Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam.
Foreign.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: It's not about hype. It's about structure. If your foundation is weak, your goals are really just wishes. Today's not going to be about talking about wishes, but it's going to be about building your foundation first, then scaling yourself to be advisory or value focused with intention. Hi, I'm Ryan Kahn and you're watching Pivotal Change. This is our first episode of the new year, so we're going to talk a little bit about those, those cliche things like new starts, fresh starts, or making those big changes that you need to be successful in the new year. This material comes CS Business consulting. And it's been used all over the country to help people get themselves to that next level. So one of the things I want to walk you through is I've got a little presentation I'm going to present with you and this comes from my Leadership Lab. And your journey really starts here. With leadership, you have to look in the mirror. You have to become a better leader. And that is uniform across relationships, any industry, anything that you put yourself into team and everything really comes down to leadership and mindset. It's really important that we understand that most businesses stall not because of a lack of effort, but they really stall because of a lack of clarity and alignment to a clear vision.
You see, when the leader is unclear, that means the entire team is inconsistent.
This year, I want you to build clarity that works even when you're not in the room. You don't even have to be around or available for your clarity to push the mission and push the vision farther.
There's something called business foundations that falls underneath the Leadership Lab and it has business foundations, the five M's and there's some other entrepreneur journey things that happen inside of that. But this effectively provides a roadmap. So I'm going to be leaning on this roadmap for the starting portions of this episode.
CS Business Consulting Leadership Lab. It goes through the process of forging. When we do some of our more accounting specific work, we call it Forging an Advisory Firm and Ryan Forges leaders is the tick tock the YouTube the pages that you go to to find this. Because forging is a process that requires heating up, striking hot metal, capitalizing on the moment when things are moldable and putting in effort with precision to make things change and create something new.
The seven principles of influential leadership, or the seven pillars as I've renamed it because it stands on a foundation and it ultimately holds up. Everything else is something that's a little more high level but extremely practical. So I'll just go through these seven pillars with you real quick. The number one thing you must understand is that these seven pillars are held up on a foundation of servant leadership. So you've heard leadership leadership already in this episode, and that's what all of these things are built on and hold up the rest of your structure that you're going to build in your life.
Number one is being humble. You want to start the year by checking your ego. Look back on some of the friction moments and see how much they really had to do with your own personal ego.
Ask yourself some questions. What worked this year? What failed? How do I need to change those things? And if you want to apply some wisdom to that, you'll say, whatever worked and whatever failed, I can apply both of those success or failure stories to other areas of my life and save yourself from having to make the mess ups and the screw ups in those areas.
The pillar number two is giving permission.
One of the greatest things that we just completely omit as a human and more so as a leader is we fail to give proper permissions to our people. So they don't know what they can or cannot do. If you give your team permission to go ahead and tackle these big problems, to take initiative early, to ask questions and to improve systems systems, they're going to be able to do so much more than the people that lack clarity and don't know how far they're allowed to go or what they're allowed to actually get themselves into.
That kind of coincides with the third pillar. The third pillar is set expectations and boundaries. Because the expectations are you have to go at least this far. And of course the boundaries are, I don't want you to go past this distance or pass this effort.
And what that does is it lets people know clearly how we operate, how do we get things done. And it clears up things like deadlines, quality assurances and quality reviews. It definitely clears up communication and it gives people a sense of ownership. So if you know you must go this far and not past this, you have an exact playing field of where you're allowed to go. The expectations and boundaries of any footage ball game you watch is your expectation is to move the ball 10 yards in four tries. You get four downs. The boundaries are exactly that. You have the out of bounds and the end zones. And if you cross one boundary as an expectation, you're awarded points. But if you cross the other boundary, guess what? You're out of bounds. It doesn't count or the play stops there. Think about that metaphor when applying this pillar to your business.
