Entrepreneur | Part 1 – Daily Management And Achieving Operational Excellence

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to hear what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s where I’mma dive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. Now Lee, we’re talking about daily management in achieving operational excellence. leaders making on a daily basis? I think mainly they’re not with their customers and they don’t know what the customers are thinking and that’s why even at Disney we finally required our managers to be out with the customer during the time the business is open and to do their administrative work before you open and after you close and it’s like salespeople. Wait a minute, so you’re saying that if I have you out in front of customers, leaders and managers need to be out with the customers during the day. Absolutely. So what time would you have to get to work if you were going to do your paperwork or administrative work before? What time would you have to get to work? I think it depends what time you open or what time you start taking phone calls from customers. Let’s say I own a hair salon and I see customers from 10 to 7. What time should I get there from a leader to do my administrative work? Whatever the workload is, you might have to get there at 7. If you have a lower workload, you might get there at 8. You may prefer to do it in the evening instead of the morning because you have children and have to get off to school. Or you may have to work Saturday and Sunday if you’re an entrepreneur. You’re saying like 7 to 9 in the morning, you might want to do all your paperwork, just roughly. Get your administrative work done and then from 9 to 7, be around the floor walking around, making notes in your little book about maybe some administrative improvements or system enhancements, but you really want to be with the customer. Yes, and I would even say for an entrepreneur it may not be every day, every hour of the day, but that you’re spending a fair amount of time out there. You know, maybe Monday you’re spending four or five hours on the floor, maybe Tuesday you had to go do some meetings or get a loan or something, Wednesday you’re there for three or four hours on the floor. A lot of your time is spent knowing what’s going on with the customers and watching your hair cutters do the cutting and doing things. And you will decide how much time makes it work better when you’re out there. Because when the boss is out there showing and greeting the customers, it works better. At least half the time? Maybe. You would say 10% of the time you do little though. Oh, absolutely. And it’s got to be so you really know what’s going on and you know how well each one’s doing it and you can see the skill level. Here’s where it gets tough. I was reading a book years ago and it talks about the penalty of ambition. So if I’m ambitious, okay this is the guy who started ESPN. I cannot remember his name but he was the personal assistant for Jay Paul Getty for a while. And he said, well, one of the penalties of ambition is that you have to get up early or you have to do it after the kids go to bed, but you just have to get it done. So what would you say to the entrepreneur who says, yeah, you know, I would like to spend time on the floor with my customers or around my people, but I just don’t have the time. What would you say to that person? Well, I’d say you’re deciding your success level when you do that. Okay. It’s cut and dry. Yeah, I mean you’re going to decide to not be great. And if you can live with that and the income’s right and you take a chance on somebody beating you out and a new store opening up and taking your customers and that’s a personal decision you make is how, you know, excellence is a state of mind. It’s a state of mind. I had this was brought up to me, a guy who was mentoring me years ago, I told him, well I’m not an early person. He goes, well, you’re either gonna be a divorced person or a poor person, because you can’t be great and not be an early, I mean, so you’re saying cut or dry. I mean, you have to get there early enough to get. I think you need to rethink your, why, what’s the problem with getting there early? It’s fun. What’s the, why is that such a bad thing? I think for me is when, you know, growing up how I grew up, a great family, great mom and dad, but it wasn’t around a lot of entrepreneurs who had been successful. And I just thought it was like an ungodly idea. Like it would be unhealthy to wake up at 6am every day. Because I need my sleep. You can’t wake up at 6 every day. What? You know? Well, part of the thing you have to live in life is to make sure you forget about half the stuff you know, because half the stuff you think is not even true. That’s what I’m sure. And that’s what I tell people. When you go into business, you’ve got to forget about half the stuff your parents even taught you about those people and their religion and those people and you know those people down the street. Forget about it. Most of that’s not true. Yeah. As I started studying successful people, I started noticing that basically 95 out of 100 successful people who I’ve read about or spent time with, they all pretty much get up at six. One guy went as far as to say, he’s a very wealthy guy, he had said I like to get up about 5 or 6 because the idiots aren’t up yet and no one calls me and I have time to think. That is true. This morning, you know, because I had a workout at 6.30 this morning, about 20 minutes from here, and I really like to go to Starbucks before. I