EP182: Optimizing Business Growth: Insights from Cary Prejean

Okay. I graduated with a degree in accounting, did the CPA thing, worked with a big head accounting firm, eventually got hired away by a client. And what I found out working with small to medium-sized business owners is that they really didn't understand the financial statements and they didn't understand the impact of some of the decisions they made on how it would affect the business. You know, I kind of, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, made a mission of educating business owners on making sure they understood what their financial statements were saying about their business. Because really, that's your report card. Your balance sheet says this is where you are in terms of your financial condition, and the income statement says this is your result from operations. Are you profitable? Are you efficient? Are you financially strong? Are you liquid? And in addition to that, I started coming up with what I call dashboards, even weekly data on the business, how the business is operating. Instead of here's the financial statements from the 15th of the next month, and there's some problems last month, there's nothing to do about it this month, right? If you're getting interim financial statements every week, not interim financial, interim financial data every week, and you see that's a problem, you can take action on it now. Anyway, so I started working with smaller clients. Eventually, it's developed in this, you know, with actual financial data, using processes and systems to systematize a business where they're easier to manage and planning strategically long-term, designing your business in the future. on purpose rather than it winds up somewhere.

Right. Here's my experience. Business owners that I work with generally are frustrated in the beginning, like when I first talked to them. They're frustrated that their businesses require so much of their time. They have to spend all their day putting out fires. They're working seven days a week. They're working $800 a week. They can't take time off and extend time off. And they're frustrated with why their employees don't get it. Why don't they see what I see? Because they're not entrepreneurs. They saw what you saw. or they had your narrative, they have their own business. Entrepreneurs are about 20% of the country,8% are worker bees, you know what I'm going to call them that. People who want a steady job, steady paycheck, regular hours, they're not looking for, you know, they don't see what the entrepreneurs see in terms of opportunities. So despite all that dissatisfaction when I speak with them, you start introducing, okay, so here we're going to get some actual financial data. You start getting weekly dashboards, and we're going to go through them. It's going to take about an hour, that's it. You should have to do accounting or finance the rest of the week. Well, you know, we need to get your processes documented. We need to start thinking strategically and start to have you do some exercises to start designing the business you want into the future. What I normally get is a lot of resistance, you know. They don't like the present, but they don't want to change either. I can't wave a magic wand and fix a business. One client. of mine once said, he said, the only people who like change are babies with wet diapers. So yeah, you get a lot of pushback from the employees. The owner's like, how's this going to affect my business? Yeah, I want to change, but it's just having people do things differently. Is that going to cause some dissatisfaction? And yeah, probably it will. There's always that scary point. Let me say it this way. People treat you the way you train them to treat you. They will dislike it when you begin to train them to treat you differently. Right? So, yeah, I'm working with a new client, fairly new client, a few months. And it's a little short process. It might take five minutes for store managers to do this marketing thing every day for five minutes. Or you'd have thought, you'd have asked them to clean, you know, all the solves that Hercules had to clean, the stables. It was supposed to take off. You know, you're asking me to not move the world. It's like in five minutes. So finally, it's like, okay, let me show you what it's going to take. It's like two and a half minutes. Oh, oh. And the dollars, oh, it's different. You asked me to do more, and I'm not getting a pay raise for this. The dollars, I'm going to have several firm managers threatening to quit. I said over two and a half minutes of work. And again, I think it was a lot of it was I didn't present it. They presented it. It's kind of like do this now. You have to do this. We're calling everybody to do this rather than let me show you what you can do to help your store revenue increase, and let me just show you. It takes two and a half minutes, and we're going to be doing it. This is what we're going to be doing from the, the main store. So it's all worked out. But that's the kind of thing you normally get, especially about processes. Like we're going to start documenting this. And everybody kind of groans like, oh, no, we got to write this stuff down. And you got to, yeah, I'm going to ask you to think. What are the critical functions? And what are the steps in each of those? And we need to write them down in simple recipe, site, or outline, you know, format so that everybody knows how we do this and how we do that. Think of a fast food restaurant. You can take a handful of teenagers and they can run it. Why? Because all the process is written down. Everybody knows how to make the fries, how to make the Roya with cheese, how to make that harapu pie, all that stuff. It takes all the mystery out of it. And it's not how some manager is feeling that day. So if you have processes for all your critical functions, the manager can manage the business to free up the owner to go do his visionary thing by making sure employees just follow the processes. And if something changes, then you change the process.

