I’ve heard a million excuses for why people don’t have the time to write things down, so why do we do it? Well, let’s dive in to that today. One of our Core Values here at BOP is Write it Down. Now, it has a ton of different applications. From Writing down our Vision to taking notes at team meetings, to documenting processes, and even to producing Coaching Notes from every meeting we have with clients. The list of ways we write things down is exhaustive. And yet, we get pushback all the time from clients and key leaders about whether or not it’s truly necessary. All I can say…it absolutely is. Don’t believe me, well two instances in the past week, not month, week, of when it's been worth it. A little back story from the first instance. I was working with a contractor who was frustrated about the cash in their business. We were looking at their Level Two Dashboard, and pause, this is the simple tool we use to, you guessed it, write down the weekly cash position of the business. In looking at it, his cash position was somewhere in the neighborhood of 450k.  “There’s just so much pressure and so much fluctuation with paying vendors and subs and still not feeling like we have the buffer we need.” So, what I did, was scroll back to the first week in January and just started laughing. “Hey, if you look back at January you only had 125k in cash in the bank to start the year. So that’s a 300 thousand dollar improvement in cash over the first 8 months of 2023. That’s a pretty impressive amount of progress!” And the business owner was blown away. He could see with his own two eyes the undeniable progress that, if he hadn’t recorded his numbers consistently, he would have still felt stuck and unsure of the growth of his business. But taking the time to write the numbers down and record them provided freedom from the chaos in a refreshing way as he entered the fall to where he knew his pricing was sound, and his operations were leading to predictable profitability for the foreseeable future. And he doubled back down on continuing to record and write it all down. The second story. I was working with an installer who was so frustrated about some employee issues. “My guys just don’t get it. We’re so busy and so working so hard that they constantly complain about how hot it is and how they don’t like what they’re doing and we just don’t feel like a team right now.” So, after listening to the conversation for 30 min or so, I scrolled back down through our coaching notes to look at what we were discussing this time a year ago. Sure enough, some of the same thoughts came up then, too. It was a seasonal discussion in August of every year as the summer just takes its toll. But, the good news is he saw that there would be an end to it. The other thing we noticed is that we had spent 2 to 3 coaching meetings talking about materials and pricing delays and revisiting his estimates to make sure he could hit his margins. It was a period in his business that was so exhausting as he never knew what was going to happen next. He looked at me after I finished and laughed, “Well I’m glad I’m not fighting those battles anymore!” Perspective! Hits you right between the eyes when you look back and often realize how far you’ve come and the battles you’re no longer fighting. When you can pull the plane up to 10,000 feet and survey the landscape with clarity. To give yourself some sanity in the midst of owning and running your business. So what do you need to commit to recording? Is it your cash position, so that you can know how your business is performing? Is it your vision for your business, so that you can know where you’re headed and make sure your team knows? Maybe it’s some systems and processes, to ensure your team is set up to thrive in their job roles and can be held accountable to a standard? Maybe it’s even just writing down your Core Values and your mission, so your team can know who you guys are trying to be as a business! It all matters and it all adds clarity in the midst of chaos. That’s the goal friends. But remember, it doesn’t start big…it starts small. Think of one thing to record each week and then build on that. And, as always, if you need tools or accountability for this…we’d love to help!  Thanks so much for listening, have a great day!

