Use the little time in your day, the cracks, to get something done – or at least started

“Do you see the positive or concentrate on the negative” – “Do you give yourself the credit you deserve for the think you got done?” – “Do you see and recognize your progress?”

I have found the longer that I or someone else needs to talk the less that has been actually and truly accomplished – and we know it. We need to be able to speak in clear and defined terms when we establish commitments and when we discuss plans and results. Telling a story in words and using text is much easier than show hard core facts and being ready to commit to being held accountable to these facts.

Too often we fall into “feeling really good about …” or “feeling confident about …” or “feeling like things are getting … “ with little to no factual information to back up our story of the past, the present or the future. And many times we are allowed to get away with this. Few people in our lives are going to call us on being nebulous, few are going to “call it tight” on us. We are at the top of the pyramid, we are the drivers, the owners, the CEOs, the Presidents. There are very few people, and probably none, who are going to call us out for a weak story and face the risk of being chastised, fired or assigned the task of making it better.

Important and strategic are not the same thing. A person can be extremely important to your business and at the same time not be a strategic asset to you or your company. Sometimes I offer important people in my company to share in the success of the company, but that does not mean I ask them, or allow them, to participate in the planning, analysis or decisions that set the strategy for my company in the medium or long term. People can play key roles and be critical the perception of your company in your client’s eyes and not sit at the table that determines growth targets, profitability targets, health care options, new product offerings or expanded service offerings.

In fact, important people can get a seat at the strategic table and then get distracted by the demands of this seat. The stress of spending clock time on both strategic items and on their day-to-day tasks can cause them to perform poorly at both of these levels – even though these people got what they wanted – or thought they wanted – or even what they specifically asked for.

It took me a long time to have this realization.  Even my A-Players needed room to learn and to grow, to “mess up” and recover from it.  A-Players vs. Perfect Player: perfect does not exist, try to understand that mistakes and other vices sometimes happen.  Be ready to coach, council & train an A-Player who makes mistakes from time-to-time.

Stare at the Beast – and stare him down. We all have demons and we have them all the time, every day. The key is to recognize them, and acknowledge they exist. Ignoring them or wishing they did not exist does not change in any way the fact that they exist and are hacking away at our conscious and unconscious minds. Beasts that we try to ignore and hope they go away consume huge amounts of our thinking and down time, and influence how we react to what the world presents us.

I created this site to help fill a gap I believe exists between business leadership theory and the execution, or implementation of theory on day-to-day basis.  I have observed and personally experienced the gap between a great seminar, class or book and the “What do I do with this information?” on Monday morning.

This site is intended for the small business owner or CEO.  I want to provide the benefit of my experience and my lessons learned from over 20 years of creating, running and growing a small business in the United States.  I do not wish to represent myself as being everything to everyone.  I do not have the answers to every question, nor do I have all the ideas.

Much of what you will read here comes not from my intellectual brilliance, but from my scars. If my lessons learned can help you prevent learning them yourself then I will consider this site a great success.

I searched for mentorship & coaching for years. I hired CEO Coaches, leadership coaches and life coaches. I have read, and continue to read a lot of books.  I also read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of TED Talks.  I have joined and participated in local, regional, national and even international business leadership and life improvement organizations. I participated in deep, immersive experiences that took 12-18 hours a day for 4-7 days at a time. I found a lot of good, a lot of bad and a lot of self-serving recommendations. I found a lot of big, generic theories that got me and everyone else around me excited. I found a lot of great events, ideas and materials. I saw a lot of people get addicted to events, entertainment and excitement. And then I went back home, back to the office and struggled with converting those theories, concepts and events into a specific action item at 8 AM on Monday morning. I found a gap between all the excitement and all the theory and Monday morning in the real world.

I found books written by former US Presidents and the CEOs of successful and large corporations to be entertaining and interesting. I also found them discussing the use of resource pools and access to the kind of money that I had no chance of reaching. They were great reads, but taught me little about the day-to-day leadership of my company.

I was looking for basic answers. How was I doing as a leader? How could I do better? What should I change and how should I prioritize my changes? How do I improve profitability? How do I improve employee retention? How do I stop the revolving door at the top positions of my organization? Was I behaving in a manner that forced my leaders out the door?

I have spoken to small business owners and CEOs since my experience and believe that many small business leaders struggle with a search for basic help and advice. What has worked? What hasn’t?

