Okay, so in this session two, which is more, let's get down to some laser coaching, some
practical stuff. I'm sure you've all done very similar four square type analysis, right?
Where you've came up with four squares, it's an X axis and a Y axis. And the first thing
we want to plot is we want to plot the dollars versus the effort. So what will happen is
you'll end up with four squares. I'm sure you can just draw that on a page there somewhere.
And so just take a blank piece of paper, if you're taking notes, make four squares and
think of it as an X and Y axis. So on the Y axis are the dollars, and on the X axis
is the effort. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to use this twice. The first
time we're going to do it for customers, the second one we're going to do for products.
So this is an exercise I did a lot of when I was doing a lot of CEO consulting. I'd come
into a company, I would just take out a piece of paper out of the printer, literally in
front of the CEO, and we would draw this. And then we draw these four squares. So if
you think about it, where you have low dollars in the bottom square, low dollars and what's
your worst combination? Low dollars, high effort, right? Customers that are low dollar,
high effort. So let's mark that category as four. What's the opposite of that? What's
your best customer? High dollars, low effort. Mark that as a one. Now, what makes a two
and a three is a little bit dependent on you. Maybe you're more interested in the quality
customer, not to worry about the money, in which case you would pick, you know, you wouldn't
mind the effort. But if so, what will it, but let's choose high dollars, high effort
as our number two. And then, which one did I leave out? Low dollars, low effort is number
three. That makes sense? Whenever you do this. So by the way, you can literally use this
tool in a thousand ways to figure out which was your best vacations, fun versus money,
four squares, pick the best square as number one, worst squares number four, pick the others
in between. Now let's go through. I think you might need to draw it, says dear. Let
me see if I can get Bridget to get me my iPad and I'll draw it with you. Are you guys good
though? You're drawing it yourself? Yep. You're good. Okay. So here's what we're doing. As
we're drawing this, this effort, think about, so we have, um, I have so many of these slides
I could have just dropped one on. Yeah. I just didn't think of it. Sorry about that.
So if we're thinking about these, this thing, we want to get the customers. Oh, good. Thank
you. Who's doing this for us? Let me guess. Is that dear? I threw it up there, but anybody
can do it just FYI. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well just draw that just for draw
four squares for us. Thanks Tamara. Okay. Good. Okay. There you go.
So while she's drawing that, you can see very quickly what we're going to do. So we're going
to do dollars on the, on the Y axis and on the Y axis we want, and the, and the X axis
is effort. So our number one client is going to be high dollars, low effort, right? So
that's going to be box number one for us. So that's going to be the top left box. And,
uh, as soon as we got those drawn, we will jump into them. And your next box, um, is
going to be the worst customer is high effort, low dollars. So the bottom right is going
to be your, your, your four. So if you can give them numbers, that'd be great.
Um, which one did you want Dion? You want to know where, which one are we going on this one right
here? Sorry. It's a little messy, but we'll get there. Don't worry about it. Everyone's getting
the point. Thanks Dia. So Dia if you can do my numbers. Yeah. So, so, uh, top left is number
one, low effort, high dollars. That's our number one category. Correct. And, uh, the bottom right
is our number four. You always pick your number one and four first when you do this analysis.
because they're not always the same box it depends on what you're what you're looking for
and then um let's say the low effort low dollars we'll make that a three
so the bottom left corner is three and then the top right hand corner will be two
now the rest of this will be self
okay we've got um is everybody seeing it we're all good
okay so what we've got is um thank you so much and so oh did you bring the pencil
sorry no worries yep yep thanks um it's like ideas already handling so if we want to get
so rule number one is let's plot all our customers so why don't you take a second
think of your top five customers as a quick example at some point you want to put all
your customers on here put all your customers one two three and four put them in there
and uh once you've got let me give you two minutes on that
quickly fill that out and as you're putting your customers in there
everybody understand what to do we're clear yep so once you put your customers think about your
customers which are pretty low effort now they may not be exactly the same amount of low effort
but if they more or less in the same box try to get them roughly into four into those four
quadrants so what we're looking for is the ones where we have good revenue pretty easy low effort
customers we love those people and the ones who are high effort but it's high dollars they're
worth it you know we'll put them in twos the low effort low dollars yeah i mean it doesn't cost us
that much effort but it's you know it doesn't make a lot of money but it's okay um and then
four is high effort low revenue or low dollars okay now that you've got all that put together
thank you so much um sorry to make you do that um so now that you have that all put together
so now that you have that all put together now everybody got some customers in the boxes
you need more time just let me know what you're doing because i can't quite see you with all the
couple of minutes would be good a couple of minutes okay so you're thinking this through
and by the way this process i'm gonna walk you through will work on anything literally anything
and we're going to apply it in two cons two from a more ceo
senior executive viewpoint and this is helps bring reality very quickly
okay so once you've got some customers put them in the list
you
okay how are we doing guys winning okay
here we go we're gonna just uh good we're gonna we're gonna write down the rules here
in a second so when you're doing this you have the steps step one draw the four boxes step two
decide which is number one and which is number four and number three is then add then you can
see which is two and three sometimes two and three are interchangeable but that's up to you
one and four are never interchangeable they're very clear what those are
the next step we're going to do is put a big x through quadrant four
meaning find a way to get out of that business now there's a few ways we can do that
number one way is we can call i i literally sat with the ceo we got on the call we did this exercise
the next morning we got on the phone i was with him on the phone and we called he had
three high effort low revenue customers and we worked out a deal and we called each customer and
by the end of the day we were out of those deals and they were thrilled like yeah this isn't really
working for us anyway whatever or they whether they were complaining or not complaining this is
not this is not
taking out all the nutrients from the rose bush and so we have to deal with this and so
there's another way to deal with it is that is we either have to move it to a two
or across to a three so you can just follow the axis to move it to a two what do we have to increase
right if we have to move a four to a two what do we have to increase we have to go up the
we have to go up the y-axis right we have to go up the y-axis which means it needs more dollars
so either we find a way to get more dollars out of that customer to move them to a two or we have
to find a way to reduce the effort with that customer so that's where you can keep them if
you can either reduce the effort or increase the dollars you can keep the customer if not
you have to call it a day i dion tyler had a question on that i'm not sure if that answered
his question but i think he wants to dialogue a little bit about having a repeat customer
yeah so if you have different projects for that one customer and their repeat customer
if that one project you know is is a uh maybe high effort low revenue yeah you can't really