Let's be honest. As business owners, we can often be the creator of our own chaos, which means we create chaos for other people. Hey, it's Scott Beebe with the Business On Purpose platform. Make sure to go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy and you can take a Healthy Assessment of the backend health of your business and see if you're one of those that stirs up chaos. You know, one of the biggest reasons of chaos stirring in a business is, lack of communication, which means a lack of clarity. And you go, Well, Scott, we talk all the time. Well, if Ashley, my wife, and I just talked, quote, all the time, that meant we're texting, phone calling, that sort of thing. But we never sat down to have intentional conversation on a walk, a bike ride, the back porch without distraction being our constant companion, then that's not really talking. That might be communicating back and forth, but we're not actually growing. We're not developing. And so we've got to do something different. The reason I'm doing this podcast is I just got asked about the difference between meetings. See, there's a variety of meetings that we have when we talk about the five foundational cornerstones of any business vision, story, mission statement, unique core values, hiring process being the center, we've added this fifth team meetings. Now, usually we get eye rolls when we do it right. God, we hate team meetings. We don't like team meetings. They never do anything. In fact, one author wrote a book, Team Meetings Suck. Or maybe the title is just Meetings That Suck. But nonetheless, they share a lot of sentiment from a lot of people that we've got to be aware of when it goes into meetings.  Here's the truth about meetings. Too often they're just a continuation of the chaos that we've done chaotically throughout the day. So we bring that chaos into the formality of a team meeting rather than allowing that to be a hub of clarity. There's a couple of different meetings I want to share with you. Number one is the good old fashioned team meeting. Now, I'm going to give you a rundown of what that agenda should look like here in just a second. But for most of you, you should also have what's called an operations meeting or a project meeting or a production meeting or in our case, for a business coaching firm. We have a coaches meeting. That's where we spend the majority of time following up on a couple of different elements around our weekly scorecards that we have as coaches. But more importantly, we dive in to the reality of our client work. Questions that we heard last week, conundrums that we were in trying to help clients through to help liberate them from the chaos of working in their business. See, if we leverage our team meeting to do our client meeting work, then we would never get to the purpose of our team meeting, and we would never create culture. Remember, Torbjørn Ekelund of that great book "A Year in the Woods"? He said that nature is God made, but culture is man made. It's manufactured. What does that mean? That means anything related to culture in your business was directly created by you. And the people you work with don't like your culture. Guess what? It's kind of on you. Like your culture? Great job. It's on you. Part of the reason we have team meetings is to create culture. That's right. We can create culture. We generate it, we manufacture it. We're not waiting in reaction to those things. There are other times that we need to communicate in a reactive format to see what's been going on and what we need to do to change that. That's where it comes into the project meeting or the production meeting or operations meeting, depending on what kind of industry you're in. Now, the over 50% of the industry that we work with are construction, infrastructure and supporting entities around that. So we talk a lot about project meetings. So we'll talk to a client about a team meeting. They'll go, oh my gosh, ours last 3 hours. Why do they last so long? Well, it's because we had to talk about all the problems at 31 21 Maple Street. Wait a second. That's where things begin to break down. See, here's the thing we've got to remember about team meetings. Project meetings is too many of them are not agenda driven and leader led. In fact, they keep the seesaw of predictability out of balance. What in the world is that? The seesaw of predictability balances two primary elements that lead to unpredictability, which ultimately lead to micromanagement. Many of you wonder what's the difference between micromanagement and healthy leadership? Well, it's the seesaw of predictability. Imagine on one side of the seesaw you have the right questions. Imagine on the other side of the seesaw you have the right time. If you ask the right question at the right time, you have equilibrium, you have a lack of chaos, you have clarity and you have leadership. But if you ask the wrong question at the right time or the wrong time asking the right question, then you are out of balance and you're now in the realm of micromanagement. So if you want to know if you're micromanaging or not, then just ask yourself, am I asking the right questions at the right time? A right question might be, hey, do you have last week's sales numbers? The right time. At a designated agenda driven, leader-led team meeting, the wrong question might be, hey, do you have sales numbers from 2014? The wrong time? texting at 11:37 p.m. on a Friday night. The moment we start asking the wrong question at the right time or at the wrong time, we ask the right question. That's when we know definitively we've moved into micromanagement. So instead, let's take the time and make the time and take the effort to build an agenda driven, leader-led team meeting. Give you the outline in just a second. And also an agenda driven, leader led project or production or operations meeting to talk