My Business On Purpose

Greenlights

Well, happy new year friends! I hope you were able to relax over the holiday season and rest with those you hold dearest. I hope it was a great time of reflection on the past year and a time of eager anticipation for the year to come.

My holiday was spent wrestling with my kids, trying to run the sugar out of them at every turn, and being genuinely thankful for everything my life consists of. It’s far from perfect, but I’ve realized that a heart of gratitude is where I want to be no matter what life throws at me.

I spent a good bit of time over the break reading and reflecting. One of the best books I’ve gotten to absorb is called Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. If you haven’t picked it up yet, do yourself a favor and listen on audible. McConaughey reads it himself and adds so many nuances that you cannot get in the printed text. He’s an artist in every sense of the word. You will be shocked, you will laugh, you might cry. But you will also be left in awe at a man who has kept a journal for the past 40 years...from someone who has WRITTEN his life down and has taken the time to look back on his successes, his failures and the lessons learned along the way. It’s spectacular!

Now, a small/large disclaimer. This book is not for kids, it’s full of foul language and quite a few adult situations...please know that in advance and if that is not your thing, this may not be the read for you. But, if you can push through some of that, I was amazed at some of the things shared and left to process through what I’ve heard in a way that makes me a better man.

One of the most powerful vignettes he shared was from one of his first movies. He had spent years grinding and living off his talent. Years just winging it and letting his “true self” shine through. Until one day he showed up to set and 5 minutes before they called action, he looked at the script. Not one, not two, not 3, but 4 pages straight of a monologue...IN SPANISH...was sitting before him. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. He was exposed.

I was listening to this in my truck as I drove up to a family farm and I was moved by something he said. It was so powerful I played it again. As it rang in my ears I pulled the truck over to the side of the back country road and played it a third time so I could write it down. I didn’t want to miss it. Here’s what he said after his embarrassment. 

“We have to prepare to have freedom...we have to do the work to then do the job. We have to prepare for the job so we can be free to do the work!” 

That’s it! I can’t put it any better myself.

Preparation...for whatever 2021 throws at us. It won’t just happen. There is no shortcut to success, it’s brick by brick.

So what does that look like for you today? Is it taking the time to write down goals? Is it building a weekly schedule so you can focus on what matters? Is it recording a process or two and building systems that work? Maybe it’s all of the above and you need to set a time to just begin working? 

All I know is EXACTLY what McConaughey said…”We have to prepare to have freedom!” The freedom we’re looking for is just on the other side of the preparation and the work. Don’t miss that and also don’t be intimidated by that. If I or BOP can help you with that, please reach out. 

2021 is going to be a great year. There will be many twists, turns and unexpected surprises along the way. I don’t know about you, but nothing monumental happened at midnight on New Years Eve...much of life is the same.

But, if we can focus on what we can control…”Preparing for the job so you’re free to do the work,” then whatever is thrown at us this year we will take it in stride.

Know this year that we are for you and will do whatever we can do to help you succeed. As always, check out our website at mybusinessonpurpose.com, we’re offering one month free to our member site. There’s zero excuse to not give it a shot. Head over to mybusinessonpurpose.com/thomas28 if you want to. Subscribe to our podcast at the business on purpose podcast and check out our youtube channel for TONS of new content this year. 

Let’s get it!

Have a great week.

Your Preparation informs your performance…

How prepared are you for the work ahead? Well... let’s find out. Hey, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose.

I was sitting in a men’s breakfast this morning listening to a good friend of mine share about his experience serving in the Marines. He’s been through things I’ve never dreamed of and we’re blessed to have men like him defending and serving our country. His name is Joe McNamara and he has some amazing stuff on leadership, so make sure you check him out. 

He said 4 or 5 things that stuck with me...things like “It’s called Leadership, not Likership.” This thought of our job is to lead our teams, not necessarily be liked by them. He said, “Attitude is a weapon.” Your mindset is a weapon that you can use to combat any situation. 