Another one that's really fun for me is teaching people how to find the answers. And I really want to emphasize the how. This isn't giving people the answers. If you just sit here and give people the answers or you teach it one time and you expect them to know forever how this is going to happen. That's very unrealistic. And you're going to create bottlenecks. In fact, you are going to be the specific bottleneck if you can't delegate, if you can't teach people how to find the answer. So somebody comes up to you and says, hey, boss, I don't know how to do this.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: And you say, well, do you know.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Where to look to find the answer? Of course there's Googles and chat GPTs, but there's probably like an SOP. Hopefully there's probably a workf or there's probably another senior person in that area or even a peer that's been there a minute longer than them. They want you to go ask Chris. Why don't you ask Jackie or Susan how to get it done? Have you checked chapter three of the SOP and really examined where this material might be covered? Go look at the workflow and come back to me after you've read it in this category and let me know if your question is not answered then. And then they're realizing that, oh, I can go to an actual source, I can go to an actual research area, I can go to an actual person and find the answer. Then I study and learn the answer, and I imprint that on myself. Teaching people how to find the answers is of paramount importance. Another thing that's important is the very next pillar. You don't want to be the only source of influence as leader. Even though leadership is influencing people to go a certain direction or accomplish certain goals and, and have followership, you need to actually create influence on your own teams. The influence ultimately comes from consistency, from building up competence and letting people know that you care. If you do that, you know that your teammates are going to work just like that in cohesion as a team, and it's not going to be a bunch of siloed individuals going out there trying to say, well, this is my work and that's your job, and I'm not touching that and helping you because I got to make my deadlines. No, no, no, no. Create consistency on how everything gets done the right way. Make sure everyone's competent in the areas that they need so their confidence then increases. And make sure that the entire Team cares about each other and can have influence. Influence can ask for help, can give help, and everybody lifts the ship. Remember, rising tide lifts all ships. That's what you're going for in creating influence. If the lowest person on the rung, the lowest rung has a good idea, they can lift everyone up a step higher.
Another one that's really cool is that we need to get out of this ivory castle mindset.
The next pillar is roll up your sleeves and jump into the trenches. The boss has to be able, especially if the getting is good and everybody needs to get after it and get down there and get some good with your team. Get in the trenches, make some of those sales calls, fix those little problems. If you're on the construction site, go in there and drive some nails and help the frame get built. Now, it is absolutely paramount importance that you don't get stuck there, but you have to have the ability to swoop down low, walk beside somebody, ment or educate or physically get the work done. And I always put this example. Tax season for accountants is super hectic because it's just mass volumes of paperwork going everywhere. Now we're streamlining things. Everything's digital at this point. Our workflows are going better, but we're still increasing complexity of our clients and we're increasing the number of our clients. So if we get to a bottleneck where maybe, oh man, a team member's out sick for two or three days, I can jump in and knock out tax return just like the junior level accountant. There's nothing wrong with me rolling up my sleeves and doing that. And I demonstrate my competence and my willingness to serve the team.
Now the next thing is learning how to develop your people.
This pillar is super important because you can't just rescue people out of their discomfort. Okay, so these boundaries is more about mentorship. So you need to say, hey, I'm going to coach you through something. I'm going to put you into a difficult area of more responsibility so that you can now experience growth. Right. It has to be a specific plan. You have to have metrics assigned to each of your staff roles and responsibilities to measure them. If you can't improve and grow what you can't measure. So what is the return on this line of work, on this inventory item, on this employee pursuing a task? If you can do those things and turn that into a mentorship program, everyone is going to flower and bloom and grow bigger.
So that's some of the highlights of the seven principles or now pillars of influential leadership. And that's part of the leadership Lab. The other thing that we do is we expand on from your true understanding and giving real world examples of all those into the Business Foundations program. The Business Foundations program is really fantastic because it starts with a lot of leadership documents. You go through things like your mission statement, your vision statement. You actually learn and take a test to pull out and figure out your core values. I love that because your mission statement has to have real purpose, it has to have real meaning. So many people just look up something on the Internet, twist one from another famous company and make it a wall hanger. Your vision statement is your future self, the future self you are chasing after. This is what do you want to be when you grow up, right? Well, I want to be an astronaut. Well, start taking actions to become an astronaut. If you're in a accounting firm and you want to be advisor, you have to have a big version of yourself, usually a five year or longer goal. And you have to be able to measure it. We want 1,000 clients in our book of business that we're serving every year. We want this number of revenue. We want to be a 10 million 25, 30 million dollar firm that's helping people and you can push yourself along that vision of yourself or we want to have this level of influence and these types of relationships specifically that lean on us and that we lean into.