change something for that one project but you know the next project they're going to ask you to do
is uh moves it to that one or two category the low high revenue yeah so what you got what you're
effectively doing is you're the the second third and fourth repeat customers moving them you're
either getting more revenue or it's becoming easier so in other words you're looking at the
overall experience of the customer you're not looking at a one particularly annoying
event or one particularly wonderful event either so what you're looking for is the general
experience just your gut feel and your intuition as a leader where's that going and here's the
other thing is there a trend like every time we speak with this customer is this getting easy or
getting harder every time we work this customer are we are we making less money or more money
so this gets super practical right
right so we we know where we have a bunch of number one customer how many of you have
category one customers just show your hands quick category one customers you have a few
category one customers good so if you've got a category three customer what do you either want
to move them to a one or to a two what do you have to do to a three to move it to a one you have to
increase the revenue now you may not be able to get it all the way to a three but you can get it
up to the boundary you can move it to the top end of the box do you see what i'm saying sometimes
we can't always move them all the way up but we need to think about what can we do to our all our
customers in three to increase the revenue we don't want to make a three into a two by making
them a high effort customer because effort means resources so the question would be for me if i were
you guys i wouldn't want to move a three to a two i just want to move a three to a one or i want to
move a two to a one so all our twos is there a way to still give them a great experience but reduce
the effort typically things like automation or deleting steps or simplifying how you engage with
them what's creating the high effort are you on the phone all the time do they demand a lot of your
a lot of senior resources so this doesn't take a lot of complex thinking you just have to think
about how we move them over okay and so we're going to apply a concept called 3d a 3d a
the first is can we delete that's what i talked about put four in delete the customer because we
can't move them and think of the most gracious kind professional way to set them free to go and
have someone else serve them right second thing you can do and even if you have to work at a great
deal give them a discount whatever it is worth it for your business because now we're trimming the
rosebush so that's the first d the second d is can we delegate this to someone else like for instance
is there a is there a contractor or is there someone else that we could you know partner with
that could help us with this the the third one is can can we uh increase the um the deliverable
like can we package up other things to help drive the revenue still the same effort
but is there a way to deliver more that's the third d and the final thing is a which is can we
automate maybe the effort is because we have lousy automations so we delete delegate can we deliver
and finally can we automate can we are there automations that we can
use that can substantially reduce the effort if we can do that we can rescue our twos and our fours
so i'm not saying shoot the fours but when you've exhausted the way of moving a four
then you have to delete you have to find a very gracious way now if you have a contract and so on
that's something else obviously the on ben's asking are we doing this in quadrant three or is it
which one no i was so what i was saying is then on the fours we're trying to move them to a three
or a two or delete them well that we're doing the 3da on everything the threes we don't particularly
want to move them to a two because we want to take more effort we just want to know can we
can we can we find a way to package more and deliver more to the twos can we automate something
and by the way if you can make the ones more profitable why wouldn't you do that
but that's not the focus right now what we're trying to do is we're going through the pruning
stage what's data needs to go is a four what is not well and not what's not doing well it's not
going to get any better is a three what is good but not great is a two what is great this is when
we said 20 of the life now based on our little quadrant one could argue it in a basic math that
it's 25 since it's a cube quarter whatever it is 20 25 of your business is in quadrant one
this is what's driving your business so the question is if you can put that in the right
category if you can get these things in the right thing you know exactly just from the
the diagram which is moving where
okay any any feedback let's talk to me i think one of the clarifications too can be that you
might have something i don't know if you can you see my cursor yes you might have something that
maybe is the top three so it's like it's actually a pretty high revenue so these would be you know
like a chart where we can plot different things so maybe it's actually at the top of this so maybe
it's not that big of a concern but something that may be at the top of over here we might need to
bring it back down to three so it's not just that they fall on these quadrants but you may actually
plot it to a certain level of the quadrant and that's where you can identify what needs my
attention first and this might not just be clients this might be packages that you offer as a business
maybe you offer one package you know that is it's high effort but low revenue and you need to entirely
cut that package even if that's how you founded the business right or we've been doing this for
20 years you know whatever um and so moving again as much as you can get closer and closer over to
here and then again diane i think you might have mentioned this but i really wanted to hit on that
the order that you do the the 3d and a is very very important you never want to automate something
that could be deleted delegated um you want to make sure you run through those first items and
then put your emphasis and your effort into automating yeah order yeah never never automate
something that should be deleted never dealt never delete something you know if you wouldn't want to
give a really tough customer to a partner and say let me bless you with this really annoying customer
who's highly demanding and doesn't pay very well that's not much of a blessing so the idea is delete
always starts first that's what we start with for what needs to be deleted let's turn to we'll go to
ben then rich so are you uh are you categorizing these customers primarily based on your sense or
intuition or are you using some data i mean i can see gross profit as being a point but i don't know
if if you have other pieces of data you use to categorize these yeah i think um
i mean obviously you want to be as informed as possible back to our own internal language you
want white hat data not red hat data red hat being your intuition if you think of the six colored
hats right white's facts you know black is you know uh red is rather um your heart your intuition
i think i gotta feel but some of it there is a little bit of also uh green hat in the sense of
it's a little creative thinking in the sense that you're saying look uh we know we had a rough start
with them we've sorted out our issues we have a better process now i think we'll get them to a
three i think we'll i think they'll grow into a two but we need to keep an eye on it so that's
okay it doesn't have to be like done in today but you're you're immediately starting the push
that i'd answer your question
Yeah, I think so. I mean, in a project-based business, it's more about customer type,
probably, and project type. Yeah, project type. So, let's talk about that because that's the
next exercise, and that is your projects, your products, your services. And project type,
for instance, is very helpful. But I want to get to Emily's question next, and sorry,
Rich, and then Emily. Go, Rich, and then Emily. Mine's not really a question. It's a thank you
for this because we just went through this with overseas clients, and ultimately, we came to the
decision of letting that go. But these four cubes would have helped save us a lot of headaches and
a lot of strife along the way. But yeah, this is fantastic. I appreciate it.
