My Business On Purpose

Business Owners are invited daily to walk away from Wisdom and instead to go down the wide, inviting, luxurious path of deception, feeling-above-truth, injustice, confusion, apathy, gossip, and near-term assumption.  Of course it never feels or seems that way in the moment.

There are two reasons why Wisdom must be the primary value that hovers above all other published values in your business (and everywhere else).

I was exhausted and standing in front of a Customs Official in the Lagos airport. "Where is your yellow immunization card?"

My face turned yellow I'm sure as my eyes darted through my passport. I was no stranger to the Nigerian customs process and was usually well thought out and on my game. Not this trip.

It was a situation where I literally grinned, looked at this powerful lady and said, "E'karo Mommy, se' dada ni'?"

She laughed cautiously and then asked again in a playfully inquisitive tone, "your yellow card?" I said with a thoughtful smile, "I will find it." She waved me through with my passport, visa, and a yellow card I was committed to find. I eventually did find it.

It was a situation where I sat their metaphorically naked and hoping for the best with noticeable perspiration.

That is the typical posture when hiring a team member, hoping for the best with noticeable perspiration.

As business owners we are constantly working to maximize profit, cash flow and a host of other metrics and deliverables. Yet when it comes to hiring we look like middle schoolers out on a first date, awkward and out of place.

Two things that you can install into your business right now to help you mature the process for how you bring in that powerfully important asset and relationship of people into your business.

First, a written hiring process. An actual process that you will follow no matter how desperate you are for employees nor how well you may know said-candidate.

Important elements of a hiring process combine a mix of subjective (how you feel) and objective (what the data says) points.

Subjectively, having an initial phone call followed by a series of live meetings. A live-discussion sequence that we recommend looks like this:

1. Initial phone call as a simple get-to-know.
2. Live Interview with a focus on company vision, mission, values, culture, and direction. There is to be little to no discussion about the actual role. The goal is to find out if they fit the company. Literally share those elements and have them go home and call you later if they are still interested in the actual job role.
3. Live Interview to include other team members over lunch. The actual role is the focus on this entire discussion along with an initial layout of the company compensation structure although you may not be prepared to discuss an actual compensation offer.
4. Live Interview over dinner with a spouse or significant-other. Dave Ramsey says it best, "if we find out you're not crazy, then we need to confirm that your spouse isn't crazy because either way, we can't let crazy in the building!"
5. Final Offer

"But can't we do it faster?" If you want to be less informed and hasty then yes you can. Part of the value of multiple steps is to intentionally slow down the process so everyone can process all of the information.

Objectively, here are some elements of the process that will give you hard metrics to look at.

1. Administering a personality profile (we prefer DISC...it's simple) is crucial. You do not want to hire a "people person" for a highly technical, isolated job. Do this for every serious candidate you have.
2. References. Yes, ask for them and call every one of them. You never know and all it takes is one phone call to provide you with more intuition and information that you can ever receive from all of your interviews combined.
3. Contract your candidate for a couple of hours to actually work on a project. Be creative. If you are hiring an Estimator, give them an old bid to estimate. If you are hiring a Real Estate Attorney, have them write out a simple version of a Real Estate Closing process in their own words.

All three of the objective opportunities are severely underutilized primarily because they take time and effort.

Embrace the time and effort. See it as a gift allowing you to make an incredibly powerful decision. It's romantic to think, "I was at a gas station pumping gas and a guy walked up to me and I hired him on the spot and he's been the best employee I've ever had."

That may work for your Grandmother's dating game 70 years ago...but not for hiring.

Secondly, you need an Onboarding Process.

Day one is no longer day one. The first day for your new team member is actually the start of their warm up period which should be about 3 months.

A healthy Onboarding Process will include a simple layout of what the new team member will learn, according to their role, week by week over the first twelve weeks.

Weekly, the new team member will sit with their direct report and walk through a few crucial and well positioned questions and statements…

• Follow up from discussion last week
• What are you seeing/thinking?
• What Blind Spots are we missing?
• What questions do you have about your role this week?
• What new ideas do you have?
• What do you need from me?
• Here is what I see in you (supervisor)...
• Action Items to install, improve, etc.

Spend 10 minutes reviewing that list of questions each week with your new team member and your investment will begin returning in a major way. A simple, implemented onboarding process is one of the simplest ways to ensure your hiring investment.

As Owners, let's commit to stop just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best and let's work the process.