Then a part of business foundations is knowing that you have core values, core values as each and every one of the leaders and that those are in alignment with and are non negotiable with your company and the people that you work with, the people that you hire, you fire, you promote or you correct them all in accordance to these values. Your leadership philosophy. This is an underutilized piece of paper, an unutilized tool. It is your method of leadership and your mindset of how you will lead, act, conduct yourself and do all the major things in your life written on paper to hold others accountable and ultimately be held accountable. It talks about your goals with what your team and they can sit here and predict what you're going to do or say and even act on your behalf in your absence. And then another thing that you need to do and get yourself in gears have all of the essential policies that you need. There's these four essential policies that are really kind of bludgeon into people about, you know, you got to have an anti harassment, you got to have a drug and alcohol, you got to have a computer or equipment uses policy and you got to have a standard operating procedure that does the gross nature of like when you show up on time, how you dress, how you take vacation days, etc. And then the other thing I want you to understand before we get close to wrapping up this segment in commercial break is that a journey in leadership is just that. It is a journey. There's not really just a final destination to say I've landed at success. I'm the pinnacle leader that anyone could hope for and I'm ready to move on and put my legs up and just let the ship sail into the sunset. It it's a constant path, a constant journey where you can always look to improve yourself and others around you. We're going to keep talking along these lines in just a second. Sit tight for the five M's and we'll get back after these messages on pivotal change.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Welcome back from the break. We are talking about leadership on this episode. That's one of our major themes. And we're talking about the new year is a great time for you to build the foundation or rebuild the foundation of your leadership. And when we went through through all of those little categories on the Business foundation program, the seven pillars of influential leadership, we began that journey together. But if you missed any part of that journey, the good part is you can find it anytime, anywhere on the Now Media TV network. You can go to NowMedia TV. You can download all of the episodes. If you missed a segment, you can just fast forward to that segment. You can get the podcast version in case you just can't watch the show. You guys are going to get everything in bilingual access. That's English and Spanish. It's international anytime 24, 7, wherever you need it. That's row Roku, that's iOS. You can get all these platforms and get now media and all of the great culture, business leadership that you're looking for. So speaking of leadership, let's go ahead and move on with this conversation. After covering those first couple of sections, I like to break things down for people more and more. A broad issue, just leadership in general. Your journey in leadership starts with the foundations and then it moves into the pillars that build up and hold up from the foundation. And then we move on to things like the five M's. The five fems are kind of near and dear for me because it gets a lot more systematic from here and we get a lot more granular in how we deal with leadership and running our businesses or our teams or our homes or our churches, whatever it may be.
So now with the foundation built, assuming that you're going through a program to build it and putting in the effort. The 5m come and they take you from a busy firm to an advisory form or a busy company to a value based company. And you do it in this way. You start always. And I hinted toward it in the first segment with mindset. Mindset is the number one thing that you need to be a successful entrepreneur, to be a successful leader, to be successful, pretty much everything.
Because if you're going to do that, it requires you to take ownership, a lot of ownership, of not just task completion, but of all of your surroundings and what your shoulders will be bearing. And we're going to talk in this position as well, or in this section as well, about the five positions of leadership.
You have to have a mindset of understanding that I'm not just the leader in the ivory tower that slaps the table and everyone must obey my will. There's a lot more to it. And you heard me about being humble and you heard me about getting into the trenches and you heard me about taking time to mentor and grow people. You have to do those things. So on the five positions of leadership, they're going to help you with your mindset because they make you understand that you have to move and groove with and around your people. Here's the important part, right? You can come in here and you can get your ability to lead out front. Now most people think, yeah, I'm the leader, I should be out front. Well, for the most part, you should be out front only when you're blazing the trail, when you're making changes, when you're driving the vision into the future. The leader should ultimately start that journey out front and clear the path for your people. That's really important. And like, hey, we have to have a change of direction. And if there's ever negative things coming back at the firm, the leader has to stand out front. You're the face of the company and you have to take those flaming arrows of accusations of your product's terrible, your people mistreated me, you failed. And you have to own it, you have to eat it, you have to correct it and be out front for that.
