Episode #801
Are you ready to take your business to the next level?
Have you considered the importance of reviewing your performance and conducting thorough audits?
In this podcast episode, Tim and Doug delved into the critical aspects of scaling a business effectively. They emphasized the significance of reviewing game tapes, akin to how sports teams analyze their performances, to identify areas of improvement and ensure effective leadership delivery.
Additionally, they highlighted the necessity of conducting audits to plug potential holes in the business that may hinder scalability.
In this episode, you’ll learn about the essential steps required to scale your business successfully. From conducting thorough audits to identifying key areas of improvement, the hosts stress the importance of meticulous planning and mentorship.
By seeking guidance from experienced entrepreneurs and analyzing data-driven insights, listeners will gain valuable strategies for navigating the challenges of business growth.
Whether it’s refining processes, addressing staffing issues, or honing leadership skills, this episode offers actionable advice to help entrepreneurs thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
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Head over to our BONUS page for special access to some of the deeper tactics and techniques we’ve developed at The Powerful Man.
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Transcription
Doug Holt 0:00
I run the marketing for TPM. As an example, if I leave, can somebody else come in immediately and take over and someone take over without too much disruption? If we were to double, its yes, no situation. It’s not well, you know, they could, but that to me is enough. Now you have a scalability issue. Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the TPM show. We are back and today we’re going to talk about scaling. Is it scale or fail. So overcoming the growing pains of business expansion, something a lot of us have felt. And here at TPM, We are a movement. You consider us a business, but we are on trajectory to do a 10x. This year, we’re on track for that. And Tim, and I want to talk to you about some of the things that we’ve looked at to so you can be ready to take your business to the next level and not be scared of the hurdles, that inevitably you’re going to face. Tim and I have done this multiple times, between the both of us, we’ve done this with many, many businesses, we want to talk to you guys about as business owners what you can do to grow and scale your business. So Tim, some of the takeaways I want to talk about is how to identify when and how to scale your business, and the importance of systems processes and team scaling, as well as balancing growth while maintaining the quality and culture that work for you.
Tim Matthews 1:21
Yeah, it does.
Doug Holt 1:22
So you know, as I said, here at TPM, this year, we’re on pace for a 10x growth within the movement. And really, it’s because of the men, I love to say it’s our great work, but we actually have amazing men that are coming here. But you also got to realize listeners, that the people that work within TPM, most are old business owners when I say old, they’re not old by age. But they’re men have gone through our programs in the movement who have been business owners. So they take a very intrapreneur like a entrepreneur within a business approach to things.
Tim Matthews 1:58
Oh, sorry, you cut out the funnel point, that joke? No,
Doug Holt 2:01
no worries, I was just stopping to give you an opportunity to talk. I’ve had a lot of coffee.
Tim Matthews 2:09
Yeah, we do. We have a lot of amazing people on the team, like you said, who used to be I hate the word clients. It’s not how we view them and in the movement is it but for lack of a better word, I call them clients, lot of people in the team that used to be clients. And like you said, because it did have such an impact on their life, they just reached a point in their own career as well, where they were tired of just making money for the sake of making money, right part of them going to the program, open their eyes up to what was really possible for them and how much they wanted to do something meaningful. And the final 10 to 15 years that Korea. So yeah, some of them chose to come on board, and they’ve been pivotable pivotal in helping the movement to impact the number of kids and men and families that it’s impacting today. Yeah.