I mean, once you get the processes down, all of a sudden, all the emotion and the competitiveness and the squabbling about who does what, when, how, and all this, this is how we do it. And what you do is the owner shouldn't even be involved in the process, except the one thing the owner contributes to the process is, these are the results I want to see produced. And this time constraint. and then these financial constraints, if there are any. In other words, the owner has to be super clear on exactly what he wants to see, what is going to satisfy you. I work with satisfaction, not happiness. What is going to satisfy you? I want you to be ultimately satisfied. So tell me what's going to ultimately satisfy you, and we're going to have your people, your management team, and your people who are involved in these functions. come up with a process that will produce those results.

Well, yeah, that's a problem. You're going to have to do some work. You know, I can't come up with what's going to satisfy you. Only you can do that. And if you've never taken the time to think about what is going to ultimately satisfy a That's funny about whatever. It's going to be some work. It's going to take some time. You're going to come up with some things you think you want that really when you find out when you get them, you don't really want them. We had a client one time, I forget what it was. He wanted to just start some division to go do this special product installation in landfills. And he kind of went crazy with it. Had crews all over the southeast United States. And it was too much of a logistical nightmare. And he found out pretty quickly he was losing money. It was going to be something he really didn't want to do that. But the money sounded good. So yeah, it's going to take some time. Let me back up. Most people never think about what's going to satisfy me. They're always worried about what's going to be. I want to be happy. Well, happy is a short-term emotion that's derived from your short-term assessment of your circumstance. So happy comes and goes all day long. Who cares about happy? Satisfaction is more lasting, is more, well, satisfying in terms of you're getting what you want. But to get what you want, you got to know what you want. And to know what you want, you got to actually think about it. If you're not used to it, yes, it feels like work. It's mentally, you physically feel tired from the mental work of that.

No, I'm not familiar with it.

In order to have what they call a next level business, the work to do is not a mystery, you know? What there is is maintaining the rigor and the commitment. that you keep doing it, you show up every day, and you do it, you do it, you do it, to get there. And again, you know, the name is Charlotte, Hammer and Grind. It's a grind. It's a grind. And if the owner is doing it, quote, in the proper way, they're not trying to manage every aspect of the business. They're working on visionary and revenue generation. That's their main thing. It's like, how can I design the business? What opportunities are out there? What risks are out there they need to avoid or mitigate? They enjoy that. That's what got them in a business to start with. You know what they don't enjoy? They don't enjoy going through accounts payable or trying to figure out a logistic thing or group health benefits or whatever. All that kind of stuff they always find themselves embroiled in from day to day. They hate that stuff. They hate accounting. So, you know, get yourself some processes, get some good. management team or even one person have your processes and they just manage to make sure the employee follow the process. Now you're freed up. You can actually take four weeks off if you want to. Now the business works for you rather than you working for the business.

Yeah. Well, again, you have a process for sales and marketing. You know, how do we grow the business? We have a process for that. That has to be so involved. But again, the owner can contribute to that a lot because, you know, the owner's going to come up with all kinds of ways. They're going to see all kinds of possibilities about how we're going to make money. What the owner generally needs is somebody that can channel that energy into like, okay, those are like 15 great ideas. These two are probably the best ones out of it. Let's focus on, you know, you can't do all 15 at once. And that's why I see owners get in trouble. They come up with all these great ideas and they scatter their energy, they scatter their resources among too many things and none of them come off. Rather than let's pick one or two that really look promising and work with those. And when those go, you know, say we've expanded our... organization, we have more people, then we can go tackle some more. And you probably will come up with some new ideas by then anyway.

Yeah, and the EOS system, that's, well, the implementer is an EOS consultant. It's the integrator.

It works with the visionary. You know, again, it's like the visionary can talk with so many ideas. Some of them are good, some of them are terrific, some are kind of bad. It takes the integrated to say, okay, that's the most practical. Let's focus on that. They have to temper the excesses of what can happen with a visionary.