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose and the host of The Business On Purpose Podcast. He can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

Spend 10 minutes reviewing that list of questions each week with your new team member and your investment will begin returning in a major way.  A simple, implemented onboarding process is one of the simplest ways to ensure your hiring investment. 

As Owners, let’s commit to stop just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best and let’s work the process.

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose and the host of The Business On Purpose Podcast.  He can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.co

We stopped about 38 minutes through our coaching time and one of the Owners asked, "could you help us just sell our business?"

He was frustrated with his construction company because construction is hard. With all of the lead hunting, bidding, questioning, job costing, crew recruiting, scheduling, material ordering, monitoring other people's schedules, weather delays, and market variations...construction is hard.

Instead of selling your business out of frustration (not usually a good idea), what if you proactively designed your business to sell and then stuck with it?

If you want a business that could sell here is a roadmap that is easy to follow and requires loads of vision, discipline, and repetition to implement.

Put in the work now, and you will see the returns later.

Here are a few items that are non-negotiables in order to lead a business that you can sell...

First, you must write your vision story.

The wisdom is true, if you do not have a written vision you (and others) will scatter. There are seven categories to think through when writing your vision:

• Duration: How far out do you see your vision? Usually no more than 36 months.
• Family & Freedom: How does the vision for your business impact your family and your personal time?
• Financials: How do you make your business profitable so you can serve both inside and outside of the business?
• Products & Services: What do you offer the market and what do you not offer the market?
• Team: What roles will be needed to serve those products and services to generate the defined financials?
• Client & Customers: Who do you serve best and who do you not serve best?
• Culture: When someone comes into contact with your business what words or phrases do you hope they would use to describe your business?

Second, you must write and constantly repeat your mission and unique core values.

Whereas your vision story is a detailed, multi-page description of the future of your business, a mission statement is distilled from your vision and should pack a massive punch!

A mission in the well documented writings and talks of Simon Sinek is simply "your why". It is a short on sentence phrase, less than 10-15 words telling us exactly why you got out of bed this morning.

For Business On Purpose we liberate business owners from chaos. That's it. Our vision is four pages long and takes a longer time to reveal. If you are not interested or impacted by our mission, if it does not grab you then you will likely not be interested in our vision story.

By distilling our vision into a short, punchy mission we have been gracious and saved you time so you can either go deeper with us or move on to something else.

Your unique core values are the guardrails of decision making in your business. When we make a decision at Business On Purpose we run each of those decisions through our vision, our mission, and then five unique core values (unique values are not integrity, responsibility, and excellence...we should ALL value those).

Here our five unique values:

• Work IS Faith
• On Not In
• Automated Strategy
• Relentless Learning
• Full Implementation

You will make haphazard, confusing decisions that violate your vision if you are not constantly reviewing and repeating your mission and values.

Third, you must have a documented set of repeatable and trainable systems and processes.

This is typically where most owners begin to really nod their head in agreement and internally battle because they know that the intention to build systems and processes does not equal the actual work it takes to build them.

Some of the systems and processes that must exist and be used regularly are items like…

• Delegation roadmaps
• Tracking Dashboard(s)
• Budget/Bookkeeping/Accounts
• Team Meetings process and agendas
• Training, training, training
• Weekly schedules
• Org Charts based on needed roles
• Master Process Roadmap
• Documented processes (we use screen capture video as our primary form)
• Job roles
• Hiring, Onboarding and Retention Processes
• Separation Processes

Fourth, you will be well served to have a team of professionals around you (all can be engaged by contract or retainer and are worth their weight in gold), whether you sell or not.

A Business Coach will be the Bill Belichick you need to keep you locked in and focused on what's next and what's now. A great coach studies, gameplans, encourages, motivates, designs, and holds you accountable to maximize your capacity. Your coach will also help facilitate discussions between you and your team (you know, those tough conversations you don't want to have:), as well as the other contract professionals on your team.

A Business Attorney will allow position you to make sure your "i's" are dotted and "t's" crossed with agreements, contracts, wills, trusts, liability (see an Insurance Pro to help), power-of-attorneys, and overall legal plans.

A CPA and/or virtual CFO will make sure that you are budgeting, projecting, tracking, monitoring, maximizing profit, paying your taxes, and retaining cash to fund the future.

A Valuation Specialist has the skillset to walk into your business and determine how much the business is worth to the market. Again, your goal may not be to actually sell the business, but instead to offer ownership to others who can help you grow.

Fifth, you must be willing to grind for a while.

The more you build your business to sell, you will actually end up building a business where people thrive. Sure, you can throw a bunch of borrowed cash at a business and flip it, and that is fine if that is what you are into. Our business is our platform to serve people.

