In this transcript, Caleb Taylor (Thrive correspondent) and Clay Clark (Founder of Thrive15.com and owner of 9 businesses) discuss the importance of managing your team to win on business coach platform Thrive15.com, the best sales training program ever.
Caleb: Business coach notes: I can also see another level of importance of this would just be a way of keeping accountability. The next one is just some grounds for termination.
Clay: Yeah, grounds for termination.
Caleb: You have to have those expectations written down, right?
Clay: If you don’t have those rules … it’s a deal where like, “If you do this homes, you are getting fired.
Caleb: Right.
Clay: You just lay it out. In every business it’s different. Your standards though … if you go to Disney today, if you go to Disney World, try to put some trash on the ground at Disney World.
Caleb: We have somebody who did.
Clay: See how long … Tim Bradman, one of the Thrive business coach mentors allegedly went to Disney World and threw trash on the ground just to see how quickly they would pick it up, and it happens really fast. They pick it up right away, because it’s a Disney World standard, whereas in other businesses that might sit on the ground for hours or days.
Caleb: Right.
Clay: Again, it’s the standard and the rules of excellence. You have to let people know clearly this is the boundaries, if you do this you get fired, if you do this you get promoted.
Caleb: Operations manual.
Clay: An operations manual is a little different than a handbook. An operations manual explains how we do the job, how. Specifically like, this is the log in system, this is how the software works, this is how you use the …
Caleb: Step by step.
Clay: Yeah.
Caleb: Good. Weekly staff meetings; you’ve got to have that on the schedule.
Clay: Yeah, you’ve got to have staff meetings here, weekly meetings. If you don’t have those weekly meetings you are going to find that you are going to get some monthly beatings when you go to the bank, because you can have … people have to be held accountable for everything. You’ve got to have a meeting to communicate with your team and it’s got to be scheduled otherwise, chaos happens.
Listen, if you have one employee and you say “It’s just me and Craig”, you need to have a set staff meeting. Some of you are watching this, you are in a dorm room right now, “It’s just me and dude.” You and dude need to have a set meeting. I am telling you, you need to have a meeting where you sit down and you call time out, and you get together and you communicate and you follow up on things.
Caleb: Were you doing that when you have just one, two, three employees?
Clay: I was not doing it when I had one employee and then my company didn’t grow, but once I put in these techniques I did it, when I had three employees and it grew.
Caleb: Yeah, love it. Last one, weekly training scheduled. You need that as well as the meetings?
Clay: Yes, because if you don’t train your people they are not going to know what they are doing.
Caleb: Weekly.
Clay: Every week. Some business coach companies even have daily trainings. I would advocate that daily trainings are where you want go get to. I know as we continue to scale Thrive you will probably see us move more into a daily training system than a weekly. You can watch sales training videos on Thrive15.com as well.
Caleb: Awesome. I feel like a lot of these and what we were just talking about, what common sense has become, but a lot of these are not new. We understand and we can agree why they are important. Why are they never implemented?
Clay: If you are watching this right now, first off we just went over 13 things and if you do not write them all down and commit … ask yourself right now specifically; when are you going to write down your difference metric, your difference. When are you going to write down your goals, your path, your pay scale, your task; when are you going to do it? I would argue these 13 points will probably take you 25 to 40 hours to do all this here. To make these systems it will probably take you 40 hours. If you are like me and you already work 40 hours in your business you have to figure out when are you going to work on your business. For me, I do that between 4 am and like seven.
That’s what business coach Thomas Edison did when and Walt Disney. These people weren’t getting to work at nine, they weren’t. If you are watching this right now you might have to burn the midnight oil or get up early. If you only spend four hours a day working on your business, then you are going to have to do it for 10 consecutive days. You are going to have to ask yourself, what 10 days am I going to work on this? You’ve got to ask yourself, when am in going to do this stuff? How long is it going to take?
Caleb: It’s kind of overwhelming, where do we start? Is there somewhere to start or you just …?
Clay: Difference. That’s where you start. Start with difference …
Caleb: Go down that list.
Clay: Then you go down to vision, go down … but will it be perfect? No, but it’s done. The book that I finished writing today with errors is better than the one that you are still working on.
Caleb: Right.
Clay: I am telling you I have always been amazed by people, but when I read bestselling books I will still find spelling errors. Have you ever found a spelling error in a bestselling book?
Caleb: Yeah.
Clay: Yeah, but you know what, it’s done. We need to start it, and it’s kind of like the constitution; you want to amend it slowly. The constitutions had numerous amendments to it, you vote on it. You shouldn’t just randomly change things quickly but you need to have at least a basic framework that you can amend over time. Just real talk with your dress code. One the companies I work with, he probably updates his dress code every four weeks, with some little nuance.
He is like, “I never thought I have to put in my dress code that a woman can’t wear a thong that extends beyond her pants.” I mean, that’s real talk, but you’ve got to put it in there. The new one we had last week was, when you are wearing your clothing you can’t show massive business coach cleavage. He never put that in his original deal. A couple of weeks ago he is like, you can’t have huge gauge earrings. He never put that in his original deal.
Caleb: It will continue changing.
Clay: Constantly change, yeah.