about the actual work being fulfilled. So what's the difference between the two agendas? A team meeting should go something like this. We always start with BIG wins- Begin In Gratitude. We ripped that off from Dan Sullivan years ago. And so we start every team meeting, every coach's meeting, every director's meeting, and every client meeting that we do. Hundreds a week, starting with big wins. Why? Is because we can definitively begin in gratitude. We can set the tone of the call. This isn't some Tony Robbins, pie in the sky, toxic positivity sort of thing. This is really setting a tone so that we begin to work through our agenda at that point. Now, once we're done with big wins, shouldn't take any more than 3 or 5 minutes. We then move to our first agenda item that is walking through our culture calendar. The top side of the culture calendar is the date of the first day of each week. Take Monday of this week, and then Monday of next week, and then Monday of the following week. And then the left side of the graph, which would be the vertical side of the graph, are all of the ingredients that you want to insert into your business to build great culture. Do you want monthly team days? Do you want a weekly team lunch? Do you want regular team meetings, regular project meetings? Do you want individual one on one check ins, vision days every other month? Do you want unicorn rides for the kids every quarter? Whatever it might be for you? There should be 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 elements that you see that you want to build into great culture that goes on the vertical element. We call that the culture calendar. And then every week in the team meeting, after big wins, the leader of that meeting checks the agenda, which tells them to go look at the culture calendar. They review it, everybody stacks hands, and we move on to the next line item, which is 12-week plans. Now, if you're a client of ours, you know what those are. If you're not, it's essentially our goal setting tool. Every team member, owner, key leader has a 12-week plan. Goals with multiple tactics per goal. And so during that time on the weekly team meeting, no more than 1 hour, the leader goes around to each person after big wins, after checking the culture calendar, and says, all right, Tim, give us an update on your 12-week plans. All right, Hannah, give us an update on your 12-week plans. And so we're holding each other accountable to the business goals. These are not project goals. Sometimes projects might creep in, but ultimately they're our business goals. For the next 12 weeks to make sure that we have alignment in our accountability. Then there's also a line item at the very end just to go back and make sure everybody's got their action items for the next meeting and then we leave that's it. No longer than 1 hour. And if it bumps up to an hour, you cut it off and you learn for the next time try to keep it within an hour. Then the project meeting is where you can deep dive into projects. I would still start it with BIG wins because project meetings you're usually talking nothing but problems. So let's set the tone for something different. And then within each project, I would highly encourage you to set a timer. Too many of us owners get on our high horse and we start pontificating about what we see rather than really using that time to encourage, to leverage, to understand, to offer feedback and to gain insight. And so we get on our high horse because dang it, we're the ones who started the business and we start telling people what to do rather than active listening, offering feedback and then maneuvering through the real issues that you're dealing with. Each project ought to have an allotted amount of time. A project meeting really shouldn't be no longer than 1 hour. If you have to go 90 minutes then that's it. But absolutely zero minutes longer than that. Why? Is because you're going to exasperate your team and eventually they'll either leave physically or they will leave mentally and emotionally and you as the leader cannot afford that. So team meetings, project meetings should be agenda driven, leader-led, really no more than 1 hour. Always start with BIG wins, should have an agenda so they follow a method of predictability so people don't get exasperated with what's going on. And by the way, each of these to start with should happen every single week. And if the owner's not there, they should happen anyway. Just because the owner is gone doesn't mean we don't meet. What is that communicating when we do that? So that's the difference between those two meetings. And every business should have a version of a team meeting, which talks about the macro-level culture and goal thing and then from there should also have some sort of project meeting to talk about the in the weeds element and they should be absolutely separate. Why? Clarity. Remember the RPMs of great leadership, Repetition, Predictability and Meaning. All those together equal clarity so that you can be liberated from the chaos of working in your business. 

Join Scott Beebe, Founder of Business On Purpose, and Thomas Joyner, BOP Director of Coaching, as they break down the 30-Day Business Owner Challenge. Learn about preparation, key takeaways, team strategies, and driving business growth in this insightful discussion.  LISTEN HERE to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos?  Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on.  Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

