In this victorious episode, Scott Beebe, Founder and Head Coach of My Business On Purpose, shares how he
You will discover:
– Four simple steps business owners can take to conquer chaos
– Why, instead of putting out fires, you might just want to let your business burn (so that it can grow)
– The biggest lie in business and how it’s affecting you right now
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another Scott. Today, we have Scott Beebe with us, and after recognizing the need to support business owners who are overwhelmed by disorder, Scott founded business on purpose, helping them gain a clear vision and strategic path for their business’s success in future. Scott created the business on purpose roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working in their business and help them to get their lives back. Scott also hosts the business on purpose podcast, sharing real stories of how he and the business on purpose team work with business owners and their key leaders to build people, purpose, process and profit. He’s also the author of a great book called let your business burn, and he’s here with us today, Scott, that’s admittedly a bit of a scary title for a business book for founders and business owners. But why did you call it let your business burn? And what’s the big idea you wanted to share in the book?
Scott Beebe
There’s a friend of mine. His name’s Jesse Cole. He owns a baseball entity empire. Now I dare say it called Banana Land, is how it’s known on ESPN. It was the savanna bananas. And he and I would get together for lunch periodically, and he’d be in his yellow tux and top hat. We were sitting down in Savannah one day, and I’d driven down there. I said, Jesse, I’m just having a really, really hard time titling the book. I had a bunch of things, and he’s got a philosophy that basically says what everybody else is doing, just do the opposite of that thing. And he said, so what is everybody doing? And I said, Well, they’re constantly putting out fires. They’re spending their day like little fire. People running around, putting out fires, putting a superhero cape on, etc. And he said, So what’s the opposite? And I was like, I guess they just let their business burn. And he goes, I love it. And so I sat there, and I thought about this, and I was like, Wait a second, it is. So what we’re trying to get people to do, and that is 90% of the fires that are burning right now, if you would just let them burn, they would put themselves out. And yet, we feel like we have to put on the superhero cape, put it around, and then we go home at the end of every day and go, I didn’t get anything done today. Well, it’s because you were too busy, albeit a little egotistical, going around with your cape, putting out all these fires that, quite frankly, if you would have just let them go. They would have, they would have put themselves out.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that egotistical thing is interesting, because it’s not like you’re this kind of big egomaniac. It’s just that it’s tough, right? You’re looking for a couple of wins along the way sometimes, right? And it just, I’ve seen folks who will hang on to things like their travel planning, just so that they can start and finish something in the same sitting right? And so I love that idea, I love that concept, but it’s one of those things that’s a little easier said than done. So we’ve got a whole book to kind of unpack here. We’re not gonna get through all of it. Folks are gonna wanna read. It’s fantastic, but I wanna pull out a couple of what I thought were key points from the book. And the first one was that very interesting to me. You don’t start it off with, Hey, go do this or do that. You started off with the biggest lie in business. What is that line? Why is it such a big deal?
Scott Beebe
Well, it’s actually, since I wrote the book 567, years ago, I feel like there are multiple lies in business. But one of the biggest is this phrase that we say to each other that it’s just business, you know, I’m using air quotes here, and essentially, what we mean is you and I could do business together, and it’s going well, and then one day it doesn’t go to my liking. It might go to yours, but it doesn’t go to mine. And so what I’ll do is I’ll do something that might be a bit subversive to whatever the relationship is, and I’ll do something where I’m able to win, and you’re unfortunately, going to have to lose in this situation. Then we’ll come home and we’ll tell people, I was shrewd today, and I did this to Scott, but it’s just business, and so it’s a way to sort of assuage our guilt as to what we did that, quite frankly, was pretty harmful. And so it lends into this phrase that we have now that says that life and business necessarily intersect. You’ll hear this come back when you ask me a question later in the podcast, but life and business necessarily intersect. If something happens to you at work, it’s going to follow you home to some degree. And if something happens to you at home, it’s going to impact you at work the day. We’re doing this, this podcast, we’ve got one of our coaches, one of our team members, who, last minute, had to call out his dear grandmother passed away, and so he’s got to go up today for the funeral tomorrow morning. So you’re telling me that his life does not intersect with his work. Of course, it does. We’re not robots. We’re human beings, and so we need to be able to act like human beings. And life and business necessarily do intersect. And it’s never just business and it’s never just life.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and so as we kind of progress through the book, then the next kind of chapter or phase in the book is about getting clarity. How does that reality of life and work intersecting show up in either how we create clarity or the lack thereof?