Doug Holt 3:00
So the first thing that I look at, when I’m looking at is a business ready to scale is what is the feedback I’m getting for on the product or service that I have? Is it ready? In other words, is it good enough? And what I mean by good enough, so we have an anonymous feedback system. So if anybody that goes through our programs, they get sent a survey, which they thought anonymously, so they can answer as honestly as they’d like. And we have over a 90% success rate with the programs. That’s huge. Right? Men love the coaching, right? The coaches, I want to say at a scale of five, Tim, I think you know the exact number, but I’ll go I think we have a 4.9 out of five rating for the last program that we did. So we look at this, you have to have a product or service that it that is worthy of scaling. Do people want this? Does it work? Does it provide the service that you say it’s going to be so if you run a marketing agency, are you able to get leads or brand recognition for your clients? It’s a yes, no question. I was talking to a guy earlier Tim, who runs an agency. And he asked me, he said, I think I’m ready to scale. I said, Great. I go How long have you had your clients? Like how long do they stick around for? He’s like, Oh, well, you know, we have really high turnover. Well, why is that? Well, Doug, you know, we actually when it comes down to it, people just end up leaving us. And so when I ended up talking to him, Tim, he wasn’t ready to scale because he didn’t have a product or service that actually worked. And that was the problem. And he realized that really his focus wasn’t shouldn’t be on scaling. It should be going back to home base and coming up with a service in his case. That actually helped people so much. They wanted to stick around.
Tim Matthews 4:50
Yeah, scaling is like the sexy thing to do, isn’t it but it can be absolute chaos. If he’s not there on the right foundation, and a third tier takeaway you had in the beginning, now how to how to do with a little bit of balance. But I think an important piece as well as how to do without sacrificing your health, your happiness and your relationships. Because if you scale if you add flaws to a building with crumbling foundations, before, you know, you might be thinking that you spinning plates now you choose to scale from that place of instability and you can multiply that by 10. And it’s going to be absolute chaos. I
Doug Holt 5:29
think it can be I think there’s also seasons, right? So transparently with me within TPM, I gained a bunch of weight over this last year. But that’s because my whole focus was on growing the movement, which is so important to me. I mean, when you’re in a position that I’m in, and you literally have men coming to you and saying, You saved my life, or you saved my family, on a regular basis, it’s, it’s hard not to want to dive in fully to that and sacrifice yourself a little bit. I can speak for myself, but I’m guessing I’m speaking for a lot of men, like we sacrifice officer lights or default, that’s certainly something I’m always working on. Because I’m always willing to sacrifice, face myself give you the shirt off my back, even though I’m freezing. I think a lot of us are that way. And if you know it’s for a season, then I think that’s okay. Right? I think that’s okay, like right now I’m pulling back on a lot of things focusing back on my wellness. So you do want that balance. Unless you’re deciding, hey, look, this is the time to scale, this is the time to grow. Then in which case you have a conversation with those you love around you, I talked to you about this, I talked to people on the team, I talked to my wife, I let them know, okay, I’m putting my head down, and I’m getting this stuff done. So we can get to this end game. But it’s for a short period of time, right. And to me a short period of time is less than two years, or two years or so. Right? That’s in business that to me is a short relative span, to get to this point. And so I think for a season, that’s great. But you want to maintain to your point to him the quality, or you cannot let go the quality in my opinion, just to scale, right? Because if that goes down, you’ve lost your business. It’s a short term, short term win for a long term loss if your quality goes down.
Tim Matthews 7:16
Yeah, I’m with you. On all of what you just said, I think for most guys that it’s not a season, it’s the path of FOSS is very different for you. You know, you’re still on the path of power. Right? Even though you may have may look different at times. For a lot of the listeners, the vast majority, no disrespect to those guys in reality is there’ll be on the path of power. In it. One, there’ll be scaling. I’ll just be that’s just the way they operate. Right? That kind of hustle mentality, which is, is I love so many strengths in it. But it’s when it takes over them. And it comes at the cost of everything. But yeah, to your point, if you scale and you lose the quality and the product, which goes back to original point, right? Do you have a product that’s even ready to scale? Well, if you retention rate, or whatever it’s called for in your particular business is love and of course not, right, you get to get the foundation and make sure the foundation is solid enough, it doesn’t need to be perfect needs to be good enough. So the actually adding flaws and it can hold the building up. Whereas now I’ve seen many business owners who have chosen to scale without having the basics in place and have gone from think one guy in particular went from I think about 40 employees to about 100 in the space of the past 12 to 18 months scaling in the way that he’s chosen to scale which is terrifying to me though he’s chosen to do it because there’s just no there’s no optics on anything.