The phrase gets tossed around a lot. Same thing is I want to manage by numbers. And my experience is that most business owners have no idea what that means. You know, you say, yeah, okay, my next level business, what does that tell me about that? What does that look like? Well, you know, I want to have more revenue.

One dollar more is more revenue. Again, it's a matter of they haven't declared what's going to satisfy them. They haven't really thought about what future do I want to design my business into? So next level, my definition is, number one, you have a business that runs on its own. You have a management team that manages the business for you. You don't have to even show up for work. And you spend almost all of your time outside of, say, weekly dashboard and a monthly financial statement review. You spend all your time doing the visionary revenue generation work. And that you have long-range strategic planning with your leadership team as a... ongoing normal business process. It's not something, eh, we'll get to it when we're not busy with other stuff. That's what normally happens. Yeah, we're going to do strategic planning. Oh, yeah, but we have this emergency over here. We've got this big sale we're working over there. We've got this problem in operations. When we get through all that, then we'll do it. Well, you never get to it because there's always going to be something. There's always going to be some problem, some issue. So it's a matter of committing to come hell or high water, we're going to have a strategic planning. half a day on the second Friday of every month.

the owner needs to begin to focus on. Where do I want this business to be eventually? What products and services? What market? What kind of employees do I want to hear? What kind of culture do I want to have? How much time do I want to go take off? What kind of revenue am I looking at? How much profit are we looking at? How much compensation for me? You know, all those kinds of things. What's going to satisfy you out there? And then from there, work backwards in terms of intermediate steps, goals. Well, let me say it this way. Your long-range vision is your, oh, man, I'm drawing a blank here. Tactics and strategy. Yes. Your long-range goal is your strategy. The goals in between the action steps you're going to take to get there, those are your tactics. So when you have those, even those intermediate things, you break those down into smaller parts. So when you do, you want to assign them. You want to assign somebody who's responsible for making sure that happens. Those results get produced and a deadline. You can't just say, well, sometime in the next year. If you want to say December 31st, but just sometime this year doesn't really work. And you don't want the owner doing much of the results being produced unless it has to do with visionary or revenue production. But if it's like designing a process, if it's like getting a new line of product or a new vendor or some whatever, you don't want them to move with it. or designing a new compensation plan, benefit package for people, they're not going to like it. They're not good at it.

Well, yeah, you want to be able to delegate. You need to make sure whatever you assign, whatever responsibilities you assign, that those people know full well what's expected. What are the results for you to be produced when are the deadlines? If you have any questions, ask. If you need help, ask. If you need some outside help, like you need to talk to an attorney, you need to talk to whatever, go do that. But don't just sit there and like, I didn't really know how to do it, and I didn't really know how to tell you, you didn't know how to do it, and you didn't get done.

Because the owner generally trained them to not be engaged unknowingly.

Okay. Well, most business owners see their employees as, you know, is kind of like cogs in the machine. A tool. Yeah, they don't really, what employees are looking for is do you care about? Do you tell me hello in the morning? Do you ask about my family? Do you ask if there's anything I need to do in my job or any tools missing or any training missing? You know, how's it been going? So what they get is it's like, I'm just here for my paycheck. So what I got to do to get that? You know, it's what I call a transactional relationship. And those kinds of relationships, both sides are going to give exact change. The employee is going to do the minimum. The employer is just going to give them the pay. So the way you get them engaged is to trust you. And if transaction relationship, they're going to trust you to give them a paycheck and that's about it. And you can trust them to give you minimal effort in return.

Yeah. And I'm, and I'm clear that businesses have to make money and I'm not talking about paying people more. I'm not a big fan of big base salaries because what they breed is some sense of entitlement. Well, hell that's my base salary. What are you going to pay me now? So keep the base salaries in a decent market level, but have monthly to quarterly performance bonuses. In other words, these are results you need to produce bare minimum for your job. These results I'm looking for that are in addition to it. So if you can, like, increase efficiency, you can make more money, you can reduce costs, you can do whatever it is that's going to, the results the owner wants to see, that's what performance bonuses come down. It doesn't have to come down to your bonuses. You can have a departmental bonus. If the department does X, Y, Z. The department will share, and this bonus calculated like this. Making a team effort. The big thing employees are looking for is, again, do you care about me? That's the first element of trust. Do you care about me as much as you care about your concerns? Are you sincere? Do you mean what you say? Three, are you confident? Can you do what you say you're going to do? And four, are you reliable? Do you have a history of keeping your promises? Or have you gone through a history of you say one thing and do another? Are you saying something's going to happen, and then it doesn't? And you don't say anything. If you want them engaged, you have to engage with them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to do this. And then doesn't happen. Don't say anything about it. And everyone's like, well, what happened? Hey, he must've changed his mind. You know, you can't count on anything.