Scott Beebe
Yeah, you know, we fell upon this idea of clarity and realizing that we go around different places, giving talks, and when we go, usually it’s in some sort of Expo type setup. So we’ll walk in, we’ll do some workshops, we’ll do some keynotes, and then we’ll sit down, and we’ll interact with everybody, either before and after, and start to ask sort of the same questions. Hey, what are the big challenges that you’re dealing with right now? And they really fall in two categories. And whatever they say, they fall in the category of people or money. Those are the two biggest headaches that business owners deal with all day long. But whenever we hear about the people, the phrase that we heard about starting around 2019 2020 was, Hey, Scott, nobody wants to work anymore. You know, we try to go find these people and just nobody wants to work anymore, they’ll usually start blaming usually start blaming millennials and Zers and everybody else. And so in our talks now we’ve got this little phrase, and we’ll throw a curve ball, and we’ll say it’s nobody wants to work anymore, right? And we’ll get the crowd, yeah, yeah. And they’ll nod their heads. And then we’ll pause and we’ll ask, Hey, is it that nobody wants to work anymore, or is it that they just don’t want to work for you because you’re chaotic. And so that’s when we’ll throw in what we’ve classified as the one silver bullet when somebody comes to an expo, or whatever they’re looking for the Hail Mary, right? That one thing that’s going to save their business and all of that. So we’ll say, hey, we have it. And here it is. It’s one word. It starts with a C, and it’s the word clarity. You will be amazed at the amount of people that will stay to be employed at a certain place, over money, over resource, over career pathways, if all they have is clarity. So when an owner and an ownership team and a key leader team start to commit themselves to radical, methodical clarity, we actually call it the RPMs of great leadership, repetition, predictability and meaning. And when that, when the owner commits to a life of RPMs, and they look at a process that’s out there, and they go, hook, let’s go capture that. Why? So that we can create clarity through repetition, predictability and meaning. By that, all of a sudden you start to build a culture where people want to stay whether or not they’re being paid somewhere else higher.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that, because one of the folks, one of the principles layout, for folks who are familiar with my book, is we get into this, what I call stage three. And the defining question is, what’s wrong with these people? Right? No one wants to work. For me, it’s the same, another facet, the same, same challenge and and what you’re talking about are some of the basic mechanics to how to overcome that. It’s not a problem with everybody, right? We always have this principle. When I was a CEO a previous company where training our managers said, hey, if it’s a problem with everybody, it’s a problem with you, right? If it’s a problem with one person, it’s probably still a problem with you. But we can look into it a little further, right. But everything really rises and falls on leadership. And when we have this challenge with everybody, the first place to look is internally. So the question that I have for you then is, how do we know when we’re clear? How do you know when it’s time to Okay, shift out of we’ve created the clarity now it’s time to move into the next step?
Scott Beebe
Yeah, to me, there’s subjective ways I’d like to focus on the objective ways where we actually have measurable clarity, rather than just felt clarity. Felt clarity is good, by the way, because that’s again, we’re human beings. We feel things we don’t want to avoid emotion and feeling, and yet, at the same time, if we can objectify some things, that would be helpful as well. And so we look at it, and we have something, and you’ll see it in the book. It’s called a master process roadmap. It’s this idea that we can take every process that exists in the business, and every process really lives on four major, systematic walls. So there are four systems in every business. Doesn’t matter what you do, marketing that tells the world that we’re here. Sales, that’s where we decide, in the dating relationship of marketing, that we’re going to we’re going to elope, we’re going to come together in a contractual, contractually bound relationship. And then we move into operations, the third wall, that’s where we fulfill the service, the product, whatever that is. And then administration, accounting, HR, all the things that change the light bulbs, change the diapers, mow the grass that we’re just living life for the next, you know, 3040, 50 years together. And so those four systems, every time we do something, whatever it is that the next thing that we’re about to do, we need to take hold of what we call the systems mindset, and that is, capture it like it’s the last time you’ll ever do it. So you want to know if you have objective clarity, is if you look on one sheet of paper and you have in those four major systems, marketing, sales, ops and admin, and you’ve got a litany of processes that are not just listed, but are actually linked. And they link to the actual process. So somebody could go, if I wasn’t here today, somebody could go into the business on purpose, Master process roadmap, and they could functionally run our business top to bottom, even if I wasn’t here, because it’s got objective clarity, which actually mapped out so you can see your entire business on one sheet of paper.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s a couple things that I love about that. One is generally when folks define clarity, a lot of them just define it as visionary clarity, right? Where are we going? And what you’ve done here, and what you’ve done so well in the book? Book is not just outline where how to get to. What is that? Where we’re going, but how do we get there? What are the actual ways of doing that? And you use this kind of concept of a roadmap quite, quite a bit. And there are six kind of practical roadmaps you lay out in the book. And the one that really drew my attention was, was number two, and you even mentioned this earlier on in the show. Most founders in your kind of the stage that we’re talking about here, they’re just running all over the place. They’re they end the day completely exhausted and further behind than they were the day before. Right? It just, it feels like it’s going backwards. How? What is this idea of a non negotiable weekly schedule? And can it really turn all of this around?
