EP198: From Operator to Owner: Mastering the Art of Business Transition with Pete Mohr

30,000 foot view is just celebrated my 30th anniversary in business. So kind of excited about that about a month or so ago. Congratulations. I used to have a bathroom renovation company and about 15 years ago I sold it. And the fellow that bought it from me called me up and he said, Hey Pete, you own the business for 15 years. I've owned the business for 15 years. It served us both well. And, uh, you know, so that was, that was kind of a, a little, yeah. happy moment, I guess. I mean, it goes by quick, Brad. Holy Moses. But at the same time, I had my bathroom renovation company. We also had a cleaning franchise that we bought that had 30 clients, and then we built it to 300 clients and exited that business. I helped other people buy and sell businesses. I was a licensed business broker for a short while, which is how I found a business that I currently still own. We own a shoe store. We own a couple of shoe stores, actually. But at the time, we had bought one called Shootopia, and that was in 2000.2010, so 14 years later, still own some shoe stores and involved there. And a lot of the stuff that I do now, I spend a lot more of my time working with other business owners, helping them move from operator to owner, like we talked about before hopping on the call here. And I work about a day a week or so in my shoe stores right now, because it's my belief that basically as you... build your business you should be able to work in it in the area that you most love to work in and when i'm working there i really love doing what i'm doing and when i'm not working there i'm helping other business owners like our listeners here today and working through some of their trials and tribulations and helping them free up their time and make more money

we had a franchise and I was franchisee number 20. It was called Surface Doctor and they had started in 1994 and I was 23 at the time and I'm like, this is something I could afford. That was the main thing. You know, it's like I can actually buy this one with my savings. So I bought it, bought my Astrovan. We were running Astrovans back then, labeled it all up, Surface Doctor. We did bathtub refinishing, bathtub liners, bathtub wall systems. We refinished kitchen cabinets. I refinished appliances. Back in the days when everything was harvest gold and avocado green and pink and all that kind of stuff. I worked mostly for landlords, but we were in about a thousand bathrooms a year, Brad. So we did a lot of work. work and saw a lot of a lot of apartments. I mean, we did homeowners too, but the bulk of our business was for landlords. And yeah, it's like I said,30 years later, still going strong for James, the current owner of it now. The interesting thing was the franchisor changed three times in five years. And after the third change, I just said, you know what, this isn't for me. I'm not a great franchisee. They aren't great franchisors. I bought it out and just called it Surface Medic. So for the last 25 or so years, it's been called Surface Medic. So we defranchised it properly and went our own way after that. But it was definitely one of the things, you know, I've held a spray gun in HVLP. I've ripped apart bathrooms and tore out tubs and put in, you know, shower bases and all that kind of stuff. a big part of my past and something that I just loved doing at the time. And, you know,15 years later, I'm into something else, but I certainly have a unique sort of spot in my heart. And two of my kids are contractors. So that has stayed in the family as well.

Did the sales, did the spray and did, you know, the liners, all that kind of stuff. Like Dig in and go. You had to. I mean, I was a young kid. I didn't. I was 23 and, you know, had met my wife, but we weren't formally married yet. And it's like getting going. And, you know, you have to put in your time for a lot of people that don't have deep pockets. So I built it up and, you know, got it to a point where I was busy pretty much full time, handed my truck off to a tech that I had hired and then got my next truck, started sales and then built out the truck fleet that way. And I ended up being more of a salesperson. And then we added that other business, the cleaning company. So I was selling for both the businesses and sort of had operation managers in both of those. and overseeing both of them as time passed on. But I've cleaned more toilets than you could imagine. I've scrubbed more urinals than you could imagine and sprayed more bathtubs than you could imagine in my past. It was just part of getting going, you know?