But the one that stuck out most to me was this…” There’s no such thing as rising to the challenge.” There is no such thing as rising to the challenge. Your performance is always an indicator of how well you prepared.

I thought about how true that is. I have seen countless talented people just wing it... expecting to “rise to the challenge,” and time after time their performance is less than it should be. 

I was reading an article recently about a basketball player that has been playing some really good ball recently. His coach was bragging on him saying,  “You guys have just now seen what we’ve been watching for months.” The reporter asked him to go a bit deeper and the coach elaborated. “He won’t leave the gym until he’s made 300 3 pointers after practice.”

That’s where his success is rooted. He doesn’t just wait until the game to try to show up. No, he knows that he will fall well below his performance ceiling if he does that. So, he spends hour after hour, with no fans watching, so that he knows he’s prepared when his moment arrives.

My friend speaking this morning, was talking about how proud of his men he was. As some really, REALLY intense stuff starts happening, they remained calm and performed, BECAUSE THEY WERE PREPARED! Because day after day, they trained in the morning, trained in the evening, tried it in light, in the dark when they were rested, when they were exhausted. Until they could perform at any point.

And when the moment was upon them and it really mattered, they were ready for it!

How prepared is your team? Is your sales process documented in a way that frees your sales guys up to perfect it and REALLY be prepared to capitalize. Is your Admin team ready to take on the constant barrage of phone calls with customer complaints that they get every day? Or do you just leave them along, hoping/praying that no one calls and complains about...Is your team trained to be able to handle the business without you if something were to happen to you? Trust me... it’s happened to normal people just like you.

My purpose in saying these things...is all of this preparation happens when you do it ON PURPOSE! It’s why the name of our business is My Business on Purpose. Because we know that to be successful it doesn’t just happen in crunch time. No, it’s day after day of doing things the right way, so you’re ready to capitalize on opportunities.

I hope that makes sense. And I hope you go connect with Joe McNamara. I really look up to him and the way he’s served all of us and the thoughts he has to share on leadership.

Have a great rest of your week!

Stop Making Resolutions And Start Making Habits

For some it’s a book, for others it’s a cigarette, and for others, it’s a phone call.  Each evening throughout the world a sequence of nighttime habits are taking place in every home, apartment, flat, and dorm in the world.

For me the routine is to enjoy something sweet; a cookie, a small piece of pie, a handful of chocolate chips.  Not just a quick bite, but instead a long sit down alongside an ice cold glass of milk.  That’s my routine. 

At the beginning of each new year, I consider a resolution to do something different each evening moving forward, maybe some fruit or a cup of hot tea.  But I never do.  

Why do I do that?  Why do I do the same thing every night?

In fact, why do I repeat most things most days over and over again?  The good things and the bad things?  

It’s like they are on repeat.

What is going on?

In his powerful book The Power Of Habits, Charles Duhigg lays out a three-step “loop” that we all experience that creates the habits we repeat.

After I share this three-step loop from Duhigg, I’m then going to challenge you to ditch resolutions which have a history of not lasting, and instead replace a resolution with a habit.

What habit?

Email.

There.  I said it.  

Email.

A McKinsey analysis found the average worker spends 28% of their workweek “reading and answering e-mail.”

I can hear many of you right now, “but you don’t understand...my job revolves around email.”  I hear you loud and clear.  

Let’s OWN your email and do something different.  

If there is no plan, or habit, email can come to a place where it dominates your day, dominates your mind, and dominates your ultimate agenda, and keeps you from transforming your business on to the purpose that you intended in the first place.

I heard someone say once, “email is someone else’s agenda for your day!”

What a horrible truth.

Let’s not just resolve to change it in our minds, but let’s actually change it in our habits.

Duhigg shares a powerful three-step loop that will help us.

The three steps: cue, routine, reward

The cue is the thing that provokes or sets off the actual habit...it’s what launches you into the very habit you do.

The routine is the actual behavior that you are looking to change.  The routine is eating the chocolate before bed, drinking three cups of coffee before 7 am, or checking email obsessively throughout the day.