There’s no clarity on anything. As a result. If you imagine a circle with loads of arrows pointing different directions, that’s what you’ve gotten if there’s 15 of those arrows is manageable. 100 of those arrows becomes a bit like chaos, which, as business owners, we tend to have the mindset of okay, I’ll just do it. Imagine having that mindset with 100 people I’ll just do it I’ll swoop in it becomes crazy. So I think the product is a key piece for me you know I’m much I’m a big fan of diagnose and alleviating constraints. An ideal world if I was to look at whether a business was was ready to scale or not. I would be able to see a set of numbers many numbers but you know 10 To 15 numbers I can think off the top of my head that give a good indicator one of those would definitely be retention rate our customer lifetime value, our frequency of whatever it may be to see how loyal and happy that customer is right and then from there if if let’s assume the product is ready to scale. Cool, how would you then go about scale? Is it a lead issue? Is it? What is it that you need more of? Which those numbers ought to be able to tell you?
Doug Holt 10:05
Yeah, I love that sheet. I love that train of thought. I think before I get there for for my train of thought, Tim, is, you know, we have a show in the States called Shark Tank, you have Dragon’s Den in the UK, there’s a guy and Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary, love them or hate them, he’s got this line that he uses a lot of you know what happens if you get hit by a bus, then the business is over, right? And this comes down to are all the people on your team replaceable? Because you can’t scale otherwise. Otherwise, that’s what comes up as the bottleneck. Most often it’s the owner or the CEO, who are trying as an owner CEO is even worse. They’re trying to just do too much, right? Because their hands are in the middle of everything. You know, there’s ego involved, there’s all kinds of, I can do it better stories, as you were just saying. So, really, when you’re looking at that, from a scaling perspective, you know, and this happened on our leadership team today, with somebody you know, what was asked was, hey, look, you have this knowledge in your head. What happens if you leave? Right?
No disrespect, that knowledge is lost. And so you need that to be able to scale up. Because if we, if, let’s say, We’re selling coffee cups, right, whatever. And we went from selling 5 million to 10 million, we want to double, we need more what’s going to happen? We need more people, right? How are we going to scale up the people and the resources to package the cups to pour whatever aluminum This is, or whatever you get into the machines? Who’s going to repair them? Right? We have Frank doing repairs, but now we’re doubling our process. We’re going to need another Frank, how do we train somebody? How do we onboard them? What are our interview processes? What’s our recruitment process? You know, I had this great mentor, I told you the story a lot, Tim named Bill when I was my early 20s. He said, Doug, you always have to have a B team, you always have to have a B team on the sidelines that you can recruit from. That’s something you and I have been working towards. But you need to make sure that the people and processes can run without you. And without the actual people in them that what I mean by that is I run the marketing for TPM. As an example, if I leave, can somebody else come in immediately and take over? Can someone take over without too much disruption? And if we were to double is that is that’s yes. No situation? It’s not? Well, you know, they could but that to me is a no. Now you have a scalable, you have a scalability issue. And that needs to be taken into consideration, I think before you get to the diagnosing and fixing constraints. But that’s the next step in my book.