You're most welcome. It's also a very powerful way to explain to your team why you're doing
what you're doing. Get them involved because what's happening at this level is now you're
in a different mode. Well, let's go to Emily, and after Emily, go to Matthew, and then Todd.
Yeah. So, from a logistics perspective, I don't know if anybody here has worked in logistics,
but you can price things depending on if they're a full truckload or limited truckloads. So,
in these squares, I can see how, say, for instance, if you've got a customer service
perspective and a pricing, you could elevate and kind of weed out the carriers. I know we have
thousands of carriers, and some we don't use frequently just because they may not produce
as much, obviously, as the other ones. But this four square is very unique in the perspective
of logistics and how those can be moved around for sure. Yeah. Emily, you raise a great issue
here, and that is often this informs your pricing. You know, there are times you have to lower price
and so on. I mean, so the way Warren Buffett explains the power of pricing, he calls it the
power of franchise. Don't think of, you know, McDonald's, but think of the ability to control
your prices. So, if you can move the bar along and your ability to control price, if you have the
power to move pricing in an industry, then you have an incredible valuable business. But if you
are in a more commodity business where there's so much competition and you're like in the airline
business, you know, the price of the ticket can be compared instantly on 20 sites or whatever,
right? So, you have limited price control. And so, here's what the point is. The less price control
you have, the higher quality management and leadership you need. The more power you have
of your price, the less effort it takes to run it. Or as I've forgotten, it was in my research,
I found a guy did an amazing job, a British guy on this. And what he did is he figured out
that why companies like airlines need unbelievably genius CEOs, because they live in a commodity
world. So, the more commodity-based world you're in, the worse it is, the higher the leadership
has to be to make it work. Whereas you can have a lot more, you've got a lot more flexibility in give,
so give yourself that margin. And that's a great conversation to have with your senior partner,
Jesus. That's a great conversation. And so, trying to make this as a relational engagement tool,
it's really an interesting way. It's not just an obedience, we're not just in child mode.
Oh, just tell me what to make the price, tell me where to move it. The Lord wants to teach you as
a mature believer. And a mature believer, the Lord says, what do you think? What do you want?
Because he wants you to know his ways and to act like he does. Yes, there's always an element,
sometimes he just tells you what to do and we never lose child mode, but we also get to be in
son mode. We're children and we're sons. Let's go to Matthew and then Todd and Tamara. Yeah,
Dion, I've got a question for you about automation. What are some ways that you've
seen businesses automate and what kind of stuff do they automate? I'm new to the entrepreneurship
game, so. Yeah, no worries. So, this is really easily answered by businesses like ours and like
Ray's business, I expect Ray, you're in the same zone we're in. So, for instance, when we do at
Brilliant, we have a lot of online things that can be offered. So, we offer a service, it's a
subscription-based service and it's got over 600 videos and it's sort of an online digital mentoring
platform and it's called Brilliant TV. So, so much of that is automated, how we market it, how people
sign up, you know, all the wiring behind the scenes, how this system talks to that system,
there's not people involved. And more and more and more, we've added more and more automations.
And these days, there are so many powerful tools that really can help you see immediately
how to connect people, and then send them the email, and then they click on the link,
and then they can download the app, then they register. And if there's an issue,
you know, how that goes, and they click on something that goes automatically to our back
end Zendesk service, and it goes through three layers of customer service, that process takes
time to do all that wiring. But the more you can lower the human effort. So another way of thinking
of this is, how much friction can you remove? Right? So think of the friction to get a customer,
to service a customer, or when a customer leaves, the friction that it took to get that,
and the total cost to acquire that customer, versus the cost to keep the customer.
That is what you have to think through that process. Todd?
All right, you're muted. There you go.
Yeah. So in looking at this quadrant, it's hard. We have several hundred customers. So
it's a bit of a challenge for me to do this from a customer base, because we have so many unique
individuals. But it was, I'm looking at this from a product base. And maybe that isn't,
you know, what we get to do here. But the only way I can figure out how to do it is from a product
base. So where, you know, as far as where are we putting our money and where we put our effort,
because all of our products are translated into contacts with different customers at different
levels of where they're at. So service packages, when we say products, we're talking about service
packages. Correct. Yeah. So the next exercise was exactly that. The next exercise, take the
fame four squares, look at effort versus dollars and do it again with your products or product type.