The reward is the feeling, emotion, or response you receive as you complete the routine.  It’s that immediate gratification or satisfaction you feel, see, touch, or experience.

Duhigg makes the case that simply by replacing just one part of the three-step loop, you can transform your habits.

It is difficult, and in some cases impossible for us to control the cue.  The cue might be a time of day, or something that happens naturally in our course of life (i.e. bedtime).  You cannot change that...you will always have a bedtime.

The reward is tied to your psychology and physiology which of course can shift over time, but again, much harder to master.

Duhigg suggests that replacing the routine, the second of the three-step loop, will provide the key to changing your habits.

Let’s apply this to our email challenge.

With email, the cue may be “arriving to work” or “scrolling my phone” or “don’t know what task to do next”.

In fact, think through your last few days at work and answer this cue question, “why and when do you check your email?”

Is there any rhyme or reason?  

Some habits are very methodical like eating sweets before bedtime but not as much throughout a normal day.  Some habits are erratic like scrolling phones.  

Simply being aware of what drives you to email, or coming to grips with the reality that maybe it is unrestrained, will be an important step in you owning email rather than email owning you.

Now that you know the cue, let’s now change up the routine.

For most, the cue that launches you into email is erratic, not scheduled.  You keep it that way under the false truth of “but I have to be on email all day because that is how people communicate with me”. 

No problem!  Let people continue to communicate with you that way, but YOU change the routine.

Instead of being on email throughout the day on other people’s schedule, YOU SET THE SCHEDULE.

“Can I do this?”

YES!!!

YOU can set your own routine for email (or anything else for that matter).

For many business owners and key leaders we have seen a three-times-per-day routine work really well.  They read and respond to email for 30 minutes in the morning, 60 minutes mid-day, and 30 minutes at the end of day.  It is still around 20-25% of a typical workday, but it is blocked in focused time so you are not distracted from the real work.

For other business owners and key leaders, we have seen an every-other-hour-for-30-minutes strategy work.

For both of these strategies make sure to literally set a timer on your phone.  This is part of making a new routine which will eventually make a new habit.

From now on, align your cues to a new routine, and you will receive an even better reward...the result of a new habit!

How To Write An Annual Letter Like Jeff Bezos

Sometimes we can get lost in the repetition of the process, a good thing, to the neglect of the humanity that can be found in our words. Your team wants to know what you are thinking.  They want to know your ideas, your plans, your real-time thoughts, and your reflections; they want to know what you are seeing.

One of the most powerful, durable, and recordable ways to share your human thoughts as a leader is to write them out, personally addressed to your team.

Of course, you have doubt.  Poet Sylvia Path helps us confront our doubt saying, “... By the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it... The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

When you write a letter to your company you have immediately created a recorded history.  When your business is two, or ten, or forty years off into the future, those future team members and leaders will be installed with the founders' or previous owners' principles, ideas, innovations, and foundations.

When you do not write a letter to your company, it gets lost to time.

We are encouraging you and challenging you to write a letter to each member of your business every year and personally mail it to their home with their name on the top.

To help you, we are going to walk you through a simple template you can use to write your powerful annual letter.

The first exposure I had to a powerful annual letter is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in his 1997 Amazon Shareholder letter.  I used it in my first ever coaching session with a client as we built out their Vision Story.  

In his letter, Bezos works through some key elements that we can put into a simple template to help you think through your powerful letter.

First, Bezos begins his letter with key milestones that Amazon has achieved throughout the year.  It is short and sweet and very powerful coming right out of the gate.  No fluff, dive right in.  You may say something like…

Dear Hannah,

We saw ACME, Co. grow beyond our projections by about 5% and YOU were a huge part of that.  Our goal is to move beyond where we are at now and for next year become the second largest XYZ company in our county...

Next, Bezos then goes on to discuss multiple opportunities that are in front of them.  Even if you are staring down the barrel of a recession, the opportunity is in front of you.  What is it?  What could your business do even if you don’t know the “how” quite yet?  Writing this letter forces you to see an opportunity and then take the risk of sharing that opportunity.