Okay. The ontology, first let's start with ontology. It's a weird sounding word, right? It's made up of the Greek word ontos, which means being, and ology means to study of. So it's a study of being in language. And the discipline was invented or developed by a gentleman named Fernando Flores from Chile. Brilliant guy. I took one course with him. He could be brutal, but he was brilliant. Anyway, the ontology of language makes several claims. Number one is that language is generative. Language is action. So in one aspect... Your language, your narrative, what you listen to all day long is going to have you see certain things and have you not see certain things, be blind to certain things. It's going to tell you how to act, react, feel, think, whatever. If you think about it, everything that comes in, all the input from all your senses goes through a filter of good, bad, right, wrong, like it, don't like it, make sense, don't make sense, agree, disagree. And then, depending on what it is, that triggers all kinds of other assessments. And it allows us to be on automatic most of the time. We don't have to stop and think, would I like a hamburger for lunch? I don't know. I've never had a hamburger. I mean, imagine having to be like the first decision of everything, all throughout the day. You'd be exhausted before noon. It allows you to just automatically choose, automatically choose. What it also does, it has you see things a certain way or empowers you in some ways. It also has you be blind to certain things. It has you disempowered. certain ways. So being an entrepreneur, here's part of the narrative. I see all these possibilities. I'm anxious to make it happen. I'm going to kick ass and take names. I'm excited. I want action. I want movement. I'm also impatient. These freaking employees just don't get it. I'm going to have to kick ass and take names. When somebody screws up, they're threatening my livelihood. So I'm going to vomit lava on top of them, but I'll be better five minutes later because I feel better now. So the empowering part of that narrative is like, I see possibilities. I'm going to take action, kick ass, take risks, get things moving. The disempowering part of that narrative is that, yes, you're patient. You're not going to be patient with people when they, quote, don't get it. And the thing when you jump ass, when they don't do it, quote, your way or the right way, you vomit lava all of them. I've seen some business owners just absolutely lose it, cussing, screaming. Well, they feel much better five minutes later. Guess what? The employer's still coming. Still dripping with hot lava. And so what the part that disempowers the owner is now that employee is motivated to help a whole lot. Are they probably going to talk bad about the owner to other employees when he's not around? Yep. More likely, they're going to go home and badmile the owner to friends, family, whoever the hell will listen and diminish that owner's identity out in the community. So, okay, so that's the empowering disempowering. Language is also action. Our president right now that you and I are talking happened a few weeks ago. Again, it was email, but it's still language.

So if you don't like your present, you need to start having different conversations. You need to make different offers, different requests, different promises, different declarations. And you probably need to make them with different people because your future is being designed in your language today. Let me say it this way. Anything that happens for humans happens in language first. This country was started out of what? A declaration. It happened in language. Your marriage happens with I do. You know, let's get married. I want to get married. Can you marry me? Whatever the thing is. Your podcast. At some point, you said, I'm going to start a podcast. But it happened in language first. You didn't do the podcast and go, you know, I think I like doing this podcast thing. That doesn't even make any sense. So the ontology of language is designed to have you be a better observer of the observer that you are. What is the narrative that's driving you? what other narratives serves you, what other narratives doesn't serve you. And it's pretty hard to do by yourself because your narrative is there so much, so long, it's been there so much. When you start to look for evidence that it's not right, it's going, oh, no, no, no. I've been telling you this 20 years. You're stupid if you look at that. You're not going to be able to change yourself much, probably by yourself. What it usually takes is the coach to help you see your narrative. And a lot of your narrative, you don't even see. You see it's like the truth. So a good coach, a good ontological coach is going to ask you the right questions to help you examine that narrative. And why do I say ask the right questions? Because it's only in questions that we think. Real thinking happens in questions. If you're just having the same old thoughts, you're just, that's all you have. You're having thoughts. You're not really thinking. But, you know, if I ask you, you know, what makes you think that way? What makes you see that? You're going to come up with the narrative that has you see that and like, okay, so how does that work for you? You know, is that working? Is that effective? Is it producing results you want? Well, no, you know, so you can have the conversation, get them. Oh yeah. This assessment I picked up when I was a kid, maybe that's having me act this way. Let me choose these things. And now I can, let's reinterpret that story to something else, to something that's going to empower me. That makes sense.