Maybe you have types of products. So if you're in, if you're more project based business, you probably
have more types of products, right? If you are in a, if you can classify your products by product
type, that's fine. Or you can actually put the products in this. So for instance, something might
be really low effort, high volume, but it's frequency is very low, right? You did once a year
it lasts for a week and you do a training program. And it's great. It's very little effort. We get a
lot of money. And when we do it, we just don't do them often enough. So you may have a cadence
problem with your, with your, so that's called the velocity of your, of your product cycle.
So you may, so maybe you should do twice a year or three times a year that, so what you have,
what this diagram helps you look at, takes a deep look at trimming the rose bush because
most people do not want to trim customers or products out of their system. And that's why
they continue to grow slowly because they dragging the heritage stuff, the history stuff. Now
the fastest way to fix some of the low revenue stuff, anyone else in a very service orientated
business, let me get, let me see how many people I'm talking to first. Okay. So a lot of us are
service driven. Ray, I know you work on some of this stuff yourself, so feel free to weigh in on
this. So in, in, in a very service orientated business, you have in a way,
less capital cost to launch a new product, right? So if you take, I'm physically, we used to own a
manufacturer in North Carolina, an electronics manufacturer, and we developed a product that
looks almost identical to this. The difference is we did ours in 2003, 2012, Apple launched their
product called an iPad and almost put us out of business. Well, did put us out of the hardware
business. We had to very quickly pivot into a software company. So when this happens,
if the market's changing on you, your ability to pivot has a lot to do with how well you know your
customers and services. So let's go and put a plot, your own plot with services and products,
plot them, and then have the same exact conversation in the same order. Find quadrant
one, find quadrant four, decide which is a two and which is a three, and then figure out if you
can't move the four, delete them, and then decide what to do with the customers who are on them.
So what we do, Kingdom people, when in doubt, be generous.
So, and people say,
well, I don't have the money to be generous.
Well, here's the thing,
think of it as putting seed in the ground,
which is a whole session we'll do in about two months time.
And when we're talking about, well, you know,
that what got us here doesn't actually take us further.
You know, the thinking and the products
and the customers that got us here
may not be the thinking, the products and the customers
that take us to where we need to go.
It's like in private equity, we all know this one thing,
the team that started almost never the team that finish it,
almost never.
There are a few exceptions.
Everyone goes, yeah, there is this guy and that guy,
but they always pick the one in 10,000 story.
But by and large, that's not the case.
And why?
Because the capacity it takes
and the talent it takes to take the company
to get your first million,
which is actually pretty tough to do.
That's your getting the first million.
Once you're through that, then of course,
each goal as you go through that list,
and each time you cross a barrier,
I think when you've got less than 15 employees,
there's a whole bunch of issues
you haven't learned you've got yet, but you will.
And then you hit 15 and then it's 25
and then it's about 50 and then 75.
And various thinkers have plotted this along the way.
Then it's kind of jumps to 150, 500.
I don't know, I don't think we have Glenn on today.
I thought I didn't see him earlier.
Normally he's on.
So in Glenn's organization,
when he started that four or five years ago,
which he just retired in December,
when he was a PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC Digital,
when they launched that, it was no one, it was just him.
And when he launched that
and they went to 3,000 employees in whatever,
three years and $500 million in revenue,
they had more problems than they...
I was talking about developing these people.
He said, I don't even know their names
and if they work for me or not.
What do you mean develop them?
So he's sitting with a whole new realm of issues.
Ray, do you want to weigh in on this?
I don't want to interrupt your thought here.
No, no, no, go ahead.
So like we think about,
so one in our business and also,
and we do a lot of service like you mentioned.
And so, and a lot of times we're working,
like we've had clients that have 750,000 people
in their network marketing team.
And we've probably coached maybe 50
that have over 100,000 in their team, right?
So not employees, but sales team.
Right.
And I would just, if you're in any kind of service,
I would just be hypersensitive to anything you repeat.
Like literally anything you ever repeat.
If you have a conversation that you're saying
multiple times throughout the month,
that needs to be a specific video in a specific thing,
not buried in module 33, but like,
you know, your support team needs to know
exactly where to send that video.
And so when that question's asked,
one, analyze, okay, can we make this simpler
so that question isn't asked?
But don't repeat yourself.
And so just point and say, oh my goodness,
we have a video, walks you right through it.
There you go.
And so we teach leaders to do that
so they're not constantly repeating themselves.
And so it may mean creating a little bit more effort
upfront of doing these different videos and things,
but it'll save you a lot of time.
Yeah, now you raise a whole new realm of wonderful issues.
So let's go down that road,
because the first thing is,
think of challenges as a pyramid, right?
And it starts with a small problem.
And the longer it takes to respond,
that pyramid grows exponentially.
And the more people it touches in your organizer,
it becomes like a wedge that just drives friction
in a deeper and worse and worse way
until it actually ultimately gets solved or gets stuck.
And so what happens, the cost of that wedge,
the longer you let that thing live,
the more expensive and the more it sabotages
your internal processes.
So if you think about this, to go back to Ray's point,
if you can take some time,
if you build some innovation time into your week,
so as you know, many of us,
we've pushed the idea that you should be doing
one deep work session a week, four hours a week,
uninterrupted, working on the business, not in it.
This is a perfect thing to do in a deep work session.
Okay, what's the 10, 30 things we always have come up
when we offer our products, when we offer our service?