Use wisdom, use discretion, and be bold.  You can do all three together.

Third, Bezos begins sharing true stories that are aligned with their unique core values of “long term” and “obsess over customers”.  With each of those stories, he is also diligent to layout bullet points of what the impact will be to Amazon from those stories, both the fun parts and the challenging parts. 

For instance, an impact of “long term” is “When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.”

He’s honest and discrete.  Bezos shares what he can share, but I’m sure doesn’t share everything.  

Also, remember that Amazon is a publicly-traded company so they will tend to be more open about their financial numbers due to their public transparency.  You may wish to not share those.  

With whatever you write, just ask yourself, “how will this impact particular team members when they read it.”

The overall goal is to celebrate, encourage, inspire, motivate, show appropriate vulnerability, and vision cast through your annual letter.  Use your discretion with how much information to share.

Next, Bezos shares some key metrics that make sense to the Amazon team.  What will make sense to your team?  Is it the number of increased contracts signed this year compared to last?  Is it the user ratings that have increased this year over last?  Your performance rating?  Safety metrics?  

What are those key metrics that matter to your team?  This may be a great place to share them.

Fifth, Bezos devotes an entire section just to the Amazon team...to celebrating them.  He is aspirational saying things like, “The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team.”  Bezos is also sober mentioning, “It’s not easy to work here...but we’re building something important.”

Near the end of the letter, Bezos then goes into full on vision casting and goal setting mode.  It is a sentence by sentence power punch to the soul of each team member as if to say, “I so value you that I’m going to stretch our horizon, so you will always have a place to RUN by doing your highest and best work.”

Where are you headed?  What are the broad steps that it will take for you to get there?  Remember the words to the Jewish Prophet Habakkuk, “write the vision down so those who read it may run!”  

Finally, Bezos signs off with a two-sentence summary.  This would be a great place to reinforce your mission statement saying something like, “This was a powerful year to (insert mission statement), and I am beyond grateful for you.  Thank you for your work, your commitment, and for your devotion to (insert a core value here).”

To summarize, here are the eight elements that we have pulled from Jeff Bezos’ 1997 shareholder letter that will help you write a simple, powerful, and meaningful letter to your team.

Personal

Write their name at the top of the letter and mail it to their home

Celebrate Milestones

Key milestones that the business team has achieved throughout the year

Opportunities Ahead

There are always opportunities...find them and share them

Value-Based Stories & Their Realities

True stories and a simple layout of the impact of those stories

Key Metrics

What are those key metrics that matter to your team?  Highlight them.

Celebrate The Team

Highlighting all of the “insider” things that it means to be a team member.  “We say all of the time…”

Vision-Cast and Goal-Set

Broad vision of the future of the business along with a few broad steps of what it will take to get there. 

Sincere Summary

A simple, thoughtful summary of the letter and a shot of motivation to press on!

That’s it.  Proof your letter, send it to a team member along with a trusted advisor for review, read over it one or two more times, and then personal address each one and send it to their homes. 

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters.  Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

How To Help Employees And Yourself With Money Problems

Through our work with business owners, we have seen some who have had access to significant money.  Not all, but some.

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with a business owner who has what some would consider to be “life-changing” money...meaning, he wouldn’t have to work anymore if he didn’t want to, and he still has at least half of his life left to live statistically.

He has houses, boats, cars, toys, investments, commercial real estate, and access to a lot of other people who have the same.

We talk frequently, but this one particular conversation he ended with, “it’s ain’t what everybody thinks it is”.

When money becomes THE thing instead of just A thing, then EVERYthing changes.

Lynne Twist wrote a great book entitled The Soul Of Money.  In her book, she writes of money, “Money alone does not guarantee a fulfilling life, and excessive amounts of money more often become an obstacle to it.”

“Money is the most universally motivating, mischievous, miraculous, maligned, and misunderstood part of contemporary life.”

“Money has only the power that we assign to it, and we have assigned it immense power.”

How do we know when money has become THE thing?