For the last 9 years, my two sons and I have made a pilgrimage to Camp Ridgecrest in Black Mountain, NC for the annual father/son weekend camp.  A weekend marked by meaning, muscular pain, intentionality, and ibuprofen, this time may be the most momentous in our relationship as dad and sons.  The regularity, frequency, and repetition of daily life is wildly important, of course, and these dedicated moments of focused intentionality have bred special awareness. This year was different for two reasons. Both of my sons are now living away from home, each maneuvering through their own experience outside of the daily, in-person interaction of mom or dad.  Both were working as staff members of father/son camp for the weekend while I was able to participate as a volunteer cleaning floors and watching dads walk with their sons to play frisbee golf, hike through hornet's nests, and most meaningfully, sit and read what they had written. There is a tradition that has been manufactured through premeditated repetition; if a dad is not careful, he will miss it and so too his son(s). The second uniqueness of this year’s father/son camp is that a key leader and influencer of the day to day function of camp lost his father suddenly this past year.  What may customarily be a localized and isolated experience impacting only this leader, his family, and a few close friends; this year, every participant at father/son camp was impacted without most being aware. A hallmark of father/son camp happens each year on Saturday morning when a couple of hundred boys and teenagers are ushered away from their dads to go lose themselves in jovial amusement for an hour or so.  During the hysteria of boy fun, not yet even laced with an ounce of Mellow Yellow or Sour Patch Straws, the dads are invited into a complementary experience. For years, Mike Pineda wrote. Every single morning, Mike’s family would wake up to an email in their inbox.  These daily emails became a stalwart foundation for anyone who made the time to read them.  Periodically, one of these emails would “leak” and those of us nearby would feel the coolness of wisdom blow to influence the direction of our day and our thoughts.  I never met Mike in person, and yet Mike has a significant influence on our decision-making, our thoughts, and our parenting.   Why? Mike wrote. Mike was not a New York Times Bestseller, nor a Pulitzer Prize nominee.  Mike was a husband, a dad, and a friend, just like many of us.  Mike made time to write so that the meaning of his thoughts could slow-release into the narrow scope of his influence.  Mike’s son now oversees the camp where hundreds of dads are invited on a Saturday morning once a year…to write. Each dad was provided with a piece of letterhead, a pen, and a beautiful place spread out to be alone.  Writing requires time;  time to think, time to reflect, time to go after wisdom, and time to get all of those thoughts down on a piece of paper so that the echo of their minds rings through the peaks and valleys of life's realities.  These dads write so their sons can see and hear what they really want to say in a way that leverages the value of thought and contemplation.  Saturday night, each dad walks under the night sky with his son(s) to a place prepared by quiet and clandestine volunteers with a small firepot and a couple of chairs.  With limited distraction locked on the shimmering tongues of small flames, each dad sits with his son(s) and his letter(s).   The son sits as a recipient, the dad as the giver.  Dad reads because dad wrote.   I’m not even sure it was Mike’s pattern of writing that stoked the need for dads to write letters to their sons each year at camp; but I believe the continuation and longevity of this important rite has been, in part, perpetuated because of Mike’s precedent. In business and leadership, we obsess about the power of writing things down because of the down-stream value of replicable systems and processes.  We push you to write because it unlocks the freedom of your team to run. Now stocked with the deliberate wisdom of dads and granddads at father/son camp, sons all over can run with the freedom of knowing what their dad has to say about life; and more importantly about their son.   Mike made time to write so that we could see, hear, and run.  

Owning and operating a business is a continual streak of tests that ultimately prove the trustworthiness of the business that built.  The business of scammers and hucksters fall apart over time forcing them to be in a state of constant reinvention and re-huckstering. Traveling various parts of our historic world over the past few months has reminded me of the longevity and duration of things.  Walking the streets of Rome flanked by artifacts from late B.C. and early A.D. eras has a way of sobering the hardships of your time. Walking through the carved caves of the Cappadocia region of modern Turkey sobers you to the challenges and hardships of previous cultures.  Every culture endures testing.  Every generation is put on trial so as to mark the trustworthiness and endurance of that generation.  Endurance allows for longevity and the hope of seeing the days that are hoped for. Without endurance, life is short and hope is fleeting. The ingredients of our words fuel much of the cocktail of what is continually being tested through the swishing and swashing of the minds of those around. Each word that comes from the mouth of a leader is filtered through the taste buds of life’s mental truth machine and filed away in the vaults of our minds.  “But you said” has caught many a leader in moments of double-speak not realizing that a mere fit of external processing was being received by all others as gospel truth. In your strategy to be more decisive, more creative, more inventive, or more direct, always remember that “a fool who keeps his mouth shut is considered wise” (Proverbs 17:28). Your words enter the world with the longevitous ink of a tattoo.  Once out, your words are nearly impossible to cram back in and the surfaced emotions are floating for all to sense and respond. If you are a leader or an owner who uses words (ahem, all of us) then here are a few devices that will bode well for you to adopt and deploy. First, be slow to speak and quick to listen.   