Mod Pizza's mission is brilliant, "we make pizza so we can serve people."

YES!

A business with great vision, mission, values, systems, processes, and professional support will require a heavy volume of fuel for a while. That fuel is your time, care, and expertise. Be cautious about buying into the "scale-quick" mantra. Again, it may work for some, but likely if you are following the Business On Purpose values...we actually like working.

When you build a sell-able business, over time you will find that you will likely want to hang on to it and share the wealth!

If you want to begin building your Business On Purpose go get my book Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. It is a step by step approach to building a business that you could sell...or hang on to.

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose and the host of The Business On Purpose Podcast. He can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

We stopped about 38 minutes through our coaching time and one of the Owners asked, “could you help us just sell our business?”

He was frustrated with his construction company because construction is hard.  With all of the lead hunting, bidding, questioning, job costing, crew recruiting, scheduling, material ordering, monitoring other people’s schedules, weather delays, and market variations...construction is hard.

"I see the new building, and the delivery trucks and all of the promotions she is running around town, she must be killing it with her business!"

You and I have both said it at some point.

We declare, "they are making money hand over fist!" when we see that promotion or branding somewhere in town.

It all looks so easy...just show up, money rolls in, people love working there and all is perfect.

That is rarely true.

Chaos is more consistently the norm for most business owners who are swimming in decisions, directions, confusion, and success swings just trying to hold it together while keeping a pristine, branded exterior.

Certainly there is a lot to continually think through day to day so here are three things that are important to monitor on a regular basis in your business, in fact we monitor them weekly in our business.

We call them the ABC's and they make up the "Level Two Dashboard". You may ask, "what is the Level One Dashboard?" It is actually just the "A" of the ABC's I am about to share.

Here are the ABC's of what you can be monitoring weekly or every-other-weekly in your business.

Accounts

Darryl Lyons (author of Small Business Big Pressure) and I were having a conversation about financial elements in every business that must be tracked regularly and he surprised me with the simplicity of one of his points-- watch your cash accounts.

Darryl mentioned that he reviews his cash accounts once per week.

Eyeballs on your cash weekly will allow you to watch it barometrically, checking for any major spikes or dips. It's not a line by line drill down on isolated spending on things like $4.22 smoothie purchases, but instead a high level look to see the overall flow of your cash.

You need to see how the cash actually flows. Minor shifts are expected, but when the numbers climb or fall at a serious grade, that is when you know it is time to dig. Was there a big bill due? Did a massive check come in? Is money leaking?

One business owner we met with years ago was completely (and I mean completely) in the dark as to the amount of cash in his business accounts. His rationale, "they will tell me when it gets to low." Not a good strategy.

Once per week or every other week, take a look at your cash accounts (yep, plural, "accounts"...go read Mike Michalowicz' Profit First and IMPLEMENT).

Bookkeeping

Most businesses have some form of payables (what you owe) and receivables (what you are owed).

Once per week or every other week it is good to know what these are. For some of you it is easy to pinpoint how much you owe through a statement or a spreadsheet, for others it is more difficult. Either way, you have no excuse to not know payables like monthly subscriptions, vendor and subcontractor payments, facilities payments, payroll, and others.

Knowing this general payout will allow you to know what will be coming out of those accounts that you have already taken a look at over the coming weeks.

So instead of your account having $10,458...it actually has that PLUS whatever will be coming in over the coming weeks MINUS what will be going out over the coming weeks.

A simple "Aging" or "Receivables" report within your bookkeeping software will allow you to see what should be coming in by way of payments to the business.

On a basic spreadsheet you can a section showing all of your account balances, and then a section showing what you owe and what receivables you have outstanding.

We actually run this calculation every week:

Total Cash in our Accounts

+Receivables

-Payables

-Tax Account

= What the real time cash position IF we collected ALL receivables and PAID all payables

It's just a number that is nice to know.

Customers

Finally, it is crucial to monitor your customer engagement with

• Existing Customers
• Non-Yet Customers
• Past Customers

This is where you track important metrics around marketing, engagement, and communication.

An Attorney may monitor:

• Existing Customers: number of cases won, gifts sent
• Non-Yet Customers: number of phone calls received to appointments set
• Past Customers: number of follow up calls placed

A Contractor may monitor:

• Existing Customers: weekly updates sent, special events delivered
• Non-Yet Customers: number of website leads, number of follow up appointments
• Past Customers: past customer "Happy Hour" participants

Whatever metrics are important for your particular business is what you will track. For Business On Purpose we track things like Podcast Downloads, Book Sales, 1-on-1 phone calls, and Coaching Hours among other items.