It was said this way of a rich person.  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich person to enter into freedom.”

Why can money be so dangerous?  Why is it warned against and yet lauded and cheered?  What’s our obsession with money?  

SO WHAT’S BEHIND OUR OBSESSION WITH MONEY?

It’s not the joy that money brings, it’s the fear that we might not have it.

Scarcity.

Twist calls scarcity a lie, and even goes on to define the lie as “the mindset that tells us we can never have enough and drives us to strive above all and against all for more and more.”

Scarcity is not only a lie, but it thrives under the umbrella of three myths…

Myth #1: There Is Not Enough To Go Around

• Like musical chairs...when the music stops, somebody will lose
• The truth is, there actually is enough to go around, although the systems to distribute may fall behind... the resources are there.

Myth #2: More Is Better

• Twist said, “more is better is a chase with no end and a race without winners”
• All we have to do is evaluate our demeanor 24 hours AFTER opening Christmas presents.  Are we really happier?

Myth #3 That’s Just The Way It Is...

• Stroll back to the perms and rat tails of 1986, Bruce Hornsby and the Range
• Reflecting back on Civil Rights and the gap between rich and poor they sang over and over “That’s Just The Way It Is...something will never change”
  • Can you imagine telling
    • MLK Jr or John Lewis…”that’s just the way it is”
    • Martin Luther The Reformer
    • Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill
    • Rosa Parks
    • Oprah Winfrey
    • Chimamanda Adichie
    • The boy who harnessed the wind
    • Ema and Tofunmi Solako
• “Awe, but don’t you believe it”
  • You CANNOT believe these myths
    • It will rob you of your skillset
    • It will rob you of your soul
    • It will rob you of the gift that you have to share with the rest of us...when you BUY IN to a mind of scarcity, you buy yourself a pair of mental and emotional handcuffs
    • You’re bound, limited, stuck, unnecessarily handicapped

How can you help employees with money problems?  Train them about the myths of money.  Embrace the mindset of sufficiency and abundance, and live your own life in a way that shows that money is not an obsession, but a tool for generosity!

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters.  Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

How To Prepare Your Business Financially For 2021

Order cannot come out of disorder and yet we cross our fingers at the end of each year in hopes that next year will be better.

2020 punched us all in the mouth forcing us to play our cards and either set processes aligned with the vision, or plunge deeper into chaos and disorder.

For many of our clients, this has been a year quietly spying on their financial resources and being more aware of where it is all being allocated.  This goes beyond simply pulling an Aging Report from Quickbooks or running a Profit and Loss Statement and staring at the Net Income number to determine success.

We had a client who started the year with a dangerously low amount of cash and a dangerously high amount of payables.  We began tracking their cash accounts, receivables, and payables every single week on a single, simple spreadsheet.

No fancy apps or software, just a simple spreadsheet.

In August of 2020, after nearly running aground just 10 months prior, this owner exclaimed in a meeting, “I feel like we are printing money.”

What he was really saying was, “before we tracked it through a simple process we spent whenever we wanted to”.  It’s as if untracked bank accounts have holes in them and money leaks out.  Pay attention to the leaks and you’ll begin to plug them and it will soon feel like your business is growing at a pace you have not experienced before.

As the year is winding down, we have walked each of our heroic business owner clients through a two part “2021 Readiness Plan”.

Part One is the readiness of the owners’ vision, mission, values, systems, and structure.  We go through and re-read the existing vision, mission, values and make updates and tweaks, or in some cases wholesale changes so there is massive clarity for the next steps.  

We then take that vision and open up the organizational chart and master process roadmap to ensure that the “vehicle” or structure of the business is aligned with the ultimate destination for where the owner desires to go.  

Part Two of the “2021 Readiness Plan” is to focus your attention on the simple financials of the business.

We ask each of our clients to subdivide their bank accounts so they can partition resources into various buckets; profit, taxes, owner’s compensation, operating expenses, and others where it makes sense.

Then we make sure that each business owner is simply documenting those cash accounts each week in a spreadsheet; we call it a dashboard.  Add to that their receivables and payables each week and you have an ongoing snapshot throughout the year.