Well, you know, I wrote a little book earlier this year, and it's on a sort of a foundation that I call the five Ps. And I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but basically the five Ps are this. Understand your promise, align your products, or in this case, services. So understand your promise, align your products, your process, and your people to that so that you can have the right amount of profit. And obviously there's always a sort of catch 22 around, do I have enough money in the business to hire somebody else to do what I'm doing? And there is a leap of faith that you have to go through in order to do that. But one of my other hats as a certified Colby consultant, one of the things I do is help people understand their unique strengths. And if you can work more in your strengths, I found that although I could do all the work. I was a better salesperson than I was a cleaner or a better salesperson than I was a bathtub refinisher or a acrylic wall installer. I can do it. It just wasn't my unique ability. And so once I freed myself up of being on the truck every day and going out and doing the work and running the routes and doing the installs and all that kind of stuff, our business grew and our business grew even more because I was able to go out and do what is naturally best for me, which is the sales. And from that perspective, you know, there does come a point in time where there's a leap of faith where you just have to say, you know what, I'm going to do it. But the big thing is, especially like we talked about, if you're not deep pocketed, is the fact that what am I if I take myself off the truck, what am I going to do now in order to grow the business and make sure that all the guys have work and that, you know, we always knew in advance what was coming down the pipe. I knew if there wasn't enough work in the pipeline and it's like, OK, man, I got to hit it. I got to hit the property manager. track and stop in a bunch of different buildings and see if they got some work for us this month so that I can fill the guys up.

Yes and no, because if you are truly best at doing what you do, which is whatever it is, and that is your specialty, then hire a manager to run that side of it and you stay on the tools, you know, and it doesn't matter whether you're. furniture repair guy or a plumber or up and, you know, running the crew on top of the roof, you know, if that's what you are truly gifted at, then that's what you should stay at. And you hire the strengths around you that you need to grow the business. So I ended up being a better salesperson than I was a refinisher. So I ended up doing the sales, but if I was truly the best refinisher in the fleet. And that's where my talents are best used. Then it would have been better for me to hire a salesperson. And that's where understanding where you truly want to be, because by the way, if you're the business owner, you have the right to do what you want to do first. So, you know, understand that if you're good at it and you love it, and here's the way to tell. I've got this little exercise I call love it or leave it that I run most of my clients through. And here's the way to tell. If at the end of the day. you've worked your 10 hour shift, you know, or 12 hours, whatever the case is, and you are completely run down, completely worn out. And you're like this every single day. You're probably not working in your unique strengths. If you, like in my case, if I went out and sold all day and I hit, you know, I like had the best day ever and it was 12 days long or 12 hours long, I could go and do it again. Cause that was just like what I love to do. And yeah, actually, I was

Think about bookkeeping, Brad, like how many contractors love bookkeeping? Right.

And that's one of the first things I got rid of. Right. And I'll tell you, um, just from a background perspective, like I have two business degrees. I got an MBA. I have another business degree. I'm good at accounting. I'm actually good at it. I hate doing it. Hate it. I hate balancing my visa. I haven't balanced a visa in 30 years at work. It was one of the very first things that I hired, even though I'm capable. And that's the thing. Most small business owners feel as though if they're capable, they should be doing it. My feeling is that you shouldn't be doing it if you're capable and you don't like it. You should be letting somebody else who loves to do that. My bookkeeper at work, when she balances the visa, she's like, woohoo, woohoo. I love that. Woohoo. And I'm like, oh my God, what a, like that just drains me. Right. If you think about spending two hours. doing all that stuff, doing the payroll, doing all your invoicing, all that kind of stuff. That stuff can be hired out to somebody who loves to do it and it's giving them their love. Just because it's not your love doesn't mean it's not theirs. They're going to be better at it. They're going to love doing it. They're going to be more efficient and they're going to free you up so that you can then go and do what you love to do within your business.

Like she, she

And when we look at that, I mean, that could be a sales position. That could be, you know, your operations manager position. That could be the next guy on top of the roof. That could be the guy that's, you know, working the tow truck or the lift truck or the caterpillar, you know, like whatever the case is, it doesn't matter. You just sort of starting to, as your business grows, starting to split and separate these different duties and understanding that there are other people. Here's one of the things. Most business owners think everybody's like them. They're not. And that's a good thing. And we can't superimpose what we are like onto everybody out there because We need to have differences within our business. We need to have people that have unique differences that are really good at doing these different things in a better way to bring different ideas to the business so the business will grow better and ultimately become more valuable.