This was wisdom provided to a group of Jewish citizens who had been thrown out of their homeland and were living a scattered lot in unfamiliar territories.  Their house was not their home, their streets were not their domain, and the people were not their people. Look, see, listen.  Very rarely has a winning strategy been speak then think.  The fire of anger is stoked by the sparks of unfiltered words.   Want to throw a small group into a frenzied rage?  Make a habit of speaking the first thing that comes to your mind and you too will have created a remarkable and unfortunate riot, or at least a really frustrating place to work. Speak slowly.  Listen quickly. Second, place a timeline on your ideas. An idea is often birthed into an assumption of perpetuity meaning it never ends.  Want to start meeting in a small group?  What happens when you are tired of meeting?   Want to start volunteering?  What happens when it is clear that your voluntary role has run it course? There is no shame in running ideas through a test period of limited time.   Take an idea and declare, “We will try this and monitor the results for the next 3 months and then decide on DATE/TIME whether to extend or extinguish.” The boundary of a start and stop timeline will allow everyone involved to feel a sense of urgency, and also a sense of freedom knowing that if the idea does not provide its intended outcome, then we mustn’t be married to a bad idea for life. Third, remind yourself that your words are sticky. The words that come out of your mouth as a leader carry a volume and camera-like photograph that burns itself into the emotional landscape of the people with ears to hear. Your words tend to stick longer and with greater weight than other because they directly impact the day to day lives of the people you work with.   Be careful with “just spitballing”.  It is probably best to remember that spitballing can be construed as truth-telling and there is not much you can do to change that.   We can say, “Well it’s not my fault that is what they heard!”  The RPMs of great leadership can guide us in how we should speak.  Repetition ensures that what we say has fidelity over time.  Predictability ensures that what we say will remain consistent over time.  Meaning built into our words will ensure that we have baked in the mission and the values that we hold dear to our decision-making over time. Your words matter, and the matter of your words stick.  

Remember that Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start The Fire? It is a maniacal mantra sequencing decades of rage into a lyrical pounding intentionally crafted as a relentless onomatopoeia; the song feels like it sounds allowing us as listeners to likewise feel the chaos. That song could be the soundtrack for so many chaotic business owners who are on a remorseless campaign to find the next great marketing hammer that will crack open a whole new world gushing with leads and sales because, in their minds, sales solves everything. The myth of that last statement will have to be fleshed out on another date and time; for now, we need to confront the restlessness and confusion of marketing.  It is good to turn the volume down, or maybe off completely for a moment, and sit in the silence of what is rather than the snake-oiled and empty promises of what could be. We’ve said often that marketers are like gypsies and business coaches (a bit self-deprecating seeing that business coaching is our profession); the barrier to entry into each profession is low and broad. The good news for marketers is that the human brain is wired to respond to hope and promise often neglecting reality and objectivity.  Marketing is always susceptible to the “Clark Stanley-anization” of theatrics and promise. Clark Stanley (aka The Rattlesnake King) was known as the true snake-oil sales pioneer.  According to Wikipedia, in the late 1800s Stanley began hawking his snake-oil linament at a variety of expos and shows throughout the United States. The nothingness of the snake-oil linament was exposed in the early 1900s and eventually led to a series of food and drug laws that would be the precursor to the modern U.S. Food and Drug Administration.   Stanley sold on what could happen forcing people to neglect the balance of what has happened. Both perspectives are helpful; for without seen historical learning we will miss the obvious, and without unseen hope life will lack wonder, invention, and creativity. Are all marketers like Clark Stanley?  Of course not…just some. So how can you find a marketing strategy, leader, or team who will generate leads that convert to sales in a meaningful way? Let’s start by looking in the foggy rear view. One question that our coaches ask every one of our clients when they bring up the topic (usually in frustration) around marketing; where has 80% of your business originated from in the past? We are continually stunned by the number of business owners who are ready to burn the boats, bomb the bridges, and cut off the parachute of what has brought predictable clients and customers in the past. Where has 80% of your business come from in the past?   Start your new marketing strategy there! But wait, “most of our clients are word of mouth”.  That statement has become a bit of an arrogant monicker of recent as if to declare, “We’re so good we don’t have to market.” NO!!!   That misses the point.   Marketing is tucked into every hidden crevasse of your business.  The cleanliness of your bathroom markets.  The quality of your material markets.  The clarity of your communication markets.  