We then work through simple revenue projections and a matching budget that align with the vision worked out during Part One.

From there it is asking them to think through where they are at with estate planning (wills, trusts, power of attorney, etc.) and insurance.

Finally, we ask each owner to write an annual letter to celebrate and reflect back on the prior year, while also offering a vision for the upcoming year.  These annual letters are encouraging and allow the team to mobilize around the words of the visionary.  For the owners that have written annual letters each year, it has become a hallmark of their leadership and is an incredibly powerful history lesson for each business.

You may think, “but I don’t have time to do all of this!”

Order cannot come out of disorder, but you can choose to stop disorder and create a new environment of order for you, your team, your customers, and your family.

I challenge you to do it.  Make the time, create order, and you will begin to be liberated from chaos!

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters.  Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

A work worth doing…

What do we mean when we say... A work worth doing? Well, we’re about to get into it. Happy Monday everyone, Thomas here with Business on Purpose.

I was talking with Scott, the founder of Business on Purpose the other day, and we were talking about how my transition has been over the past year. To be honest, there have been days that have been great, days that have been easy and other days that have been a struggle.

In Young Life, it was such a great organization to work for. There were tough days and boring days, but at the end of it all was a mission I was so excited about. I knew the why behind it all and that made the tough days 100% worth it. 

Back to my conversation with Scott. I was explaining that to him and the words that came out of my mouth kind of surprised me. I don’t know if that ever happens to you, but I can be an external processor, so sometimes I’ll say things and think... yeah that’s it!

Scott had just talked about how he wants this to be MORE than a job and one of the things he hopes never comes out of my mouth is this thought of…” Oh, it’s just a job.” 

As we were talking I assured him, “No, that’s one of the things I as excited about with this... is working with business owners and key leaders feel like a Work worth doing.”

And that’s the phrase that stuck with me. “A work worth doing!”

I wonder how you would describe your day to day. Is it just a job? Is it a clock in clock out job with no real direction behind it other than bringing home a paycheck? Now, hear me say this... supporting your family and working hard to do so IS a work worth doing. 

But you come in contact with too many people, are training and encouraging and overseeing too many people to just clock in and clock out without any real idea that it could be so much more than just a job.

What if your mission was to positively impact every single person that works with you. If every single team member were to come into work knowing they were valued and invested in. It would change your day to day.

You spend ⅔ of your waking hours at work...why not make it more than just a job... why not make it a “Work worth doing?” 

So what is a work worth doing?

Well, it’s like one of our clients putting their employees through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Helping them get out of debt and get freed to make wise choices with their finances. 

It’s like another one of our clients letting their kids come in during pandemic schooling and creating a learning space for any of the kids who need to do school from home. 

It’s like another one of our clients using his success to pay for a nice lunch for local teachers so they can feel appreciated in the midst of one of the hardest years on record to try to educate our kids!

Maybe it’s as simple as recognizing great work when it’s seen, and like another of our clients, using their team meeting to formally recognize an employee of the week (recognized by customers) and rewarding that team member with a gift card.

These are business owners who invest IN their team members and don’t just show up expecting them to impact their bottom line. A work worth doing means taking hold of all that you have been entrusted with and making sure the mission is to maximize it in whatever way that looks like. 

I know, if you’re anything like me, that makes the hard days of work worth it. Having a mission that’s bigger than yourself and a “work worth doing” gets me excited to engage with business owners and their team leaders every single day.

If you need some more ideas of how to do this with your team. Don’t hesitate to check out our website and podcast for more free tips. 

Mybusinessonpurpose.com and the business on purpose podcast

Have a great week everyone!

What's Your Standard?

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! Thomas Joyner here with BOP. I want to talk about culture a bit today. How do you protect it, nurture it, and build it on purpose?

I was sitting in on a coaching meeting the other day and a business owner was talking about experiencing an employee fly off the handle in a business meeting. There was someone they worked with in the room and the employee dropped an f-bomb towards the other guy in a heated discussion. 