Well, if you really just can't and it's not doable, then you look for ways to free your time up. And it might be automations out there. It might be a better system for scheduling your appointments. It might be reorganizing your time. Because unless you're really good at time management, so many business owners aren't. The idea around time management is such a key piece. So if you just can't afford to hire somebody, then what you need to do is you really need to buckle down on time management and you need to really become a master of your schedule. and making sure that you're starting to use priority as a focus and making sure that everybody in your team starts using priority. I'll use an example. I've got a buddy of mine, great guy. I've known him all of my life since we were in public school. He's a general contractor, but I'll tell you, not a very successful one. He's scraped by for the last 30 years. He goes to Home Depot probably four times a day because they forget. stuff and they don't do like, it's like they're off to, Oh, I need this. Oh, I need this. And, and he's leaving the job a lot of time, not even sending one of his guys, you know, cause he hasn't set up a credit card or an account or whatever to let somebody of sort of lesser authority to go and take care of that stuff. And, you know, this kind of stuff, I see it over and over and over again. And this is a friend of mine who has asked me various advice over the years. And I've said to him many, many times, why do you even ask me? You never do anything that I suggest anyway. So let's just talk about hockey. You're my buddy. Let's talk about hockey because there's no sense in talking about business, right? People have to want to change. And if they want to change and they want to take some steps to improve their business and their lives, people like you and I are here to help that journey, but they have to actually want it. That's

It's a real interesting thing. You were talking about national sort of coaching and I just got back. I mean, I live in Canada, but last week I was in Austin talking at a conference with regards to this. Had so many people come up after the talk and basically say, yeah, I get it. And here's the thing. You kind of bear down in your business, like we talked about, especially those first one to three years, right? It's like, I'm doing what I got to do. I'm working those hours. I'm putting it in. I'm seven days a week. But after that. You know, you got to really start looking at what the goal is and some of these sort of things. When we start looking strategically at things, you should always be exit ready, not just when you're thinking of retirement. And I'll tell you why, because most of the business owners, business owners hang out with business owners. And so you probably know someone who came into difficulty in their business because they died. Death is a key issue of why businesses have to be exit, obviously, right? The second one is divorce. Divorces cause a ton of business exits. Partnership disagreements. Are you in a partnership with someone else? Maybe it's good right now, but just like divorce, it's not always good forever.

Like I said, as soon as you start triggering one of these things, somebody can reflect upon it, right? Here's another one. Disability. What happens if you fall off the roof and you're out for three months with a broken leg? That might cause the business to teeter, especially if you're the linchpin in every decision that's happening in your business. And the last one is distress. We all saw what COVID did to certain industries and whether the ups and downs of different things that happen in the world that we have no control over can cause business failure. And that's unplanned exit. If you're going to plan your exit because you either want to retire or you want to take this whatever bit of money and put it into something else that's more interesting or whatever the case is, that's great too. But you can see that whether you're planned or whether you're unplanned, your business always needs to be exit ready. Because especially in unplanned, if it's not exit ready, you're leaving money on the table for the rest of your family and for yourself. And values being left that should have been planned for. that should have been there. Because if you get to a point where you have to unplanned or in an unplanned exit, you get to a point where you get cancer or something like that, car accident, whatever the case is, and you have to let this business go, you need the most amount of money, not the least amount of money. And people are going to take advantage of it knowing that you're in the predicament that you're in on the other side of the buy sell. It's got to be ready.

Here's the thing. As business owners, you can't completely split your business and your life as though everybody says, oh, you should be able to just break those apart. You can't. And as business owners,70% of business owners are upset one year after they exit their business. 70%.

They don't have a life after plan. They don't know what they want to do with this money. They get their money and then they, you know, are you going to invest it in something else? And if you're thinking of retiring, well, you can only golf so much. You can only go on so many cruises. Like after you get through your trips that you want to take and, you know, I'm going to play golf three times a week or whatever the case is and, you know, go skiing a few times a week or whatever your passion is. Once you kind of get over the initial hump of that, then what? And that usually takes about a year. And then they're like, what the heck did I sell my business for? Because they didn't actually plan. So part of exit planning is actually planning what your life is going to look like, not only for the first year, but for the next 20. And really digging down into that, not just over just saying it in passing. I'm talking dig down into it. And then you have to see personally, do you have the finances to do that? Whatever you want to do. Because if you don't have the finances in order, That's a problem. So there's three legs of the stool. One is what's the plan? Two is do you have the finances? And three is the business ready to go? And is the business ready to go? If the business is actually part of those finances and you're expecting a sum of money from your business to pop into those finances to support your dreams. What's the valuation of your business? It's a most important thing that you actually have your business valued. And when I'm talking about value, I'm not talking about saying that, hey, I went golfing with my buddy last week and he owns a contracting business. He's got a roofing business. I got a roofing business. He sold his for 5 million bucks. I should be able to get 5 million bucks. That's not good enough. We're talking about a range of value. You don't necessarily need an exact number depending on how quickly you are away from wanting to exit, but a range of value of what your business is truly worth. so that you can then plan. And if it's not worth what you think it is, which is what happens to most people who get a range of value, they have an idea that's often significantly higher than the reality of it. And if all of their planning, both financially and personal planning is based on a wrong number, that's a problem.