So there's a good side out front and there's a negative side out front. The other team is leading alongside. Now, this is one we sometimes organically do, but we don't recognize that we're doing it. So leading alongside your people builds team trust and it's a shared effort, which means, hey, I'm going to help you carry the load. This is a really good time too, where something Negative have happened on a more specific level. Maybe you've had an employee with a health cris, maybe you have an employee that just really lost a major sale and they're just not going to make their commission mark, so they're not going to hit their metrics for a bonus. You can come alongside them and encourage and cheer up and also do some additional training and that can be all the way from the top to leadership and executive positions, to management and direct supervisors. But lead alongside. Now, leading from behind is kind of pushing people in the right direction. You're developing. No, you get out front and you get that certificate. You get out front and you lead the presentation with the client this time. No, you get out front and you draw up the diagram that's going to be submitted to the engineer's office and you're pushing your people from behind in a healthy way. You're not shoving them off a cliff, right? But you're pushing them from along and you're prodding them forward. Now here's two that a lot of people don't think of is leading on bottom. This is where you have to take an actual sacrificial, servant based step and you have to put your people on the shoulders. You have to bear their weight for a long time. Maybe that's just so that you stay grounded and they can get a better view of what the system looks like. They can get an absence of their regular roles. Look and peek over the system and say, this is where I can help my team. This is where I can train my team. And you've got to put them on your shoulders by funding some leadership development or funding some certification program or funding some continuing education. So they're literally standing on your monetary shoulders to get that next edge up. And you're also boosting them up in leading from the bottom when you're literally praising them and cheerleading them for a job well done. Hoorah, he's a jolly good fellow. And you're hoisting them around on your shoulders. Those are important things to know that you're leading from the bottom on that one. The other position is leading from on top. Now this is one that realistically you should spend the least time in. You do not want to do that because by leading on top, you're standing on and putting pressure on the people below you that you're leading. Now there's some accountability times to do this when you're trying to invoke accountability. Other people, you have to stand out front, say, no, this is how we do this. Here, the leading on top is when you have to make the ugly decisions too. Maybe somebody has underperformed for an entire year or two and they just don't fit at this firm. I got to stand on top and have to make a decision that, hey, you're no longer going to be employed here.
It also is part of their correcting. Now you can do correction and punishment in a combination of leading from top, saying, I, the boss, have to deliver this news downward, right? And that's often negative. And sometimes you lead on top and you say, hey, guys, in order to make this push, we're all going to have to grind five extra hours a week for the next two weeks collaborative effort so we can get over this hurdle. And you're asking of your people something more. You're drawing into that loyalty capital, and they should be willing to give it if you're spending a lot of time in those other positions of leadership. So all of that stuff falls under mindset and learning how to see yourself as valuable when you sell your product, when you pick your prices, when you say yes to this customer or no to that customer because they don't fit with your core values. That mindset of I am valuable and I'm going to lead in a certain way and I'm going to take care of my people is what leads these next four categories, and these I can run through a little bit quicker. The materials. That's the second M. You clarify your proposition. You should look at the gross endeavor that you've undertaken as an entrepreneur. And you say, it takes me desks and computers and materials, and I need to order concrete and I need to order raw materials, and I need to order so many T shirts for inventory and et cetera, et cetera. What is everything, including the human capital that you need as resources and materials to run your business? You got to have a comprehensive understanding of that, classify those things, identify them, cost, resources, longevity, and learn to budget. Learn to use those in a certain system in a certain way, and how do they connect and feed off of each other. If you can do that, which there's a whole video series on how to do that, you can draw the connections to everything. You're going to have a really, really solid time shaving your budget, increasing your revenue versus your expenses, and making connections for what comes next. Methodology. There has to be a system for everything. There has to be a standard, a workflow, a way for everybody to know exactly where do I start and go with my sales, where do I have discovery conversations, when do I go on scene and do X, Y and Z on site. How do I deliver certain products or services is how do I do these key components in our company? They've all got to have a system. They've all got to be connected to something. And guess what? There's a material or a resource of some sort supporting each and every one of those steps. You get all kinds of good stuff like this initial consultation guide and stuff like that. Key advisory opportunities like if you're an accounting world and stuff like that and how to uncover them. There's really good stuff that you can use, but you got to have consistency in your methodology or it doesn't matter. Okay, so methodology is really important. The number four is mentorship. So here we go. We're mentoring our people. We're actively seeking to grow them up to get them more skills, to get them more knowledge, to get them more ability to serve the firm, elevate themselves, bring, get a promotion, bring a pay raise home to their wife and kids and do things like that. But more than just mentoring my people, I'm mentoring my clients on how to best interact with me and give me client compliance so that we can move on. How do you profile the proper customers, how to work with third parties so I get the proper referrals, I get my insurance company to understand me better and I get a better insurance policy. So I'm mentoring everybody I can to give them the best understanding of who and what we do and how that's going to make everybody's lives better. So mentorship is a big one. And then lastly of the five M's is measured growth. You have to have these key performance indicators that are the broad scale things where you are saying we're going to get this far. Here's our first quarter goal, here's our two year goal, our five year goal. You need to have these and track them with actual dates on calendars and steps and systems like workflows and softwares that are going to hold you accountable. You have to have regular conversations, you have to have delivery milestones, you have to have retention and expansion and sales goals. And if you can measure your growth, because again, you can't improve or grow what you can't measure. You have to have measured growth. And the reason I say measured is because you're reaching for something specific. But also if you just go crazy and you go nuts, there's a really fun commercial where they oversell their product and now they're doomed because it such a great potter and they didn't space it out. Right. And there's a whole project called Pacing and Spacing. So understand the five M's, understand the positions of leadership and understand where you need to go to start moving yourself forward after you've built your foundation. We're going to keep talking about this stuff about delegation and all kinds of fun stuff after we come back from this break because you've only reached the halfway point.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Point.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Stay tuned for more Pivotal Change right after this.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Welcome back to Pivotal Change.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: You've reached a halfway point. I'm your host, Ryan Kahn with CS Business Consulting. And we're going to keep moving along this line here. So quick remembrance on the first part of the episode here is that we were talking about all kinds of kind of this fresh start of building the foundation, the mission, the vision, the core values. We talked about the pillars of leadership, we talked about about mindset as part of the five M's, really drove forward on that one, including the different positions of leadership. Talk about methodology, materials, mentorship, measured growth, all of these very good things that you can start focusing on. So this is getting ready to really go from an understanding of what needs to change. And I know you don't have enough material to go ahead and put this stuff into practice. That takes work, time, effort, consultation, coaching, and that's okay. Grasping these concepts, steps and looking for ways to resolve them is what's going to be immediately important. So let's think next about where do.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: We go from here.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: We want to go into strategy and from strategy to application.