Scott Beebe
Yeah, so this is one of the most kindergarten things that we do, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I literally mean it from a simplicity standpoint, because we found that the more we do what we do as coaches and advisors, simplicity really does rule the day, because as an owner, you go into your your day, every single day, with a world of complexity that if we could just sort of calm that down into a level of simplicity, we could do something with it. So Annie Dillard, if you look up Annie Dillard, one of my favorite quotes from this wonderful American poet, she says that a weekly schedule is a net for catching days. It’s a scaffolding by which a worker can stand and work with both hands at the same time. And then she says this, God about a schedule. She says it’s willed and it’s faked and so brought into being. And so I love how she admits the old adage, fake it till you make it. She’s like, Yeah, do that. And so what we do with a weekly schedule, and we call it an ideal weekly schedule, by the way, it’s not an actual weekly schedule. So you have your weekly schedule on your calendar or whatever, but we set aside on a simple little spreadsheet, Monday through Friday or whatever, your working days are with the working times that are on there, and you look at it like a game of Tetris in 30 minute blocks, and you say, hey, generally throughout the week, I spend roughly eight hours on sales calls, or I spend roughly 15 hours traveling to job sites, whatever it is that you do on regular basis, you start with the big, immovable thing. So every business should have weekly team meetings, weekly project meetings, etc, whatever those meetings are. At whatever time they are, they’re like glue. They do not move their gospel. Go ahead and put those in your ideal weekly schedule. So that way, when somebody, a client or a potential client, calls and goes, Hey, can you meet Tuesday at 10? And you’re like, No, we cannot. We have our team meeting that day. It’s gospel. Too many team meetings are optional. I’m sorry, guys, I gotta got a client meeting. Not able to make this meeting or wait, I heard Scott’s not coming today. He’s out of town, so I guess we’re not meeting today, right? No, no, these are gospel. They’re supposed to be in there. They’re locked, they’re firm. Then we move to the big movable items. So we have big, immovable, those should just be a few things every week, then big moveable. So let’s say that you’re meeting with prospects on site. Well, that’s a movable target, right? So not every prospect is going to meet at one time. So what we do is we say, hey, take the big blocks of time and go. I am available to meet projects prospects on site, Monday, Wednesday, Friday afternoons, from one to four and Tuesday Thursday mornings from eight to 11. Well, Scott, what if somebody can only meet Tuesday afternoon at two? Offer them Tuesday at 10. Try there. First, 95% of the time they will come to you, rather than you chaotically going to them. Then at the very end, we take all the additional stuff, the small, little, movable things, and we backfill those, but we always leave open space in our ideal weekly schedule so that we can move some things around. Will there be a prospect that can only meet Tuesday at Two? Yes, that’ll happen one time, and so you’ll move that prospect there and move the thing that was supposed to be Tuesday at Two to one of those other blocks. When we do that, we’re looking for somebody to have a 30, 50% adherence to their ideal weekly schedule, if we can just get you there and, at minimum, get you to stop checking email four and five hours a day and just move it to 30 minute blocks in the morning, midday, in the evening. It’s another phrase that we say is that email is from the devil. We believe it is. Cal Newport wrote a great book with a wonderful title called A World Without email. It’s a decent book. You can go to his first book called Deep Work and read that and really begin to understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this about our time. Time is irrevocable. In other words, you don’t get it back. You can get money back, you can get relationship back, you cannot get time and attention back. And so we need to steward that in a healthy way.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I’m interested to know what you have to say to this. One of the things that I’ve found is the that’s a first and necessary and essential step, but the real value comes on the back of that, when we realize these are things that shouldn’t be in my. Calendar at all. What are some of those most common things that you see folks either start with in their initial schedule and then work out or realize, hey, this is not what I need to be doing anymore as business owner.