Let's get those down.
Let's get the best answers to those.
How do we automate them?
Is that a video?
Is that an email?
Do we put that in Zendesk, in the script?
Whatever the mechanism is.
Now here's the key.
far can we push that right up to the pointy end of the pyramid? Don't wait until you're in level
three service before they hit the script. Make sure they hit that script as early on as possible.
In fact, Ray, I think you even just said that a moment ago, you want to even avoid it. Can we say
something in the way we sell something or the way we say something? For instance, when we just
at Brilliant's 24 and we made our offer, which several of you responded to and joined Brilliant's
School of Leadership, the year before we knew a lot of questions that came up. A lot of them
were around pricing. Most Christians were not used to investing in their own kingdom leadership.
They weren't used to that. And so we realized that we can avoid all those questions. Now, Jenny,
you might have to correct me since you were driving this part of the team, but it was my
impression that we didn't have a single question around pricing. Is that right? Did I say it
correctly? That's correct. I mean, there was pricing, but not confusion around the pricing,
pricing just about how it was laid out. Yeah. How did the monthlies versus the paid-in-fulls
or whatever. But there's a classic case of we had a whole, we had actually the Sage team and our team
working, carrying all that in the previous year, we got rid of all that support. So when we talk
on this graph about effort, a lot of these things can be moved on the effort. If you have a service,
you can normally move that around with an intentional design. Here's the secret, if you
like, if you want to know what's the secret thing, I sound like Russell Brunson. What's the secret
here is that listen to your customer service people. Don't think of customer service as the
backend of the process, put them in the front. One of our favorite stories is while we were
doing this with some of our projects and Dio and Jenny will remember this. I made a presentation on
how we can move a new primary product because I was trying to get the dollars up because we had a
$20 a month thing. And that's really, you have to have a lot of those to support a team.
And so we were questioning is how did we come up with a premium product? So I presented it
and our customer service person said, that's a really dumb idea. It's one of my highlights of
my leadership because we had just done three weeks earlier on how to make things less dumb,
which is SpaceX calls the algorithm. And we've gone through all that. And so she took over,
I think I spoke for maybe seven or 10 minutes and the rest of the hour, she just laid out the
whole product. And the product that was then launched was exactly what our customer service
said. Why? Because she works with customers. Who knows customers better than your customers?
Don't consult them as an afterthought. Go to them first. They know they're on the pointy end,
even if they're an offsite group, even if they're whatever, get the data. Find out
what are the top 20 things and are we still using those ineffective same scripts?
Are we driving all these costs unnecessary? Jenny, did you want to weigh in on that on the customer
service side? I know you oversee that too. I know, I think you covered it really well.
I think that's a team favorite story though, what you just shared.
Because for me, the fact that somebody in customer service could tell the president of the company
that he had a dumb idea and she was right. And the fact that that permission existed in a very
healthy and normal way, it meant that she was heard and seen and she had influence and she was
acting as an owner. She wasn't being malicious in any way. She was very clearly and respectfully
saying, that's a dumb idea. We can do it better. Here's why. And so, and we'll talk about, you
know, that's part of what the edge helps create is that culture of trust and so forth. So let's
go back to this. When you're thinking of that pointy end of all the problems, a lot of people
architect this after the event. So if you're going to do a big product launch, you may want to think
of doing, you know, sample products first. Go and speak to your very best customers.
I asked CEOs two questions when I took on a new engagement, when I was doing a lot of CEO
consulting one-on-one. Question number one, how many days are you in the office in a week? And
they go, oh, I'm here six days a week. And I said, why? Well, I run the business. Well, what do you
need a management team for then? Well, what do you mean? I said, why don't you fire them then?
If you're doing their work, what on earth do you need them for? Well, I don't know if I trust them.
I said, well, let's fire them and get ones you do trust. He said, well, what am I supposed to be
doing? I said, if you're in the office more than one day a week, so what do I have to do? I said,
you should be speaking to your top customers, raising capital.
and opening new strategic relationships.
That's your job.
You're meant to be out there on the pointy end.
And so here's the thing,
if you're a CEO who doesn't speak often
to your top customers,
that's an easy thing to fix.
Super easy.
Get on the phone, start calling people.
Many of you are on this call because I called you.
Is that right?
Is that fair?
Probably every one of you,
I'm just trying to think,
is any of you who are not on this call
that didn't at some point take a phone call from me, right?
And why?
Because I want to know what you were thinking.
How can I help?
Will this help you?
Can we be of a help to one another?
So any other comments, weighing questions,
anything you guys have learned
that you want to share with the team?
And then we've got a few minutes left.
I just want to jump in for a moment.
Sorry, I didn't raise my hand.
But how important,
and I know some of the room already know this,
but we've been learning since Todd came on
to the company full-time in December.
He has been automating so much of what we do
in our CRM, our Customer Relationship Management tool.
And I'll tell you, it has saved so much time
because we lost a chunk of staff at the end of November
that were very powerful, important people
that chose to step off.
And so we had to reconfigure everything.
So automating, so many of our repetitive questions,
comments, answers, workflows significantly has saved us
in the last three or four months.
And we're just kind of rising out of that right now.
But if you haven't done that, I just want to step in.
We just did this and it was a huge pivot
for where we are and where we get to go.
Well, I appreciate you sharing that.
If I might give a practical suggestion,
be careful of boiling the ocean with us.
By that, I mean, Michael Dell once shared the story,
which really helped me.
I was in my late 20s, I think.
And he talked about building the one big computer
that was gonna do everything
and they nearly killed the company.