That's how you're going to make leadership changes that really stick. And so that's important for everybody because when you go through a transition like this and again, blame it on the new year, we have to establish a foundation of those systems. Right. We've done that, that conceptually. Now we got to move on to the application, how to make the real change. And here's one of the hazards that people run into. They get really excited, they come up with this strategy. Maybe they get some experts on some consultation, they read some books, they take online courses, whatever's going to actually genuinely help. And they start marking out what needs to change, where the workflows need to change, where the people and the culture need to change. They get this giant strategy and they have this vision, but the execution falls. There's no creative effort. That or there's nothing that goes from effort of creation into effort of execution. And that builds a false confidence. Everyone kind of gets the hype, they get their hopes up, they get ready and then, boom, the Plan fails when it comes time to deliver the actual plan.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: So that's one of the main reasons.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: That application management matters. Knowledge alone. I know what to do. I know the best way, I know the best person, I know the best system does not change your outcomes, your actions do. And then taking those positive actions, those positive sale pitches, those positive results in the workflow and repeating them with accountability to make sure everyone follows through, knows the right place and leaders, you must intentionally redesign, design how the workflow is driven. Now, you could have somebody smarter, more logistically or tactically sound, actually develop for you. But you're the one that redesigns the accountability, redesigns the A to Z and says this is the goal for our company, our business or our team.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: The other thing you want to do.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: As a leader, especially the higher level leader, if you're executive or owner, you really want to do much more working on the business rather than working in the business. That means earlier mentioned rolling up your sleeves and getting into work, you're doing that too much. That should only be an occasional dipping your foot into the pool of where you're going back to actually work in the business. Times of crisis, times of example and times of mentorship.
Being indispensable feels productive, but it's actually what's limiting your growth. Growth, it's choking your progress. Everything requires a leader. And the firm or the business cannot scale if you don't have a clear and elevated lever. Elevated as far as vision, as far as where you're looking. 50,000 foot view, looking over the world, the master trajectory, that's what we need. And if you are stuck down low on the level of the helicopters, how can you ever get your head up to steer the direction of the attack? Entire battlefield leadership comes from designing the outcomes, not simply completing the tasks.
You need that expert perspective and so do your people, so do your clients. Elite firms, accounting firms, they focus on leverage. And leverage is created through people, through the systems, and ultimately through the delegation of those two things together. A leader's time must move towards strategy and it must move towards relationships. So you have to make the big picture items. Is this budget item need to be cut for next year? Do we need to add more time, money and resources to these areas to increase bandwidth? Do these relationships bring value? Do they matter? Can we recruit expertise in other fields? Can we add a little bonus add on? Because we just connected with a financial advisor that can now provide a new service to all of our people. These are the larger relationship and the larger scale issues that need to be dealt with by a leader. And if you're constantly getting your head down, stuck at your desk and your keyboard, or you're stuck behind the clipboard on a job site, making sure every box is checked, you're the choke point. Delegation is key. So let's do like a little 30 day application focus for a second. I want you to you to look back the last 30 days, maybe immediately with the holidays is not perfect. But look back at your last healthy month, let's say October or November. Or you can proactively do it. Say, I'm going to start tracking my time now. It's like a job analysis study is what they call it. And you're going to go back and you're going to identify where exactly your time is spent. Now, a lot of people have calendar versions that can help them. You can get worksheets, sheets that help you go out and identify how much time you're spending on every task. And is this a task that can be delegated? Is a task that is being handed off? Is it a task that can't be handed off and you need to hire somebody to replace it? You need to hand it to existing team members. There's all these little ticks that can help you map this out literally for you. But you need to do it across 30 days because that's when you have your full rhythm. Really. In any industry, whether you're a surgeon, you might only do surgeries on Monday, Mondays and Thursdays, right? And so you need enough Mondays and Thursdays to truly understand what your schedule, what's your rhythm, what your process is for that. So then you identify after where your time is currently being spent, like literally almost to the minute. But ask what are these tasks that I'm doing regularly that only I can do? I'm the one person at my company that can handle this. I am the resident expert.