Scott Beebe
Oh, that’s a great question. So I’m actually going to put this categorically, because what we have found, if you go by those four systems, marketing, sales, ops and admin, we actually see owners trend out of systems in a particular order, and I’ll tell you what those are. So typically, the owner is going to trend out of admin, accounting, those sorts of things, because they can usually bring a bookkeeper in, and they frankly need to start doing that early. Second what we’ll see them start to trend out of is the marketing is they start to trend out of that a little bit. Sometimes it’s either that or the operations. They’ll start to trend out of operations and the production and product delivery, service delivery after that. If you look at marketing’s true business development and not sales, then they’ll go for business, business, excuse me, the sales side of it, the estimating, the putting proposals together, those sort of things. You just usually can train somebody around that. And then the very last thing we CH, we tend to see business owners letting go up, is the raw business development, the getting out, the mixing up business. That’s different than order taking, by the way, yes. And so the order taking salesperson during the pandemic era. Now, fortunately, we’re past that, but during that, we lost the art of business development, because there was so much work in certain industries. Now, get there was some, there wasn’t, I get that, but the majority, we saw a boon in the economy, and so salespeople turned into order takers, and fortunately, out of that, and now it’s into business development, but that’s usually the last thing that an owner will let go of.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I think what’s fascinating, just a quick kind of subplot to that, is that how we do business development was changed dramatically during that time as well. Right? Ironically, so is this double effective? We didn’t have to do it, and it changed, and we didn’t learn how to do it. And I’ve seen a number of folks, especially this last year and a half, struggle with that same thing. That’s a fascinating point. Scott, there’s a question I like to ask on my guests. I’m interested to hear your take on it as well. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Scott Beebe
Actually, I give you a little insight into the life and the business necessarily intersecting. I think that is a I called it in the book a lie. I think it’s one of those things that we just don’t like to acknowledge. But I think there’s a whole nother secret that, even as you asked me this earlier, that sort of popped in my mind. I think it’s really, really important, because business is hard. 4% of businesses see their 10th birthday. Our business turns 10 in March, and we’re really excited about it. We’re honoring that time because we realize we’re one of the 4% that’s 96% of businesses that don’t see their 10th birthday. And so in the gruel and the grind of business, this is going to sound overly emotional, and I apologize if it seems that way, but the reality is, is that as an owner, you are loved, and I think that’s a good secret to remember. I know there’s a lot of tactical things that we could talk about, and we talk about that all the time, but I do think in sort of the macro element of this question that you asked, it’s a big question, and so I want to respond in a big way, and I think that is with the owners, they’re going to be a lot of days that you wake up and feel like you’re being trashed on but I want you to remember that you are loved as a business owner, not only by those of us who think you’re heroes, but there is somebody out there who loves you beyond the trash and the garbage that you feel like you’re in right now.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true, and it’s one of those places where where work in life really does intersect. But just the amount of rejection that most business owners face, especially in those first couple of years, right? Or the first couple of years since you take over, you’ll face more rejection those first two, three years than some people in two or three lifetimes. That’s right. And I love that we’re able to share even just a little piece of hey, there’s a couple people in this world you and I that are cheering for you, right? And it’s more than that. When you really stop to look around, you’ve got a bench of cheerleaders just waiting in the wings. It just takes some time to see them sometimes, Scott, you’ve got this great book, let your business burn, stop putting out fires, discover purpose and build a business that matters. And there’s a bunch more road maps. There’s two, three more entire steps. We didn’t even have time to talk about, where can folks get a copy of the book? Where can they find more out about the work that that you guys do?
Scott Beebe
Yeah, our entire work is on our website. If you go to businessonpurpose.com, we’re right there. And if you actually, if you go to businessonpurpose.com/healthy, it’ll take you to this healthy assessment that we’ve got. It’s an awesome little numerical, objective assessment that’ll give you a numerical value of the back end systematic health of your business. And it’s the area we usually don’t look we usually don’t want to see. And it’ll help you to understand that not feel bad about yourself, just give you a number and go all right, here’s where we need to go from here.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Scott, thanks for. In on the show here. Fantastic episode. Honor having you here with us today, and for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Scott Beebe
After recognizing the need to support business owners overwhelmed by disorder, Scott Beebe founded Business On Purpose, helping them gain a clear vision and a strategic path for their business’s success and future. Scott created the Business On Purpose Roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working IN their business and help them get their lives back. Scott also hosts the Business On Purpose podcast, sharing real stories of how he and the BOP team work with business owners and their key leaders to build people, purpose, process, and profit.
Want to learn more about Scott Beebe’s work at My Business On Purpose? Check out his website at https://mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy
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