And he talked about, called it the Boil the Ocean Project.
And the problem is we got this idea that if,
okay, now we're gonna fix all our customer service problems.
Now we're gonna architect this whole thing from the ground.
We're gonna build this whole Boil the Ocean.
The better thing is to go and say,
what's the most painful single thing?
If I change that one simple thing, it'll make it better.
We always get that same question about price
or whatever the thing is, fix that.
It's called thin slicing.
What's the thinnest possible slice?
It's like cutting the bread.
Don't take the entire loaf of bread, spread butter over it,
spread honey, whatever it is,
and then try and eat the thing, right?
Slice that bread so thin you can see through it.
And if you can find the thinnest possible thing,
ask yourself if we, and so the way to do that
is not to look at, and those who've been through
edge training, I apologize, I know you know all this.
Start with the appetite.
What, how long have I got?
I've got two hours.
What can I fix in two hours?
Don't start with what needs to be fixed
and how long does that take?
That's the wrong way around.
Start with an appetite because an appetite
means you'll actually do it.
And so you've allocated time at an appetite.
And so I'm gonna do my four hours.
If you don't have the habit of taking four hours a week
where you're hanging out with the Lord,
working on your partnership,
working on the business, not in it,
then that's an easy thing to fix.
Schedule it, make sure it happens.
You owe that to yourself, to your partnership with the Lord,
you owe that to your team,
your employees, and your customers.
You really do owe to them, do that.
And I mean, I try to do four to six deep work sessions
a week because that's a lot of what works for me.
But for our team, getting it up
to a second deep work session is tough.
And so that's okay.
If I can get one, if you can get every,
now here's the thing,
if you can get everyone in your team doing that once a week
and all they're doing is working on something new,
I'm not talking about concentrating on the existing work.
That's just focus, uninterrupted focus work.
That's not deep work.
Deep work's when you're going to a new innovative level
and you get everyone in your team to do, give permission.
You've got four hours a week.
You can pick four consecutive hours, go off and do it.
Most people can't do four hours when they first start.
It's like, they just don't have that muscle built yet.
So give them an hour, then hour and a half,
then build it up, be patient.
But if you can do that, and then each,
and now you've got the time allocated,
you've got the appetite,
now pick what can I do in my one and a half hour session,
or in my three hour session.
Over to you, Robin.
Yeah, guys.
What I am wanting to go to is the permission side of.
what we talked about earlier, give you a quick overview.
We started out in the black from the beginning
because they pay us first and then we give them the product,
the service, the inspection.
And we've never, over the eight years,
we've been in the black.
And so what we did last year,
we're trying to do the 10X and grow into a new company
that does inspections for jurisdictions
and not just tiny houses.
So we hired a business development person in September
and we've brought Rich on,
who's on the call as president to drive the business
so that I can focus on CEO stuff.
And last month, basically,
I took all the profits from the tiny house world
and we hired a new person and raised Rich up.
And last month, I found myself in new territory,
which was we made less money than our nut.
And I'm concerned about what I call fits and starts.
We tried boroughs and townships in two years ago
in Pennsylvania, that didn't turn anything.
Then we did inspections on re-roofs
and that didn't turn anything.
And then we did what we call rental guard inspections.
And so my concern is at what point as CEO,
do we say we're in trouble
and we need to reorganize how we're doing things.
And Rich has come to me
and he's wanting to hire two more inspectors
on a part-time basis.
And so one of my main jobs as CEO is to watch the cash
and make sure that we don't run out.
So wanted to just have a short conversation
if we could about that.
We did let Matt go, released him into the marketplace.
He spent six months and didn't produce any revenue for us.
And so we saw that that direction wasn't working.
And so we're right now basically taking everything
that we're making on the tiny house side
and trying to start something new without going in the red.
So let's do this as a team.
I have thoughts, I'm sure you have thoughts
who would like to respond to Robin first.
Hold on, let me get just a smidgen more information.
So, all right.
So in order to transition from the tiny house side
to the municipal side is you need a different set
of inspectors for the reasons of qualifications
because there's different qualifications
that they have to have by state guidelines.
So that's definitely one of the hurdles
that we're running into.
We have four people including myself
that are doing inspections on the tiny house side now.
And then we have myself and another person
out of those four.
So two out of four are currently certified
to do other inspections as municipal wise and all that,
but the other two are not.
But the one of them is a pivotal member
in on the tiny house side.
He knows the product in and out.
He knows the, he has very good relationships with people.
And, but yeah, it's like Robin said,
where do we draw the line?
Because it's a huge burden to weigh on them.
Very common, very common challenge.
Let's, anybody want to weigh in on this?
Well, I don't have a lot of experience,
obviously in the field that you're talking about,
but if you've got, if one side of your business
is all in the black and has been since you started,
it seems like if you're, as you're starting this new branch
to go to 10X, that there would be a way to continue
to build the profitable side of the business
that's always been in the black
and maybe bring someone in to increase the production
on the tiny house side of things
where the people are giving you your money up front
in order to offset what you're experiencing
and developing the new side of your business.
That you want to take,
that you want to use to take you to 10X.
Does that make sense?
If you've got something that's purely profitable,
why not build that simultaneously
as you're building this other side of the business?
Yeah, we are doing that,
but we're a big fish in a small pond
in the tiny house world.
And we've kind of maxed out.
We are the, in my opinion,
we are the biggest fish in the tiny house world.
industry expert there. And so there's not a whole lot of
upward mobility on that side. And I don't want to go into debt
borrowed to try this. So that's kind of out of the question too.