Nothing was said to address the behavior at the moment, but the question was posed to our team... what do we do about that?

We asked a few more clarifying questions, but at the end of the day, we knew this couldn’t be tolerated. You can’t live that emotionally and expect others to continue to do business with you. That’s what is so important about culture. 

A great quote came to mind that a friend had shared with me months back and it’s this…” What you allow in your presence, IS your standard.” 

I’ll say that again, what you allow in your presence is your standard.

It’s that important! In essence, by saying nothing when the employee dropped an f-bomb, you’re not explicitly cheering them on, but you are subtly giving your approval of their behavior. You’re saying “I watched this happen and that is fine by me” when you stay silent.

Now we went back to the businesses Vision story and looked at their culture section. We asked the question if this is the culture you wrote down...the one you want others to see and experience, can this behavior be tolerated? 

The answer was a quick and decisive, NO!

Ok, so let’s put a plan in to talk about this with your employee. Now, this was the first time they had ever blown up like this. So, it was a great time for the owner to check in and see if there was something else going on at home or something going on that day. It’s a PERFECT time to nurture the culture of your business with a personal touch. 

Your employees aren’t just soulless, emotionless chess pieces for you to move around, but are real people with real lives!

They’ve got to be cared for and known.

So, what the business owner did was set up a meeting and lean in. Not take their hands off. Not condemn the person, but condemn the action as a way to care about them AND the culture of the business. Casting vision for how he will see him in the future and pushing him to realize that potential!

Said another way, how you allow your employees to act, treat one another, treat other businesses IS your culture. It’s the little memories that other businesses point towards to decide who they want to work with. It’s what’s said about your business at a casual lunch that either propels someone to call you or sends them to the next person on their contact list. 

It has to be fought for! 

So, you have to ask yourself. What am I allowing to be said, acted on, or accomplished in my presence or business that is slowly becoming the standard. Culture isn’t created or destroyed all at once. It’s a series of tiny corrections along the way to arrive at a destination. Use your Vision...use your mission statement...use your core values to put up barriers to keep yourself on track towards your culture goal.

It NEVER just happens…

Hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving...as always if you want to see more of what we do, head on over to mybusinessonpurpose.com and check us out! Follow our podcast, too, for some free coaching.

Take care!

A Season of Expectation

Why do we limit our vision and excitement to just the holidays? Well, let’s talk about that...it’s Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose I hope you’re having a great Thursday!

It is November 19th! Yep...you heard that right. November 19th! If your household is anything like mine, you’re fighting over 1 thing and 1 thing only currently...is it time to put up the Christmas Tree???

I’m dead serious. Every year, it never fails, we go back and forth about when we can start decorating for Christmas. Now, I’m a firm believer that no decorations can go up until after Thanksgiving. I know, I know...I’m a Scrooge at heart...jump in the comments and tell me how horrible I am.

But seriously, I put my foot down on decorating before thanksgiving. My wife has already told me her plans for decorating and where we’re going to put the tree, how excited she is about the stockings and what she gets to put in the stockings. When we’re going to hang the lights and are there any new decorations that we can grab on the cheap to make this Christmas the BEST EVER...well that is until Christmas 2021, at least.

I have to admit, though, her excitement is contagious. All the things she wants to do and the picture she paints is so vivid that it gets me excited, too!

It should be no different for the year 2021. Why do we limit our vision and our excitement and planning to holidays? It’s ridiculous! If excitement and energy are contagious around the Christmas season, don’t you think it would work the same way around the rest of the year?

Absolutely! And THAT is why we put together the financial barn.

So, what is the financial barn? Well, it’s a conversation between you and your spouse, or just you if you’re not married. It’s setting your sights on what you want to do with your finances in 2021. Now, we at BOP firmly believe we are stewards of the resources we’ve been blessed with, so this is not meant to be a shopping spree or a 2021 wish list. No, it’s a system built to look at all of the things you want to spend money on in the next year and then formulating the plan for how to reach that goal.