Then you need to make, make some commitments. You need to commit to specific changes over the next 30 days. So you draw your list, you identify, man, I should not be doing this. This is not my highest and best use. Okay, this one right here is a very important task and I know how to do it. But Johnny and Sally over here, they're kind of helping me out with it. Sometimes I need to finish training and delegate, right? And then there's others where you commit to specific changes over these next 30 days.
That's really important as well because you're going to write down on your calendar specific goals and specific marks that you need to get to. And now that you have something to pay direct attention to. You can take all of that awareness and create some serious opportunity with it. And then execution from those opportunity goals, those opportunity steps really is going to create the results that you're looking for for. So next you want to learn to let go and delegate correctly. Well, that's what you've done. Now you have to have the self discipline to say, I'm not going to intervene when somebody brings something up to me and it's not 100% correct. I'm going to coach and turn it back over for them to fix the results.
We as business owners, people that want.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: To be in charge of our own.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Destinies also tend to have the same problem of saying, oh, you know what, I'll just fix it myself.
And when you go and try to play the game of oh, I'll just fix it myself, then you really run into the problem of never developing people, getting them into a situation of burnout. And then you really have a lot of problems with stifling the growth, stifling the company, and again becoming the bottleneck of decision making, finalization and cleaning up all the business.
So you take these options and what you're going to do is I like to create three sets of goals.
So really harped on the 30 day examination and your goals are going to be partly in collaboration with that. So I always say the three, three, three of your first set of goals. So I want a three day win. That's something that you can literally go change right now. Now, three days is technically like four or five days in a business week. You're starting on a Thursday and by next Wednesday you attack your first easy win just to get momentum going. That's fine. Three just means hurry up and do it right right away. So that's your first goal. Put it on the calendar. Let's say next Wednesday. And say by next Wednesday I will have done this. I will talk, Johnny, how to do this. I will show this GPS tracking report to this person so they can monitor it and track all the truck routes. You're going to do that type of thing, then you're going to have a 30 day win. This requires a little bit more effort. I know in my 30 days that my time and my busyness goes all up and down the chain with these different projects. So by 30 days I will have this next little bit harder step accomplished, turned over, delegated and off my lap, freeing up my amount of time. If you go through your list and you look at the delegation and what you're dealing with and who you can hand it off to. You should be identifying the person or persons you're going to hand it off to on that list. And this next one should be something that's not quite as easy hanging fruit, but maybe it does a little bit more substantial amount of time. So maybe you can really say, hey, it's going to take me more effort, but it's going to free up four hours a week. Four hours a week times 52 weeks, minus your vacations, that's, you know, 200 hours a year that you just freed up. What can an entrepreneur snap their fingers and do with 200 hours working on their business at the highest level? That's the goal. Then the third three, three, three goal is your three month goal. So the first two are definitely on the more of the Easy win side.
