of information but this is what is essentially covered in the book and its done through the story of John and his consultant Erin, John’s poorly behaved son, and his MBA graduate daughter, who really doesn’t know anything.  Luckily for John he has a really good operations manager who he has hired from another company and she effectively becomes the saviour.  It’s a fascinating read and there’s lots of lessons in there.

He goes on to talk about values, and specifically clarifying statements in the business. Without clarifying statements no one really knows what you’re talking about.  These clarifying statements become a tool for you to evaluate whether the people you have working in your company are the right fit.  It’s about having the right people in your company and if you focus your business down to the people where you have complimentary values, business becomes easy.  Too often there’s a values mismatch between employers and employees, or customers and companies, and when you have that mismatch you’re working a lot harder then you need to in order to make your company work right.

We talk about the reality of being operationally irrelevant and how that impacts emotionally.  There’s a way to be a control freak but not be involved in every decision.