Yeah, that's a fallacy, especially of long-held assessments. You know, you have this assessment about whatever certain things, certain people, the way life is, whatever. And you forget that it's an assessment. You forget that it's just your opinion. And at some point, it becomes, quote, not just true, but a truth. Like, undeniable. Any third observer would see it. Yes, agree with it. And the thing is, a lot of times, you have your head in a very dark place.

It is a different argument. Yeah. But

Everybody's wrong. Yeah, so listen, if you're interested in this topic, yeah. A good friend of mine, Chalmers Brothers, he is an ontological coach. He wrote this book, Language and the Pursuit of Happiness. Excellent book. Goes through the whole discipline. Talks about the five speech acts, different kinds of conversations, how to be an observer of the observer that you are. Excellent book.

Yeah. The thing about narratives is most people don't even realize they have, right. They don't even realize that they're being driven by this ocean of assessments mainly. about what's so and what they like and don't like. All the prejudices, all their opinions, it's having them operate on. They're not even choosing anymore. The narrative's choosing it for them. So when that gets exposed, yeah, it's kind of like a light bulb.

Well, that's an interesting concept. Your spouse is good at telling you stuff. Why is it so hard to hear from you? Have you ever had this experience? You've been telling your wife something for years and years and years, and suddenly one day she comes home and says, oh, guess what? I was talking to so-and-so, and they said, it's something you've been telling her for years. And it's like, bing, bing. Why is it so difficult to hear things from your spouse? It's usually because of the emotional entanglement and all the unspoken expectations we have of each other that make it difficult in the relationship and makes us resistant to You know, this other person is trying to change me. I'm not going to change. I don't care what they say, but hear from somebody else, same words. And all of a sudden it's like, wow, it's a very interesting dynamic.

Everyone we know. We have a story about them. We have a narrative about them. Like you say, what they're good at, what they're not good at, what you like about them, what you don't like about them, memories of them, good things, bad things, the whole bit. And we interact with that. Very rarely do we interact with a person. So what's valuable about that is people are not going to act with you who you think you are. They're going to act with who they think you are. They're going to have their own narrative about you. So if you want to change your identity, you need to find out what they think. And you may need to change your actions. Yeah. At least with them.

Right. Again, do you talk to them on a consistent basis over time? Yeah,

Okay. Generally, your identity of a person will slowly change over time, especially if they start taking different actions. Sure. That's what people are going to assess us on. The actions we take based on the standards that they live by, the standards they have in that domain of action. What's the expression? Your actions are so loud, I can't hear what you're saying or something like that. Oh, yeah. Action's a louder than words.

Okay. Well, talent optimization is important because you can have the best business strategy in the world, but what's going to get you the business results. It's the talent pool you have in your organization. So if your talent's kind of mediocre, you can pretty much expect mediocre results. If you optimize your talent, you have some really good talent, you're probably going to get the really good results. So talent optimization, what there is is, number one, the processes help take some of the friction between people out because everybody agrees on how to do a certain thing. The other thing is, With the ontology, you can begin to show people that people can begin to appreciate, number one, they have a narrative. Number two, it has them see things in a certain way, and that has them blind to other things. And the other person is not a jerk, not trying to be a jerk. They just have a different narrative. And when you can begin to expose all that, then you get to see the other person as a human being that just has a different way of looking at things. You know, they're not trying to bother you, not trying to irritate you. The best... One of the best examples I can think of is business owners act like, okay, this is a new idea, and we're going to be doing it this way. And you have the non-risk taker of the group, generally some of the administrative person, well, have you thought about this? And what about that? And you know what, this risk? And it's like, will you stop with all the negative waves? I need some positive energy here. I don't want to hear about all that. They're seeing what you don't see, Mr. Business Owner. They're seeing what you don't see. And that risk could come back and bite you in a bad way if you don't take heed, if you don't pay attention to that somewhat. You know, as you've seen, it's this pesky negative wet blanket that's always trying to, you know, take my ideas out. No, they're just saying, they see things that you don't see. You totally miss that as a potential risk. You know, and again, there's some, what's the word up? There's some cockiness. There's some arrogance on the part of a lot of business owners. Oh, you should see all the stuff I've handled. Yeah, if that comes up, I'll handle it. Well, yeah, and it may delay you. By six months, it might cost you $1,000. It might hurt your business in some way. But yeah, go ahead. Go headlong into it.