3 month goal means you might have to sit back, create a training plan. Hey, you might have to recruit a second piece of equipment so that this team or person can have that equipment as well. And then go learn the equipment, work on the equipment and then start another section or duplication of a process, a skill, something that's going to go on and that's going to be a little bit harder. But you're going to put it on the calendar right now, today, today being the day that you identify it and then you're going to have that calendar blinking at you and giving you notices, hey, have you accomplished this yet? Have you accomplished this yet? And if you really want to take that next bold step to the future, you tell somebody these changes that is accountable to you so that they can nudge you, poke you and prod you and say, hey Ryan, how close are you to that three month goal? Because it's only two weeks away and you haven't been talking about it lately and I see it creeping up on the calendar. So I've got to get in the accountability part, partner, to keep pushing me forward because I will never change if I don't have the reminders, if I don't have the action steps. And by the way, this breaks out like a tree.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: So your, your three day goal, your.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: Quick wing should have three action steps. Your 30 day goal should have three action steps that get you to that part. And your three month goal should have three action steps that you have written down. I have to do A, B and C to accomplish this. So that's the first section on letting go and delegating that we're going to get into. And I'm going to get a little bit more of a recycle on mindset and things like that on how to get the final push on delegation. So sit tight. We got one more segment to go so that you can get launched on this new year. Clean slate, new deal.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Welcome back to Pivotal Change. I know you are enjoying every minute.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Of what you're watching as we progress to this whole clean, clean slate, the mindset, all of the things we're talking about today, moving into delegation, there's something that you can do as well. You can dedicate your time to going and looking up all of the Pivotal Change episodes and never missing a moment. But not just Pivotal Change. Everything that the Now Media TV network offers, we have Roku iOS, we have access to Amazon, we have YouTube channels, we have podcast versions of it. There's really no excuse not to invest in yourself in this new year to go to NowMedia TV and download the episodes, listen to the podcast and really get the information on business, leadership, culture, political news. Everything you want is here on this network. Bilingual English and Spanish. So do yourself a favor, get that into your favorites list and make that someplace you go to improve yourself this year and continue along the path with improving yourself. We've been talking about the leadership and delegating and I've talked to you a little bit about the process of delegating and getting into life like the 333 and how you're going to sit here and think and ponder and you're going to get that list made out when it dives a little bit more into details. And I want to cycle back to the first of the five M's.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:37:56] Speaker A: That first of the five M's is mindset. So leaders, this is what you need to do right before you step off in this endeavor. You need to understand right up front that you are trying to build leadership capacity. You are trying to let go of things so that you have increased leadership capacity and therefore cultivate more leaders underneath you that can increase their capacity. So that is kind of your main goal in leadership. In doing this, you have to understand that delegation, assigning tasks of work to other people to do a good job is not losing control. You're not losing control of your company. You're not losing control of the quality of the products or the services.
Ultimately, the training comes down to you. So if they don't do a good job, whose fault is it that they were not trained, prepared or capable when you delegated it over some of the rules in business? I've heard if somebody can do the job 70 to 80% as well as you can do it, go ahead and hand it off to them and coach and mentor that last 20% until they're doing it correct. And then you review and kick back for corrections. And then you review you and you trust but verify until they can run off and they can have that complete set of responsibilities on their own again, always circling back with accountability and verification. Delegation also, when you do it correctly, multiplies leadership impact, which means you can now impact more people, you have more free time, you can show more care, you can do the special things necessary to increase this person's unique talent, increase that that person's unique talent, address special issues that arise in the company instead of constantly pushing things to the back burner. And you increase and multiply your specific leadership impact. And then domino effect, they get to increase their leadership impact as well.
Ultimately, what happens is leaders who do not delegate, either they don't know how or they refuse to. They eventually stall and they hit these breakpoints in their industry. They just can't see to get through these various breakpoints. And that could be anything from $150,000 or 50 million. But you get broken and you get stalled at these breakpoints.
You have to consistently work to improve, get out of your own way in various ways and delegate. A really good way to do this if you want to just start right.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Now, week one of the new year.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Review your calendar and your task list like I was talking about on a weekly reflection.
So as you put these processes in place, look back at your week and see if, hey, I left something off the list. Hey, I forgot that I have to do these follow up phone calls for everybody because they're a few and far between, but I'm the only person that can do them. I need to add that to list. So review your calendar, review your list. Don't just do this a one time process, make it a living, breathing organism that gets grown and adjusted over time. And then make sure you write down every task you touch that's so important that you're going to try to leave something out.
I got to be honest with myself.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Like I'm going to try to treat.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: This cheat, this list to prove to myself that I'm as good as the leaders I think I am. No, just write it down. Write down every task and that visibility is going to drive improvement. Especially if you have an accountability person looking at you. They're going to say, hey, you didn't write this on the list. And you do this all the time. Yeah, shoot, I sure do. Here we go. The Met Task evaluation talked about.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: That's good.
[00:41:10] Speaker A: You have to be honest with yourself. Does it really, like, actually really require your authority or your expertise or your certification? Or can you hand that off and just be the signator on something of that the reviewer, could it be trained? Could it be delegated? Should be a recurring thought in your mind, right? So that now becomes a rhythm of your thinking.