It starts with simply drawing a barn on a piece of paper and listing the things you spend money on in different rooms in the barn. Things like Living expenses, travel, hobbies, savings, retirement, kids college, charitable giving...subdivide it however you want! Here’s the beautiful thing. When you list out how much you will need to comfortably chase after those things, you set your sights on a goal and can put a plan in place for how to reach it.

So what are the things you get excited about? Is it taking a trip as a family? Is it maybe finally doing a home renovation or getting a car upgrade? Is it giving to a ministry above and beyond what you normally do and really making an impact with your finances? Is it setting aside a chunk for your kids college or maybe investing in something along the way? Whatever it is, write it down so you can know what your all in number needs to be.

Once you add up all the things you would need in 2021, you know what you need to earn to reach those goals…

Now I’ll break from here for a second to remind you that these goals need to be realistic. If your household income is currently $75k and you look at your all in number and it says you need 125k to reach it, you may  need to trim some things...or trim a lot! But if your number is close, then it’s finding ways for your business to support you in the ways it needs to.

Here’s the best part about this. It puts a bullseye on the board, so if you do wildy better than you had hoped for financially, you can put a plan in place for what to do with it. It frees you to be wildly generous with your funds as you already hit the bullseye. It keeps you from hoarding your cash in a way that only benefits you as you see how incredibly blessed you have been.

That’s the reason behind all of this. Set up reasonable goals for each category and then allow that to push you to be generous in every area of your life.

At the end of all this, the message is clear. Life is not about stockpiling assets. It’s just not. There will always be another room to fill in our barn or another toy to buy. Life is found in stewarding the things you have and earn to make the lives of those around you that much better.

The FInancial Barn! Do it...do it with your spouse. Feel free to reach back out and tell us how that conversation goes! We’d love to hear about it.

As always, you can check out more about this at mybusinessonpurpose.com

Have a great week!

Chief Executive Officer or Chief Everything Officer? What kind of CEO are you? 

I can’t get enough of sports. My wife rolls her eyes at me consistently as she wants to watch a new show together, but it’s playoffs for baseball, basketball, football...whatever! The scheduling of major sporting events is masterful as it’s nearly year round. I can’t help it...I LOVE IT!

As I’ve watched sports over the years, there’s one phrase that’s consistently spoken about young players. He’s just trying to do too much. I was watching a game with Young Quarterback, Daniel Jones of the New York Giants playing. Over and over he would make amazing plays, but then he would set his team back when he, “Tried to do too much.”

Announcers use this term so much, because for young athletes this paralyzes their teams. They realize that you can have all the talent in the world, and STILL not be able to do it all.

I don’t think it’s any different in the business world. In fact, it’s no different at all!

I was reading a great article the other day about how small business has changed over the past 25 years. It spoke of this evolution of the business owner and how they have moved from the CEO meaning the Chief Executive Officer...to CEO as Chief Everything Officer. It’s a subtle change, but one that dictates the entire existence of your business.

Just like in sports, young business owners are so particular that they have to have their hand in every piece of the business instead of training and trusting their employees to get the job done. Where does it lead? To underperformance every single time!

Why? Because you can’t do it all and scale your business. You have to trust people to do the job you hired them to do. And if you can’t, why pay them to do a job in the first place? It’s robbing you of profitability if you’re both trying to do the job.

So, where does this lead us?

If you look up the definition of executive in the dictionary it has two definitions I love…

1. Having the power to put plans, actions or laws into effect.

1. a person with senior managerial responsibility in an organization

You have to do both of these as the executive. You have to become the manager of the organization and put plans and actions into effect. You don’t have to do it all yourself, but you have to find a way to effectively train your team to do it the way you would do it, so you can free yourself up to do the things ONLY YOU can do.

It’s doable...in fact, we’re coaching businesses every day that are doing just this. Building the systems and processes in their business to free their employees up to do the job they were hired to do.

Then, and only then, can you go from the Chief Everything Officer who “tries to do too much,” to the CEO that your business needs.

Have a great week everyone!