just want to go there. So I got up at 4.30 this morning because I want to go to Starbucks. How old are you? I’ll be 70 next month. And you got up at what time? I got up at 4.30. What time did you work out? I went to Starbucks until 10 after 6. It takes me 20 minutes to get to where I work out. 6.30. Did my strength training. Oh yeah. But I love getting up early. Every successful entrepreneur… No competition early in the morning. No traffic, no lines. Do you have to learn that? I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, we all do what becomes exciting and we all do what becomes rewarding. To me, getting up early is… I love getting up early because there’s no traffic, there’s no lines at Starbucks. I get more done during the day because I’m not sitting in traffic. I came back this morning at 6.30. I don’t usually have a 600. The traffic was unbelievable by 7. I think at about 10 to 7 everybody comes out of their garage. Boom. And so it was an eye-opener for me this morning because I don’t usually I usually work out at 830 so I go there when there’s no traffic. And yeah you gotta you gotta rethink because if you it’s like anything you’ll get used to it and then you’ll like it. But maybe the first month you’re not going to like it. I just think we’re helping somebody right now who’s hearing this because I know growing up, I didn’t know that you had to get up early to become successful. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that was the move. And I remember trying to start the DJ business, and I’m not even starting work until like 8.50. And then people are showing up with questions, and I’m always behind and panicked. And then I learned I’ve got to be there before anybody else for at least two hours and then get my day planned out. Even when I go to give a speech I’m there an hour before the meeting planner is. Love it. Because I don’t trust anybody. I’ve got to make sure they know what they’re… I’ve got to get there and put my bookmarks on every… I’ve got to get my promotion done. And I don’t… I just have to… I don’t… I trust myself. Yeah. I get there an hour early. I got there the other morning for… I was speaking to Lexar… Lexarica. They were coming on two buses. Yeah. And I went out and stood on the sidewalk. You know what impressed him. He said, please, thank you so much for reading. Meeting us at the bus. Yeah. I said, well, later on the seminar, I said, you know, I could have not met you. And you wouldn’t have thought anything about it. But I did meet you and you thought a lot about it. Yeah. So it’s not always what you do or don’t do. It’s when you do something, you get a lot more mileage and then people not even realize. Now let me ask you this in your mind what is the biggest false belief that poor managers have when it comes to management? Biggest false belief. They have to control everything. That they have to be in control they have to have full authority nobody can do anything without checking with them. They don’t trust absolutely anybody with any authority even though they’ve trained them and they pick good people and they got a good experience of that person doing a great job. Control because you can’t control people. You can’t. You can’t be there 24-7 with them. You’ve got to pick good people, train them, and quit trying to control. I tell people I tried to control Priscilla for 25 years and it didn’t work out. The minute I quit criticizing her, she got better. Control. You can’t. You can control paperwork, but you can’t control people. They’ll back off. They won’t give you the commitment if you’re a controller and you don’t trust them. Every time I let you do something and you work for me, I’m sending you a message, I don’t trust you. So how do you balance the belief that you can’t necessarily trust everybody with the belief that you have to let people work? How do you do that? Is it through the process of inspection and following up? Yeah, you check in with them occasionally. You observe their performance occasionally. But you give them authority at certain levels and if they have a good batting average, you have the authority, Judy, to give customers a rebate or do anything up to $50 or up to $100 or up to… A doctor told me recently, he said after he read my book, he said, I went out and told my receptionist and my lady in the front office, you now have full authority to give a customer a $150 decrease in what we charge them because they weren’t happy with the service. He said, I used to have, they used to have to come to me and get approved for that. He said, they know what to do. He said, now I can spend more time with my patients. I’m not being bothered all that long. You got to decide where you should spend your time and where they should spend their time. And authority is a big deal. Let me ask you this here. From a kind of a broad perspective, what kind of person is ideally suited to become a good manager or leader, or can anyone learn this? Well, I think a lot of people believe they can’t get better at managing. They think it’s hopeless. I was born this way. I don’t really like to plan. And that’s totally absurd. Learning how to manage a system, learning time management is learned like any other course you would take. If you want to go take a computer course, you want to take a math course, you want to take a language course. If you apply yourself and focus on it, you will get better at it. So anybody can learn management. Absolutely. Okay, so you really do believe anyone can learn this? I know I did it. I know I did it. I mean, I didn’t know anything.