You know, it's... It's kind of sad, Brad, because most of the people haven't put those three parts together. And that's the first thing you need to do with exit planning. It's like, have this plan so that I know how much money I need. Do I have the amount? And I'm talking outside of your house. You still need a house to live in, right? You still need a car to drive. What's the business worth? And most of the time for small business owners, the business is their single biggest investment, but they don't even know what it's worth. You know what your stock portfolio is worth? You can go online right now and it tells you, oh, I got a hundred grand in my stock account. Great. Well, what's my business worth? I don't know. Buddy sold his for 5 million, so I should be able to get 5 million. It's really peculiar, but it happens all the time. So step one is get a range of value. And step two is... understand what you need as far as the here and life after, and does it make sense? And if it doesn't make sense, then it's like, call Brad, call Pete, let's help you get to where you need to go so that we can push you through to what you want out of your business. Because the idea of moving from operator to owner is that your business actually does the work for the life that you want to live, not you live for your business all the time. That's the idea, right? Your business thinking about foundations and construction, your business should be the foundation for your life. If you're always the one at the foundation holding that up, that's a problem. So we got to dig into those five Ps. We got to dig into better process. That's explainable. That's transferable. We got to dig into our product selection and our service selection. We got to dig into our people, which the people parts are your ideal customer, your ideal suppliers and your ideal other outsourced partners that help deliver your promise so that we can have the right amount of profit because businesses aren't sold unless they're profitable.

We call it hub and spoke in the value builder methodology that we use. And if you are the hub and spoke of the business. that definitely affects your ability to sell the business. I'm not saying you can't sell the business, but I am saying it affects the valuation of the business. And, you know, if I have a million bucks to spend, I'll just use a million bucks to throw it out there. If I have a million bucks to spend, do I want to spend a million bucks and work 70 hours a week and earn whatever that business earns on top of my million dollar, you know, like for a more risky. investment than if I just put it in a bank stock or something like that? Like if I had a million bucks, what are my other options for my million bucks? What if I bought another house or three other houses and watch them go up in value without me touching them over the course of the year, right? So most business owners don't realize that for anybody who has this sum of money that they deem their business is worth, they have other options. Lots of them. lots of other options. And so they have to be able to equate the value of this business, whatever it is, I'm spending 100 grand, a million,10 million, doesn't matter. I have to be able to equate that amount of money with my return on my investment and my salary if I'm going to be working 50 or 60 hours in it. And if I'm going to be working 10 hours in it, fine. It's more of an investment. If I'm going to work 50 or 60, it's my job. So I need to make the money on my investment plus whatever my value is worth. And you were saying, hey, your value is worth 200 bucks an hour. Well, then I need to make another 400 grand on top of.

Well, here's the other thing. I mean, you know, I've got this, it's called the value builder assessment. It's on my website. And one of my websites is called the exit ready business. And when you go there, you click the button and you can take this assessment. It takes about, I don't know,20 or 30 minutes to take it. It breaks it down into these eight different compartments. And like I said, one of them is hub and spoke. How involved are you in all the decisions? One of them is customer-based, right? And how can you prove to me? that especially if you are the hub of your business, how can you prove to me that when I buy your business, all your customer base is still going to come to me? Do you have contracts in place? Are you the primary person that talks to these people every time? Because when you leave, you're not going to be here. So how confident am I, which is why people want to buy businesses, because they are confident in what they're buying, just like you would buy. whatever stock or anything that you're thinking, hey, even a house. I'm going to buy this because I'm confident that it's going to go up in value and that I can resell it. Well, if I'm buying your customer list and you're the person that sold every single one of these people for the last 10 years, how confident am I that they're going to keep the relationship with me as I come in as the newbie? This is a problem. So part of the process needs to be that you need to have other people start selling your best customers other than you. Right? That's part of growing the value of your business. Part of growing the value of your business is you need to have other suppliers other than the two or three key suppliers that give everything. Because if that supplier leaves in any given way, folds, goes bankrupt, any of those kind of things, the person now doesn't have the confidence in being able to deliver the service that you've always provided. And the value of the business goes down. You got to have backups. The same sort of thing goes with any other suppliers. If you have a general contracting business and you have one window person that does everything, one roofing guy, all those kinds of things, think about those interpersonal relationships. Think about the cashflow that goes in between all of those. Think about the confidence that they'll have in you as the new owner. All of those things can tear down the valuation of a business if you don't have backups.