Is it possible to know every nook and cranny of your business? It is a challenge because business is dynamic, constantly changing and flowing. Monitor the ABC's of your business-- Accounts, Bookkeeping, and Customers and review them weekly and you will begin to punch chaos in the mouth.

THAT is when you know you are "killing it".

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose and the host of The Business On Purpose Podcast. He can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

Chaos is more consistently the norm for most business owners who are swimming in decisions, directions, confusion, and success swings just trying to hold it together while keeping a pristine, branded exterior.

Certainly there is a lot to continually think through day to day so here are three things that are important to monitor on a regular basis in your business, in fact we monitor them weekly in our business.

He bragged, "I don't have to market my business, it markets itself."

It was one of those statements where publically I responded with a polite and affirming chuckle but privately my mind was on the spectrum between confused and shamed.

"Is that true?" I thought.

If a product or a business is created and nobody knows about it then how are others positioned to benefit from its existence?

Is it possible to have a business without marketing? Governments market their services even though they are not directly "selling" something.

Seth Godin defines marketing as "the act of making change happen." He continues, "Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone."

Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, provides sobering insight into the "normal-ness" of marketing. Not the Madison Avenue, mass-media-buying, algorithmic version of marketing that we all feel pressure to measure up to, but instead focusing on what you have, what you could make and simply sharing that with your world.

Calagione relieves the marketing pressure that business owners feel by warning us, "you're ideal customer probably wouldn't believe your advertising even if you could afford to get it in front of them...they are too smart."

Mass-market marketing is targeted to the average of humanity-- what Godin calls "average stuff for average people."

That is not what we are in the business of.

Business On Purpose is laboring to liberate business owners from the chaos of working IN their business. You are laboring equally as hard to deliver and live out your mission-- not "average stuff for average people."

All businesses must "market" if marketing really is what Godin goes on to say that it is; "the generous act of helping someone solve their problem."

THAT is a compelling definition of marketing. Replay the naive business owners statement, "I don't have to market my business, it markets itself."

For years I have shared with my Mastermind group my disdain for marketing. It made me feel selfish and gross, not to mention I have never really felt like I am very good at it.

I can easily design a process for marketing, that is second nature for me. But to do the actual ideation, capturing, creation, polishing, distribution, tracking, and follow up of marketing...that has been tough and exhausting, but doable. It's the guessing, the thinking "will this work?" that is most taxing.

Calagione walks through some of the powerful, non-pressure filled few channels they have used making marketing feel more natural...more serve-like.

1. Press Releases: a simple written document with some quirky token to simply share with press outlets (think papers, chambers, blogs, podcasts, radio, and television)
2. Word Of Mouth: when other people simply talk about the value you bring in regular conversation
3. Failures: sharing your failures can provide some of the most powerful forms of marketing because humility and honesty can often generate enormous amounts of trust and empathy
4. Hobby Creations and Physical Things: when you make or create something we get to peer into a deeper part of you as a person, then when you take that thing, tie it to your business and share it with your network it gives us insight into your uniqueness. For instance, I like to doodle and so I doodled our business name in a handwritten design with a 1970's font. I could send that through one of our marketing channels just for fun.
5. Unlikely, Nontraditional: Jesse Cole is the best in the world promoting his Savannah Bananas through unlikely and non-traditional forms of marketing...just google him.
6. Repeating Your Mission: constantly reminding people WHY you do what you do is crucial. We are constantly repeating our mission to liberate business owner from chaos.
7. Unsolicited Testimonials: A client recently wrote me a handwritten note saying, "Thank you for being diligent and pressing me and my team to get better. I feel like it has all come to fruition and allowed me to leave my business for a few weeks without needing to call back in one time...zero communication." It was unsolicited and it is what will encourage other owners.

As a community of business owners we will be well served psychologically to see marketing as not a system to be gamed, but a channel to serve.

May you serve well and liberated from the chaos of working your business.

Be liberated from business chaos at freedom.mybusinessonpurpose.com.

Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose and the host of The Business On Purpose Podcast. He can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.

It was one of those statements where publicly I responded with a polite and affirming chuckle but privately my mind was on the spectrum between confused and shamed.

“Is that true?” I thought.

If a product or a business is created and nobody knows about it then how are others positioned to benefit from its existence? 

Seth Godin defines marketing as “the act of making change happen.”  He continues, “Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.”