Well, the big thing that I've run across with that phenomenon, it's not so much that it's easier for me to do it rather than teach somebody. It's I want it done my way. Right. Business owners are very, again, one of the things we use in talent operations is this thing called predictive index. It's a software that measures a person's motivation, drives from four different perspectives. And the primary one is, well, are they dominant? Are they more of a team player? Well, entrepreneurs are going to be very dominant. So they're going to want things done my way. And that's why they get caught up with having to fool everything in the business is they want things done their way. So they run around all the different departments to make sure that that way is being done right. And that's why they can never take extended time off because they have to come in and finish the job most of the time. Yeah. You know the movie Casino?

Robert De Niro, he's talking to the bumpkin who put the slot machines in the wrong place. And he's saying, listen. Pay attention very carefully. There's three ways we do things around here. There's the right way, there's the wrong way, and there's my way. We do things my way around here, right? Typical business owner. And the scene after that, not the next scene, but one of the scenes after that, he's having breakfast with the casino owner, whatever, and they each have blueberry muffins. And one that only has any blueberries, the other one's falling apart because of the blueberry muffins, all the blueberries in it. Next scene, you see D 'Oro in the kitchen with each of the blueberries, and he's telling the chef, From now on, I want the same number of blueberries in every muffin. The chef goes, you know how long that's going to take? I don't care how long it's going to take. Same number of blueberries in every muffin. You know, they come up with some of these. My way sometimes is really unreasonable. It's usually not the best way, especially if it's in something they're not trained in, like accounting, what do you call it, logistics, warehouse management, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah. And again, the trap is they're not going to do it like you because they're not you. They don't have your narrative. I always recommend is be very, very clear in as much detail as possible. What are the results you want to produce? Focus on the results, not on how to get it done. You know, the old build a fence thing. Go tell 10 people if you want them to build a fence, you'll probably get 10 fences. Same thing with the employees. Don't tell them how to do it so much unless they have questions. But pretty much tell them what results you want to produce. Let me put it this way. The world pays us for the results we produce, not a reason why not, right? The results we produce. But most people wind up with, well, I couldn't because of that, and I couldn't because of that. I have all these reasons why not. And that's the great thing about business owners because they're very committed to producing results. They're not always clear which results those are, but they're going to produce results. Whereas most employees, you've got to remember, they're there for a paycheck. And if you don't, quote, engage them and they're not engaged, they're going to do whatever they have to do. And, yeah, they'll put up with you screaming and hollering about your way. They'll probably be looking for another job.

Right.

a bad manager. Yeah.

Wow. I mean, I've seen it. Yeah. I had this, I had this one client one time and he was just fricking horrible. When he'd lose it, he just started screaming and cussing stuff. And I saw him run off some of the best people. And after a while I was like, yeah, I really can't work anymore. You're not accountable. My private assessment was that he was just a protracted teenager. He had, he'd never grown up, even though he was in his fifties, he had never grown up. Yep. Still acting like a teenager. Stomping his feet, screaming, demanding, not being accountable is never his fault. Um, anyway, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, I agree. I'll

Yeah. The former client I'm talking about was like that too. He screamed and yelled and cussed a lot on the phone. Yeah.