Or you go in and you say, hey, listen, I'm, you know, the old guy used to do net 15. My terms are net 30 and, you know, whatever you're changing. Because most business owners, when they buy a new business, they're changing stuff. They're doing it their way, all that kind of stuff. And that necessarily doesn't go off so great with all the people that are used to the way it is. Yeah.

And you had it in the system that the tile guy always comes in after sub floor. And it's like, it was just a system. It was there and everything was working. Well, now I'm going to tweak the system because it's my business and you've left the building.

Yeah, as much as you can do contractual sort of things are the way to go. Get everything in writing is the best. And I know that doesn't always happen, especially in small business. But the idea here is as much as you can do and have it all written down, like it can't be in your head because your head doesn't transfer with the business. It's got to be written down in a process form so that the new owner can say, oh, I need to go from here to here. What's the step-by-step procedure? I know that's tiresome for some contractors who don't want to do that kind of stuff, but if you want value in your business, you have to be able to prove in due diligence that this is how we make the amount of money that we make to justify the cost that you are going to pay for your business. It has to be written down. That's this key piece of process. This is the biggest thing, especially in the contractor space. Process is not documented. And where it is documented, nobody's actually assigned authority. It's one thing to have process, but if nobody has authority to run it outside of you, then the process isn't really that worthy. So the idea here is that... I've got another little model called the four A's and it's assess it, address it, align it, and assign it all around accountability. Assess what needs to be done, address it, which means how are we going to do it? Align it, align it to the person in the accountability chart or organizational chart in your business that can do it other than you. And then here's the thing, assign it. Don't just give them a title and not actually give them the authority to do it.

It needs to be at that level of detail because when people are spending a good chunk of cash, they want to have confidence that it will continue on. Just because you did. whatever last year, a hundred thousand in profit. And the year before he did a hundred thousand in profit, you've proven over the last three years, you've done a hundred thousand in profit. The last three years doesn't mean that it's going to continue next year when I buy this business, because especially if you can't show me on paper, how to do it, because you're going to be gone. And if you're the hub and spoke, and if you have all the tied connections with the customer base, and if you're the guy with that has all the connections with the team that we have and the subs that we have. which in most cases, that is the case. And I mean, let's be real. But at the same time, how can you be working? Remember, we're not talking about exiting the business for most of the cases, people listening here in the next six months. We're talking about the long term. We're talking about five years,10 years down the road, right? And if that's the case, just be thinking about these sort of things. Who else can go in? Like even, you know, getting back to our initial sort of conversation around going to Home Depot four times a day as the owner. One of your guys is making the run to go pick up the ABS pipe. Like they've got the connection now with the plumbing store. They've got the connection with, you know, the plywood dude. They got connection with the roofing store. And if you take over the business next week, it's going to be that guy going and getting it anyway. And those people aren't going to see any change. But if you're the person doing all of those little connections every single time, and next week it's me, how many questions are going to be asked? Oh, where's Jim?

That causes a lot of frustration and a lot of ambiguity and a lot of people wondering what the heck's happening here. That's not good for the value of your business.

Most of the time, it's because people just think they're too busy to even think about. And don't think, especially when we talk about the stuff that we talked about off the bat, the unplanned exit, it'll never happen to me. It's called insurance, folks. You never think you're going to, your truck's never going to get smashed by somebody else, but you probably have been in an accident. And it's called insurance. With your most valuable asset next to your house, why would you not insure it by doing some of this work ahead of time, by building the value in your business so that one day when you do want to exit or you have to exit, you get the most value for it at the time, which is going to help you with the legacy of your family and all the other things that you want to do with the money that you get from the hard work that you've done for all the years within your business.