So Robin, I mean, we've had a few discussions about this, I
actually think it's a good idea, I would, I would suggest maybe
a scaling back the size of effort, focusing on your, your
best possibility, and really piloting a single success story
that that you could, you know, share with other entities and,
and governments, you know, as a as a point to, as an example of,
you know, kind of the benefits they could recognize, realize.
So I'm just saying, instead of, instead of going broad, narrow,
go after your best and focus on a small win.
Thank you, Ben. Good advice. We are, we are niching down to a
very small niche too.
Yeah. So which amounts to thin slicing, right? Let's hear from
Ray, and then I'll wrap it up.
Yeah. I mean, have you, have you prayed and asked? Have you have
you asked for a direction around this? You know, I'm some of you,
I'm, some of you probably know him, but I'm going to see David
Green, the next few months started Hobby Lobby, $8 billion
company gives 50% of his, you know, profits to charity. And,
you know, he's quoted as saying, my life changed when I turned
every major and minor decision over to prayer and God. And, you
know, have you have you prayed on that, you know, because I
used craft Graham cooks crafted prayer that Tamra suggested to
me. And I got my mantle, because I wasn't sure of should I be
expanding? Should I be doing this or that? And I'm very
grateful. He gave me my tagline. And and so like, ever since
then, my my content hasn't been confusing or my direction to use
that different language. My direction hasn't been confusing.
It's been under that mantle. And and so I would just, you
know, if you haven't, I would just make sure because you know,
we either serve mammon or we serve the Lord, right? And if
we're if we're worried to go in a direction because of mammon,
then is that either a distrust of the Lord? Or is that we're
going in the wrong direction? Are we out of our anointing? And
so like, I would just, you know, maybe you have, but I would
that's the answer. I mean, I don't, I will walk by faith, not
by sight. And so, you know, if he tells me to invest in
something, I invest in something if I go, you know, and so I'm
trying to balance the more logical sort of discussions
we're having in here with, but that will not override what the
Lord tells me because the Lord's covering that. And and so, you
know, that's just my two cents.
Oh, good, great comments. Yeah, let's, let's, but you were right
on the money, Robin, right off the bat in your question,
actually, you said, I want to talk more about the permission.
So what is the permission? See, 1 John 2, 20, and verse 27 says,
you have no need that any man should teach you for the Spirit
teaches you all things. And actually, the word is the
anointing teaches you all things, the empowerment. So the
empowerment, the anointing, the gift, the backing of heaven, if
we want to put it that way, the enablement that is coming to
upstairs, you in your partnership with the Lord, that
anointing is tied to your partnership. And that part is
tied to your permission, that expands as you grow. But so what
you may be, you may be on the right idea, but a bit early. And
so if you're a bit early, then what's happening is the Lord has
got you into an awareness mode, because you haven't met the
right person yet, you haven't connected to the right source of
capital. And I'll end this because I always end up putting
my private equity hat on whenever we have these
conversations. Because we talked to, you know, you talk to a lot
of people. And so, you know, there's only a handful of
sources of capital, you already mentioned debt, you don't do
that, get that. I, I personally wouldn't suggest, this is just
my personal thing, I can't give you financial advice. I'm not a
rich financial advisor. But I can say that as it was mine to
do, I would say, I wouldn't use the profits of the one company
to fund the other, I would not do that. And, and that, back to
the point of, if the Lord is enabling and giving permission,
then there's another way. And that's the way you have to find.
So I would immediately stop that. And I would continue, as
Matthew said,
to continue, even if you are pretty much owning your zone,
I know you're the big player in that small space,
which is great.
You micro-niche down very, very well.
So you've already done that well.
You clearly have favor there.
Clearly that's working.
Keep building that up.
And then instead of, as you said, Robin,
doing the fits and start,
wasting capital and effort and so on,
what you need to look back is what's the source of capital
that's gonna drive this?
And it could be customers.
I mean, it could be that one big customer that comes in
that is possible has been suggested that could work.
It could be that the Lord wants you to partner
with someone else.
I mean, literally you may have not have found
your partner yet and not everything has to be done by us.
I mean, we're in partnership, right?
We're in the kingdom.
And sometimes the Lord wants you to bring someone else along
and so that you could look for an external source
of capital.
I do agree with the debt thing.
And so I think, and the last one is that,
you do a friends and family or personal money.
I wouldn't do that in this case.
There's no need for that.
So anything that would bind you up,
which is using the existing cash from your existing business,
I would not do that.
I would definitely not use debt that would bind you up.
Using friends and family to try to promote this,
I wouldn't do, you're not doing that anyway.
And so I think stay away from all that
and come back to the place of highest freedom
and highest peace.
That's where I would go.
And from that place, so, okay, Lord,
I think you're saying to us, we should do this,
but now I need to know more about timing
and who's coming to help,
rather than I have to go and find someone to hire them
and they work for me or whatever.
That might've been the modality
that got the first company going,
but it may not be the modality for the second one.
Off the top of my head, just,
I wonder if you shouldn't sell the idea to someone else,
license it.
That would be a quick way out.
Go to someone and say, we're the experts in this.
There's this market.
Do you want to buy the franchise or the license
and take it there?
And you can speak to our favorite IP attorney
to help you do that.
Peter.
Peter, yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, keeping in the kingdom,
but I would, yeah, yeah, for sure.
I would, off the top of my head,
I think there's a far more creative way
the Lord wants you to do
and he wants to go on that journey with him.
I think it's about as much as what it's going to do
for your partnership
is what it's going to produce financially.