What can be trained to the next person or the new person? What can be trained across the teams? What can be delegated literally from this division to that division? Because this division has bandwidth, but this division doesn't. What can be delegated across divisions? So can it be trained? Can it be delegated? Is now an echoing thought in your mind. And you got to highlight those delegation opportunities for your teams, for your people, and you got to teach them how to be delegated to properly. Like, you have to define the outcome. Like, I want you to do this exact process, this exact service, or build this exact item. So the defined process, think about the communications, the boundaries and expectations, you got to set those with your people. You have to set the deadlines, right? You have to establish a standard. Here's your expectations, here's the boundaries. This is the realm of work inside. And then you push that off to them. So the people that you're giving it the delegation to, they deserve it to be delegated properly to them. Right. And delegate responsibility, not just activity. So now they get some ownership. So if it's not done right, right. You're. You're getting an opportunity for them to go learn and curb their learning into the right area and possibly, hey, maybe you can incentivize some of this. Because if you delegate properly, you're creating bandwidth, you're creating efficiencies, and ultimately you become more efficient, effective in whatever business you're in, which absolutely should drive the bottom line. It should increase profits. So now you motivate through some incentivizing of these delegated roles and people can literally sprint and take off with it.
Identifying gaps is pretty huge because you can now do this exercise into your next level leaders, into your supervisors, your managers, into your teams. And you can ask them, let's identify some tasks. Tasks, let's identify some training needs or hiring needs. And they're going to be right on top of it. So you can have them create some of the delegation platform for you. And everybody may say, hey, we do not have a person that specializes in this, so we're all kind of halfway putting in our talents to get this job done. But if we hired a Marketing specialist that can literally just take this and run with it, man. That's a gap through the delegation process. Process that you discovered from your people is really fantastic and it absolutely reveals organizational weaknesses. We want to take those weaknesses, we want to develop them into standards to regularity and ultimately strengths. Find your vulnerabilities and cover them.
This information, it's just crazy valuable. It's super valuable and it needs to be uncovered. You have hidden gold, hidden gems, but you also have hidden cancer and toxicity in your company. And doing delegation assessments discovers both of them. So what leaders get to keep, okay, when you're delegating, you get to keep the vision. You are always the one driving the vision, getting people aligned to the vision. This is what the company is going to look like when we grow up and we're going to rise ourselves. We're not going to be an 18 person accounting firm. We're going to be a 50 person accounting firm in three years or five years and we're going to go from 5 million in revenue to 15 million in revenue and we're going to expand from 20 states to 35 states where we have clients and impact. You're going to have accountability, right? Like, hey, we're all going to hold ourselves accountable first, but we're also going to have systems in place.
Somebody can't slack off, somebody can't just keep making the mains and mistakes. Somebody can't be tucking things under the rug, the rug. And you get these standards and you get this direction that people will ultimately be able to lean on and rise above.
You also get to keep their culture. You get to keep being the one that drives the culture, drives the overall accountability of that culture. You get some advanced insight as well. Leaders should spend at least 80% of their time, 80% on that high value of work. We're talking 30, 32, 34 hours in that range of the highest, most valuable work to companies. And I would say that some of the most highly valuable work is networking, relationship building and system development.
If you can get those things mastered and you're constantly tweaking the system, not changing for the sake of change, but changing for the sake of effective delivery, effective work, profit efficient processes, you're going to be really valuable at the work you're doing as a leader and constantly tweaking that vision so you know exactly where you can take that market.
And if not, you should make delegation mandatory. Some of these assessments, some of these processes and the reviews, and you got a review, delegation from the future. Once you kind of make These changes, you make these shifts and you adjust them. Every quarter is ideal. Every quarter look back and say, hey, here's the list, here's the task sheet.
[00:46:10] Speaker B: What can we delegate?
[00:46:11] Speaker A: Put it as a part of your routine. Bigger level staff meetings, right? So you should have staff meetings and team meetings and hubs, huddles, and all that kind of stuff pretty regularly. And then your big time staff meetings, your big time board meetings and such like that should be quarterly. And then you got to have some serious leadership reviews at least twice a year.
So I want you guys to understand this. Letting go is a leadership decision.
And if you're not letting go, you are consciously making the choice to keep your company stifled, to keep your company bottleneck. Connect in tight with you being the bottleneck. Delegation ultimately develops future leaders. It develops you as the current leader. And this is how organizations truly, truly scale and establish sustainability.
So I want you to go out into your teams and go out into the world and I want you to see the change and I want you to be the change. And thank you for coming to another year of pivotal change. Go, go out there and catch us next time. We'll be back with more pivotal change and more business and life changing opportunities for you next week.