I do. I do. And I think there's a few different things that wrap around that. One of the big ones is what I call the freedom side of things. And if you want to move from frustration to freedom, You can't be making those calls all the time. You'll never get free. One of the guys I worked with had his business for 10 years, never took more than a weekend off ever. I mean, that's sad to me. And if you truly want to work seven days a week, then fine. But if you don't, and if you have a family and you do want to go see your parents or your kids or go away with your friends, whatever the case is, without being attached at the hip to your phone. Then you need to start doing this stuff. You need to start having process that other people can do without you and decisions can be made without you. I like to use the line decisions need to be made at the lowest possible level of the business. I'll say it again because I think it's important. Decisions need to be made at the lowest possible level of the business. And I'm going to go back to our shoe stores because everybody's bought shoes. Imagine if you went into a shoe store. and bought a pair of size nine without trying them on. And you got home, put them on, and you're actually a size nine and a half or 10. So you go back to the store and you're like, okay, I bought a nine. I just kind of whipped into the store and grabbed them on my way home, but I need a nine and a half. And they said, oh, nine and a half, that's above my pay grade. I can't actually make that decision. I need to get the assistant manager. And the assistant manager comes over and says, oh, nine and a half. Oh, geez. You know, I can do nine and a half in Nike, but I can't do nine and a half in Adidas. I don't have that level of power. So I'm going to need to get the manager. But the manager isn't in until Monday morning. And this is a Friday. So you can come back on Monday. And if you come back on Monday, then, you know, Jen will be in the store and she'll be able to help you out. This is what goes on with your team if you're making all the decisions out there in your job site. And how frustrating can that be for the client and for the team members who know what to do, but don't have the authority to do it? And they keep asking you and phoning you and texting you and, you know, sending you messages. And like, I need to go ahead. I need, I need this to go ahead. I need this to go ahead. And you're holding onto the power. It's a stopgap for growth too. You know, there's so many reasons why that's fundamentally wrong. When something as easy as a change from a nine and nine and a half, it's here, it's here in stock. Here you go. Here's your box. Like, take it, you know, make the customer happy and move. But so many small business owners don't allow authority to be made without them. It's, it's crippling.

This is about the shoes.

That's that four A's right. Align it, assign it, or address it, assess it, align it and assign it. And the assigned part is the hard part for a lot of small business owners. And here's the thing. If you're the business owner and somebody is coming to you, one of your team members, and you're saying to yourself, you're saying to yourself. Oh my gosh, they've been with me for eight years. They should know what to do. Why are they coming to me with this? Because you haven't assigned authority yet. That's why. It's your fault, not theirs. Because you haven't actually said you have the authority to make this call. And the best way to do that is when they come to you with one of those questions and you're thinking to yourself, oh my God, they've done this a hundred times. Why don't they just do it? What you say is, what would you do if I wasn't here? and wait in uncomfortable silence. Don't give them the answer. Your answer is, what would you do if I wasn't here? And just wait. And then finally, they'll say, oh, I would have done this, this, and this. And you're probably going to say, exactly, go for it. And if there is a coaching moment there where you think something needs to be changed and you said, you know what? I would have gone up to step six there, but in step seven, I just would have tweaked that. Go for it. And now we've got a coaching moment out of it. But if they've been with you a long time, you know, they know the answer. 95% of the time, they've already got the answer. You just haven't given them the authority. So you basically just ask them to tell you. And now you're giving them the authority by saying exactly. That's exactly what I would do if I was or what you should have done if I wasn't here today. Yeah, that's gold. Now they're never going to ask you on that again.

You know, one of the things that, I often see with small businesses when we start working with them is they, they don't even have an accountability chart. Like they don't have an organizational chart.

And I like to use the word accountability chart, uh, as opposed to organizational chart, because I really don't care what somebody's title is. I just want to know what they're accountable for. And. Are you accountable for buying all the materials? Are you accountable for the sales? Are you accountable for the marketing? Are you accountable for the install? Are you accountable for this crew going out to this job site? And when we have the accountability chart and somebody new comes on board, you show them the accountability chart. Now they know right off the bat who's in charge. It's all I need to know as a new person on board. Where do I go for my answers until I get accustomed to what's going on here? Most small business owners don't have that. And you should have an accountability chart if you're any more than two or three people. It starts, right? It starts. It's like, if I'm not here, who's making the decision? Is that the person, you know, the crew leader of the team? Is it the, in my case, the store manager at one of our stores? Or whatever the case is, who's in charge? Who's the person that signs my paycheck? Who's the person that does the payroll? Who's the person that does these different things? Because that one person might have several different accountabilities on the accountability chart, and that's fine. But if you get into problems where there's two or three people in one box on the accountability chart, that's very confusing because nobody knows who to go to. Who is the boss here? I need to know. Because if I talk to you, but you're not the actual boss, then there's miscommunication over all kinds of stuff. All kinds of things start breaking down. Doesn't look good. Doesn't look good to the customer base. I mean, it's just not good. We need to have clear lines of communication, process driven and accountability that are around those things for a better business for ourselves, but also to give confidence to a new owner that. If this is what you, if these are the things, here are the people in charge of all these different areas of our business. And this is how, you know, basically shit gets done. Right. Right. Yeah.