For their success. My clients or their audience. Probably number one is I would think that probably learning how to check in with your narrative and see what's working, what's not working. Because your narrative runs your life. I don't care who you are. If you're a human being, your language is running you. So, or let me say it this way. Whoever controls your perspective controls reality. And if you're not trying to control your perspective, your narrative. media, friends, social, whatever, all the input that you get, that's what's going to be running you. And again, it's not, I don't know anybody who could ever do it themselves by themselves. You might want to look at getting a coach. The other thing beyond that, that's really important. And this is not just for business, but for life in general is take the time, be rigorous about determining what will satisfy you. What will bring you ultimate satisfaction? My mentor told me probably 37 years ago. He asked me the question. He says, you want to know what the secret life is? I said, yeah. Being ultimately satisfied, getting exactly what you want. I said, man, that's great. He goes, how do you do that? I said, ask what you want. He goes, yeah. I said, before that, he said, know what you want. Most people don't have no clue or walk around life with, man, this just isn't it. If only my life were more better different, I'd be happy. But it never takes time to define what more better life different is.

Yeah, it's work. It's rigorous. Most people, they want convenience. Give me the drive-thru answer. Just tell me the answer, and I'll take that.

Yeah, no, you've got to think about it. You know, the analogy I like to give is you're going to think you want to hold, you know, different things. And some of the things you're going to get, I mean, why did I ever want that? My example is when I was a teenager and first started dating, you know, crazy looked pretty exciting and fun. You know, crazy girls, exciting and fun, man. Look at, she's wild, man. That'd be fun until you date crazy. And then you got to be with the crazy. It's like, don't want crazy anymore.

You shorten your time span, too. You shorten your learning curve. But, yes, in getting to ultimate satisfaction, you're going to kiss a fair amount of frogs. I promise. Yeah. But that's just part of the process. There is no shortcut to it.

Yeah, I'll know when I get it. You could have all kinds of stuff fall in your lap and you wouldn't be satisfied. I mean, think of, you know, quote, spoiled children. The reason that they're never satisfied is because they've never been given, these are your boundaries. You know, no, you can't have that. No, you can't have that. The more you give them, the more they want. Same thing with people who never. Think about what's going to satisfy me. No matter what you give them, no matter how much money they make, no matter what kind of whatever, this ain't it.

I don't know. You asked pretty good questions.

Yeah, good.

Yeah, it goes through the whole, it starts with the entrepreneurial mindset. Like, here's all the things you notice about entrepreneurs. Here's the positive things. Here's the not-so-positive things. And compare that to what is a good manager versus what is a good entrepreneur. The skill sets are pretty much opposite. And the fallacy that a lot of business owners live in is I started the business, I own the business, therefore I'm the best person to manage the business. That sounds logical, except that managing skills are almost totally opposite of entrepreneurial skills. Managers want steady, steady, steady, steady, boring, you know, just same thing over and over again. They want. No disruptions. They want steady pace, repeatable outcomes. Entrepreneurs all over the place. You put an entrepreneur in a position where they have to do the same thing over and over and over again, I'd kill myself if I had to do that. Yeah, I know you could. That's why you're an entrepreneur, not a manager. I also go through the whole thing of what is actionable financial data and why you need weekly dashboards. You need somebody to help you understand your financial statements. You need to learn how to interpret your financial statements for yourself and how to Document processes in your business for all your critical functions so that the business can now be its own machine that's run by just running the processes. And I deal a lot with strategies, long-term strategic planning in terms of what's involved, all the things you got to think of, having it be a normal business practice. You know, the three things I always talk about.

Right. Yeah. So, yeah, again, nothing happens for humans if language doesn't happen first. So your mindset, your narrative, your whatever you want to call it, your discourse is really critical in terms of if that ain't right, nothing's going to be right following it. If you don't have the right mindset, you're not going to be effective. You're going to screw up relationships. You're going to screw up your business.

Yep. Yep.

Probably go to my website, strategicbusinessadvisors. org. It's parole advisors. If you just put advisor singular, you won't find it. But strategicbusinessadvisors. org. It talks about what we do. There's some testimonials. You can get a PDF of the well-oiled machine process where you're talking about action financial data, process documentation, and strategic planning. It kind of gives you an outline on how to go through all of them. Yeah, you can schedule an appointment. You can schedule a free appointment with me there. I'd love to talk to you.