Every process, every system, every deliverable, every payable, and every receivable communicates something to your existing and potential clients and customers. When you allow your business to be lulled to sleep by the apathy of word-of-mouth marketing you are building your real estate on someone else’s property and you are robbing your business of the challenging creativity to innovate on what has already worked. As an example, we work with a sizeable number of homebuilders and remodelers in the construction space. Every time we present at a builder event we are asked about marketing at because of the assumption, “If I can just figure out where the faucet is, then we can open it up and have a constant stream of business.”  More leads and sales added to a poorly systematized business will do nothing but hasten the end. The system must be built to handle the load. If your dominant marketing strategy is “word of mouth”, then how do you build a system to capitalize on the mouths that are spreading your words? Throwing your hands up and hoping for the best is not a winning strategy. For homebuilders and remodelers, one of the best lead sources for new works are the professionals that live upstream.  Who are the professions that receive early indications that new projects are coming down the pipeline in construction?  Developers, Engineers, Architects, and Real Estate Professionals. Everytime we have built a simple process for homebuilders and remodelers to proactively, repetitively, and systematically make time for these professionals, magically new leads begin to come in. But doesn’t that require face-to-face (in-person or virtual) interaction?   A side note, generally (not always) if you wish for a digitally scalable marketing option that limits or eliminates face-to-face interaction, then the entire culture of your business will be changing also.  Not to mention, digital marketing and advertising will usually require a lot more money and resource expertise that you think and are typically prepared for. Stop right now for a moment.  Where has 80% of your business come from in the past (or some majority)? Stop overthinking all of the unproven ways to go generate new leads and begin building a repetitive, predictable, and meaningful process that will add value to the lead channels that have already proven themselves in your business. Down the road you can create a marketing slush fund for some skunk-works type activities when you have proven your predictable marketing model.   For now, turn the volume of marketing options down.  Just calmly walk on past Clark Stanley’s snake oil display, have confidence in the objectivity in what you already know, and take courage in building on that objectivity with the unseen hope of what could be. 

Brent Whitaker Business on Purpose. I wanna dive right in. So we were sitting the other day with some folks, and, y'all have heard this song, “You can't always get what you want.”True. Well, you definitely can't get what you want if you never define what it is that you want. This came up because I asked a couple in real estate, and I said, Hey, what is it that you want? And it was like deer in headlights. Like I'd asked them some quantum theory question and they paused and said, I don't know. And I said, well, definitely can't get what you want if you don't define what you want. I said, why is that a, you know, difficult question for you. “So we're just so busy” Ask anybody how they're doing lately, man, I'm good. I'm just, just busy. I don't know if being busy is a good or bad thing, but they were so busy they haven't slowed down enough to ask that question. What do I want? So that's the question today is if you're driving, if you're sitting, I'd encourage you, if you're in your office to grab a pen, if you're driving, maybe a voice memo after this is over, what do you want? You're allowed to ask and answer that question! And then write down what it is that you want. And dream a little bit. We’re not allowed to dream anymore. It feels like we're so task-oriented that we don't dream. We get to the end of our lives and we say, Hey, how did I end up here? Well, you never defined where it is that you actually wanted to be. It's one reason we build out a vision story, both for family and work. Cuz those things intersect. You can't compartmentalize those. What is it that you want? Write it down. It's a brain dump as they say. Then ask the question, what's getting in the way of what it is that I said I wanted? Identify those barriers. Just write 'em down, all of them. Then as you kind of marinate on that, digest that, let that metabolize a little bit as they say, what will life look like? what will life feel like two, three years from now if nothing changes, if we keep moving in the same manner, on the same trajectory that we're moving in now and, and changing nothing, what will life look and feel like? And then what are you willing to invest time-wise to get what you wrote down or verbalize that you wanted? That's why we create that vision story. We write it down, we get really granular, right, with what it is that we want holistically, life, work, finances, health, and then we make a plan to move forward in the direction of what we want and decisions are made in light of the vision story that we create. So I hope you pose that question to yourself today. Maybe with your significant other or just to a buddy. Hey, what do you want? See what the responses are, but then take some time to really unpack what it is that you want.  Maybe you've done this, most folks I have talked to have it. So we've gotta set the target. We've gotta create this vision of what we really want and we've gotta identify the barriers that are in the way. And it really gives you motivation when you ask yourself, Hey, what will life feel like if I do nothing different? No, I've said those several times. So unpacking the day, that's one of the things we do here at Business On Purpose. We do not start anything in our coaching roadmap, our installation roadmap until we define what it is that folks won't. Y'all have a great day. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time.