do. Yeah. Including right up to my general manager of the stores and stuff like that. And they buy thousands of dollars worth of shoes without my knowledge, you know, because we have a system and a budget in place that allows it to happen. And if things go out of that zone, then I, then I'm alerted. But within that zone, it's like, just do it. I don't need to be involved in those decisions. We have a good process. We know what our budget is. We know how things get done. You know you're accountable for it. And way we go. So I haven't hired a person, Brad, in probably six or seven years now. And it's because my team does that. Now, if the two... People that report to me that directly run most of the stuff within our shoe side of things, if one of them left, I would be in the position of hiring because that's my responsibility, those two positions. But underneath those two positions, everything else is their responsibility. So if it's their responsibility, why would I hire their people? I mean, ultimately, I'm the owner. They are my people. But ultimately, they're working with them every day. I told you off the bat, I only work in our shoe stores about a day a week. I don't circumvent any authority. When I go in working in the store, if I'm going to go in and work in the store on a busy Saturday and sell some shoes, I'm working for the store manager that day. They aren't working for me just because I'm the business owner. I'm going in like any other salesperson saying, hey, what's our goals today? What do you need me to do? How can I serve? Because I'm there as the salesperson on that level of the accountability chart that day, not as the owner. I'm never going to circumvent them. They're in charge of running the store. I'm not. I love it. And my team knows that everybody on my team knows that I go in there and I, and if they ask me a question, I'm like, have you talked to Jen about that? She's the store manager.

It's got to go through her. She's the store manager. Like, so I'm always deferring anything that anybody who's, let's say two levels down, if they're coming to me on anything, I always defer to the person in charge first. And I say, have you talked to so-and-so with regards to this? And what did they say? And often I'll say, well, you should talk to them first. And then once you lay that out from accountability structure, they don't come to you anymore. They're not trying to bypass you anymore, which happens in business, small business a lot. And then you get all kinds of hurt feelings and stuff like that. And then people who you've assigned authority to now, now they're questioning, well, do I have authority? He went and did this and he didn't even talk to me about it.

I mean, I was at a trade show last week. I love looking at new stuff and fun stuff and interesting things. I'll bring that back. I don't buy them. I bring them back to my team and I'm part of the team that does all the buying. But when we sit down and we look at it, it's like, here's I just saw all these, you know, seven new brands and all this kind of stuff. And and what do you guys think? And ultimately it's like, okay, well, you know, now we go back to the budget. Now we go back to our process and if it fits in, maybe we'll get some, but I'm not just going to override them and say, Hey, here's, here's the new thing. Like, you know, order a thousand pair and let's go. No, that's not our system. Yeah. Like we have a system to do things. We have a system that works through that process, that middle P that I said, you know, promise, product, process, people, profit. That's how it works. It has to work in a system or else it's not transferable to anybody else. And you will be making the decisions for the rest of your life. Like my buddy is still a dear friend of mine and still suffers in business. Yeah.

Well, my book, it's called The Business Owner Breakthrough, which is the same as my podcast. It's on Amazon, so you can pick it up. It's a short read, nice and good for most of the business owners don't want to read 400 pages. It's about 100 pages long, so it's a quick one. And, you know, the best way to get a hold of me really is at my website. Pete-MoHR. com. And you can get to all my other websites off of that. So Pete-MoHR. com. And all of the stuff sort of rolls down from there. And happy to chat with anybody. And if you want to take your value builder assessment, you can take that and we'll hop on a call and go through that too. I'm happy to spend some time with anybody listening here today.

Based on what we talked about today, I would say traction is a really good one to read from Gina Wickman. It's the EOS philosophy entrepreneurial operating system. We've been talking a lot about process today. And I do like traction. I use sort of a modified version of traction with my clients. It is a good book. It does get you thinking about structuring your business in a way that is good for you, but also good for a potential owner down the road if that's what you're looking to do too.

Yes, sir.

It has been a pleasure, Brad. Thanks and make it a great day.