That's always the case.
So I don't know if that's helpful.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
And it goes counterintuitive to what I,
it's a great idea to license the idea,
but it's counterintuitive to me
because my brain immediately goes to,
well, we got to have something of value
before people will want it.
But maybe the idea is of enough value to do that.
So proof of concept.
Yeah.
I think a quick chat with Peter would help, right?
You'd find out what's patentable, what's trademarkable.
The process is a trademarkable and you may well have that.
Well, guys, thank you for that time.
I am, I had a section at the backend
to talk a little bit about, you know,
your own development
in terms of your own personal productivity.
We threw in a couple of power tools into the app.
I walked him through with you at the beginning of the call.
And some of you may know this,
but there's the one thing that I would love to start.
We developed the Q system, C-U-E system,
because we wanted to give people cognitive control,
leaders cognitive control.
So I want to just give you a one minute
which your appetite view of that,
because I think it may be helpful
to see one specific point.
And I've got, you know, various, the notes are there.
So if you want to go and read to the,
if you go to the curriculum and you go into the power tools,
the very first one, Q, which is self-management.
This is such a big mistake.
I've watched so many people make
and I thought it may be super helpful
since we won't actually get time to get into this today.
But let me see if I can just quickly share my screen.
Can you guys see that, the triangle there?
Yeah?
Yes.
So this triangle, this is a summary
of how to govern everything from yourself.
As the partnering with the Lord,
the Q stands for capture, use and enhance.
And it's a system I developed over 30 years
together with Glenn and others.
And I've taught this to,
I've hired five presidents in my career.
I've taught so many of them
and I could tell you stories about them saying,
man, if I knew this, I would have doubled my productivity.
The plan here is, what?
you massively increase your productivity and lower your stress. And the way to do that is your brain
has to have a system it can trust. Meaning you have to commit to a system that when you do that
your mind knows it stays there. But if it just jumps straight off whatever the system is back
into your brain you don't have a system you trust. And so what people are doing is they have notepads
here and a book there and on their on their phone here and an app there and this and that.
And they have no setting or concept of how it all hangs together. So I've developed this simple way
of understanding. So this Q system is physically a book. As many of you know that the video will
explain it. What goes in the book, how the to-do's go in the book, every Monday creating a new to-do.
It's your command and control system. And from that command and control system you can use all
the digital stuff you like. What I call middleware. Slack, Notion, Notes, Asana, whatever project
management stuff. It doesn't really matter what all the stuff sits in the middle here. That's fine
and that will change and as technology improves and whatever. And at the bottom you've just got
a pile of digital assets. You've got videos and documents and graphics and spreadsheets and
whatever else. PDFs, whatever your digital assets are. So the middleware can help you manage the
digital assets better. If you're not familiar with Notion, it's a pretty powerful tool for doing all
that. Slack is great for informal communications, etc. But what sits on top of the whole thing
has to be, in my personal view, something on paper. Here's why. Here's why I have tried so many apps.
I've tried this so many times. Is that there has to come a point that from the way your
brain is wired, it needs to take these sort of map snapshots of the page. And it's amazing how
fast that gives you control and that sense of, okay, I've got this. And so what you can do from
your paper version, your book version, we've trained our whole team to do this. Here's the upside.
If you do it, it's going to give you cognitive control. My suggestion is, no matter how experienced
you are, no matter how long you've been in business, I've given this to so many people
and the ones who use it always say it's such a game changer. When we go through 40 weeks of
training, this comes up as the number one thing that helped people the most, right? You guys there
at K Construction, you took this pretty seriously. You guys got into it pretty heavy. I know you did.
But at Brilliant, for instance, when you hand somebody something and it's going into it, they're
cueing the thing into their system, you know the chances of it getting dropped. So if you have a
system today in which items never jump back into your mind, two, you always deliver stuff and you
almost never forget something, you don't need this. But since that's probably nobody or very close to
because it just took me a long time to make it this simple and your brain is very good at mapping
different visual elements on a page. And when the minute that thing can scroll like on a digital
screen, it loses all that mapping. So I've been building it very close. I know we have a
cognitive scientist on our team here today. So that's great, Susan. So good to have you. We'll
talk maybe more about this. And for those of you in that learning space, know that's what we want
for you. So I'm out of time. I'd like to stay, you know, and I've gone a minute over, but take a
moment, go through that video. And if it's helpful, show it to your team or to anyone else you want to
use it for. It's super easy. You can do it yourself. And let me know, you know, get on the, by the way,
I will be answering comments. I've set time every week to answer comments and response. If you put
anything on that, on the community, let's get the community thing up and running. We're a bigger
group now and give us feedback. And by the way, connect with each other. Hey, I want to follow up
with the comments you made, et cetera, et cetera. What a pleasure it's been to spend this. This is
the highlight of my month to spend two hours with you guys. Thank you so much for giving me your time
and loved it. Appreciate it. Appreciate you. Let me wrap us up in prayer and then we can,
then we'll jump. Heavenly father, what a delight that you sent Jesus and not just to die for our
sin and give us new life, but to be our partner in the very ventures you've prepared for us to walk
in. Thank you, Lord, that you've gone before us, given us a partner, given us a coach in the genius
Holy spirit. And so I pray for these businesses represented here, Lord, that you would bless
them richly. I pray for wisdom.
I pray for permission, and I pray for clarity, that they can see the ebb and the flow of
what you're doing, and that whatever it is you're doing, we do the same, and that we
will amaze the world by what we do together with you.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
The Lord bless you.
Have a wonderful weekend.