My wife runs the day-to-day operations of our horse farm – Summerfield Farm (check it out at SummerfieldFarm.com).  She leads a staff of six and asked me a great question; “Is there always a weakest link when it comes to staff?”

The answer is an unequivocal YES.  Yes, there is always a weakest link in our chains.  I believe we are deceiving ourselves if we think this is not true.  We could be turning a blind eye to a situation we are aware of, or we are choosing to not look for the weak link.  Sometimes we choose to not look because we simply can’t handle the thought of addressing yet another staff issue – another termination, another mentoring or coaching session, another ‘calling it tight’ session.  These can be emotionally draining situations and sometimes we choose to let one slide for a while.

I believe it important to understand the different reasons that cause a weakest link.  The reasons are diverse and not all are bad.  Being unaware of the reasons are what can cause us pain.  Weakest links can occur because:

• We chose to hire poorly.  We were feeling the pain of not having the position staffed and we shortchanged ourselves to just get the slot filled.
• We chose wisely and the person performed exceptionally well until…  People have life events that we may or may not be aware of that deeply and sometimes permanently affect their ability to perform well.
• We made our chain stronger, we made it better.  We uncover lesser weaknesses by addressing the greater weaknesses.  A link that appeared strong when the chain had weaker weaknesses suddenly becomes the new biggest problem.
• We chose wisely, we made our chain stronger, but we now expect more lift out of our chain.  We expect our staff to care for 20 horses and clients instead of 10.  We grow our company from $5M in annual revenue to $10M, then $15M then $30M.  The expectations of a chain expected to lift a $30M organization are far different than the expectations of a chain to lift a $5M organization.

I have found that I can reduce the pain of weak links by taking the time to hire only strong links, swiftly addressing existing or emerging weak links and being proactively aware of my increasing expectations of my chains.

We all have busy lives.  We want to please.  We say yes too often to too many people about too many things.

Pretty soon our lives resemble Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads.

“And you may ask yourself Well…How did I get here?

And you may say to yourself My God!…What have I done?!”

Someone is in control.  It is either us or the world we constructed around ourselves.

Taking control of our time is critical to being an effective CEO and business owner.  We must follow Stephen Covey’s Habit #3 which is to “Put First Things First.”  This means determining our highest priority outcomes and scheduling the actions required to achieve them.

Scheduling is critical.  To be truly effective and achieve the outcomes we desire we must consistently implement the discipline of maintaining and then sticking to a detailed schedule of our time.

Scheduling each day – to the hour – can take some getting used to.  Scheduling today is tough; it’s already committed.  Scheduling tomorrow is a tiny bit easier.  Scheduling next week is much easier and scheduling two weeks out is far easier.

We have to schedule actual work time for the tasks we must accomplish in order to achieve our highest priority outcomes.  We can start small.  Schedule 30 minutes each day next week.  Then 60 minutes each day the week after that.  Then 90 minutes, then …

We can train the world around us to be submissive to our highest priority outcomes if we do this slowly and consistently.  Consistent implementation over months can create 10-20 hours a week (and more) dedicated to our highest outcomes.

It took me over 6 months, but I now have a minimum of 20 hours in my calendar each week dedicated to my highest outcomes.  Some weeks this even reaches 30 hours.

We, and the world around us, must be able to physically see the dedication of time to our highest priorities and outcomes.  The world will respect our decision to take control of our day and the allocation of our time if we train it properly.

If our clients, or potential clients are coming to us in a distressed condition we will need to enter the ICU to treat, or service, them.

Some business models are proactively designed to support clients in crisis or emergency mode, but most are not.

Clients in crisis tend to destabilize our environment because they are panicky, demanding, emotional and time consuming.  Many times the cost to our organization is higher than we initially thought and the return on our decision is greatly diminished and can quickly become a loss.

This loss may not be measured in absolute dollars.  The loss may be in the opportunity cost of so much attention being paid to one, or a small number of distressed client.  Are other clients and potential clients being ignored or underserved because our organization is so busy caring for the client in distress?

This loss can be masked by our desire to take on a new client, increase our footprint and grow our revenue.  This loss can also be masked by our desire to be helpful and compassionate.

We should make sure the decision to take on a client in crisis is made “eyes wide open” to the impact on our organization and our current clients.

We should avoid waking up one day to the reality that we are in the ICU and didn’t even know it.  Even the ICU can seem normal if you have been there long enough.