While in Turkey, we were struck with curiosity as to the various wars and struggles that entangled Asia Minor leading to the rules and regimes that have inhabited the intersection of the world in modern Istanbul. Netflix had an interesting historical presentation of the Ottoman Empire with a focus on Mehmed II that details how the Sultan empowered his forces with relentless raids on the impenetrable walls of Constantinople. They eventually took the city and rules the regions for centuries.  While watching Rise of Empires: Ottoman I was struck by the number of messages that were sent by couriers, or delegation of one side directly to the leaders of the competing side.   These were soldiers who had but one task; deliver a message from the leader in its exact form and for its intended purpose.  Mehmed II or Emporer Constantine were the originators of the message, and the courier its delegate.    Delegation is birthed from the Latin delegere and according to latin-is-simple.com  carries the idea that you are assigning and entrusting an appointed trustee to carry out the wish and desire of the original delegator. Delegation is not a modern concept, it has been used in organizational growth since the beginning of time. In the midst of a time of overwhelming demand on his leadership, there is a story about Moses who was warned by his father-in-law, “‘This is not good!’ Moses’ father-in-law exclaimed. ‘You’re going to wear yourself out—and the people, too. This job is too heavy a burden for you to handle all by yourself.’” Leadership is an infinite cycle of emotional labor.  Leadership is the constancy of assessment (seeing, hearing, and experiencing), deliberation, decision, evaluation, rinse and repeat. There is not a clocking in and clocking out of leadership which is I why the statement “rest is resistance” is an imposing idea.  The leader must artificially will moments of sabbatical (minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months) in the crevices of leadership. A strategy for healthy leadership is found in the power of healthy delegation. There is a difference between delegation and abdication. Whereas delegation aligns with trust, equipment, and empowerment, abdication is the intention to leave a post or a task with no desire to return; a resignation. Abdication does not require equipment, training, thought, care, empathy, or intentionality.  Abdication simply wipes its hands of responsibility and walks away, at the ready to blame any nearby candidate for the failure that it will spawn…and spawn it will.   One of the privileges and massive responsibilities in leadership is to delegate well. Three elements will stock your toolbox for healthy delegation. First, setting clear expectations which can be found in writing things down. Is it a role or a task that you will be asking someone else to complete for you?  Write it down, record a video, and capture that role or task in such a way that will scale easily to those you wish to delegate.   Violate this step, and you will cascade downhill into the bitter valley of abdication. Just last week we had a couple of clients that were “sort of not documenting their processes” and it was causing unnecessary delay in important hiring of new team members that would ultimately bring these leaders freedom. Their homework was easy; “Record two videos by Friday of the tasks you are going to ask this person to do.”  That’s it.  No excuses…write it, record it, video it. Second, build a simple scorecard of what success looks like.  All humans will ask at some point, “Am I doing this right?”  Give a simple checklist of “here are the five, or eight things that will need to be done each week to ensure that your role is airtight.” A scorecard is what winning looks like. Build your first version, and then adapt as time progresses.   Finally, build repetitive, predictable, and meaningful communication points. Repetitive, pre-determined meetings times are your friend. Each person who has been delegated to must have time on their leader’s calendar that is pre-set and has a pre-determined set of questions that are aligned to the role, scorecard, and culture of what is being asked. We have regular (twice monthly) check-ins with our team members in addition to a weekly team meeting, a weekly coaches meeting, and every-other-monthly vision days.   The goal is forced conversation.  In the absence of information the mind makes things up; a wandering mind is good for innovation, but not delegation.   Clarity wins, and clarity demands repetition. Are you abdicating?  Or are you delegating? Abdication brings burden and imprisonment. Delegation brings clarity and freedom.

Join Patrice Miles, BOP Business Coach, as she interviews Conner Fennell, BOP Intern. Discover Conner's experiences, the hiring process, DISC test insights, tasks for BOP, and how this internship is shaping his goals. Don't miss this valuable internship discussion! WATCH THE VIDEO to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos?  Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on.  Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1

Join Patrice Miles (BOP Business Coach) and Jessie Barber (BOP Director of Client Experience) as they share essential tips on hiring interns. Learn the hiring process, overcoming obstacles, internship length, finding the right candidate, compensation, onboarding, and communication.  LISTEN HERE to learn more! Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos?  Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on.  Take our Healthy Owner Business Assessment HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy SIGN UP for our Newsletter HERE ➡️ https://www.boproadmap.com/newsletter For blogs and updates, visit our site HERE ➡️ https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/blog/ LISTEN to the Business On Purpose Podcast HERE ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-business-on-purpose/id969222210 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel HERE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbPR8lTHY0ay4c0iqncOztg?sub_confirmation=1