Tim Matthews 12:47
Yeah, it’s like if you’ve got customers leaving you, you have to staff leaving you as well. Yeah, there’s one particular person who had the, the example I just give the arrows in the circle went from 30, odd 40 employees to 100 high turnover of staff. Apparently, the reason one of the reasons they gave was it’s hard to find talent in the area, it’s hard to attract talent to move to the area. To which I said, Well, why do they have to be in the area? And as we kind of pulled it, peeled it back and back and back. And I kept hiring while TPM. There’s fired members of staff around the world different timezones, all with visibility, all with this. It’s possible. Every rebuttal, I will, it can’t happen because of this. And this, it needs to be in person, it became clear that it would be possible for that particular position to be remote with the ability to be in person at times as well. But I think you’re as a key point like, is there a high turnover of staff? If so, why is it and then really been able to peel back the laser as to why it could be culture, could be leadership could be the wrong person in the beginning, right, which came down to the could come down to the excuse or its location in today’s world, unless you’ve got a real hands on job, like you’re hiring surgeons, for example, who have to be in person, there aren’t. There’s a lot of things that don’t fall into that category. Right? So you can really post that particular excuse really? Yeah,
Doug Holt 14:26
it’s something that we’re going on a little tangent here, but something you and I use internally as what false assumptions are we making today? Right, and that one really serves us well, in my opinion. Like we just got back from Argentina, we hosted an event over almost 50 men and total where they’re an amazing event. And it’s so easy to make assumptions of what the men want. What’s going to be good, what’s gonna be bad, how we’re going to do things, how we can’t do things. We can’t take that many men to a foreign country that far away and deliver a five star Express means, however, coming back, we had a report today where again, we anonymously, pull everybody, we do this all the time, because we want to be better. And unanimously, we had five out of five stars for the event. Right? And we got to really question the false assumptions. When you question the false assumptions you’re making, it opens up other possibilities. I think certain personalities naturally lend themselves to this certain personalities or are much more linear, right, the more black and white stay between the lines. So you got to figure out where you are with that. But that’s a really good one. Now, let’s just say you’ve got a great product, right? People want it, they love it or service. They love wanting to love it, we check that box too. You’re saying Yep. Mine scalable. Now, by the way, if it’s not, in other words, if your people aren’t scalable, your, your processes need to be done first. That’s the next step in my book, Tim, what are the processes that everybody is doing? So you use me as the head of marketing for The Powerful Man? What is Doug do, right. And what I would do, if I was the owner, is I would have Doug, Hey, Doug, what I want you to do is just write down everything you do every day, just put it down in a document. And then as you do something, screen, record what you’re doing on the computer, and talk it through.
And then what I’ve always done with every company I’ve owned or been involved in, is you develop a wiki, like, right, you develop a working document. So the next person that comes in the next cmo that sits in the seat comes in, they can look at all the SOPs, all the processes, all the ways of thinking, understand them, and then they can add to them. So here’s a trick. So if you have somebody, not the C suite level, but let’s just say you have somebody in an admin level, you know, whatever they’re doing, maybe they’re doing fulfillment for you. They’re selling the mugs, right? They’re doing fulfillment. And they have a wiki that they can go in and look at a process and SOP, if you will, and understand how to actually put the mug in the box, clean it, put it in the box, package it properly put all the you know, the marketing brochures, ship it off, label it, get it to the UPS guy, let’s just say that’s their job role. Now, every time they have a question, hey, how do I put the promo sticker in the box? Should it be facing up or facing down? When they find the answer to that question, they need to add it to the document. They need to go back to the SOP and add that question and answer to the document. And every time they ever have a question answer, they keep doing it. So now you have a vault of living documents within your organization. They’re constantly being added to they’re getting bettered right every single time you as the owner can step out of it now you should have swung quality control it right but you can look at that. And until you get to that point, you’re in my opinion, not ready to truly scale. You can get away with it. But you’re gonna have crap you know, as you’re running fast. That’s what scaling is falling off the vehicle falling off the company all the time and you’re gonna spend more time and money and resources picking up the pieces rather than getting the foundation
Tim Matthews 18:04
Yeah, so key so easy for that knowledge to get lost. I think it could not who came up with on the TPM team that idea jungle knowledge. Just get lost get lost if somebody leaves. Yeah, key piece, key piece. One of the key things I often see people lacking as well, when we’re working with them, which kind of feeds into this is just clear scorecards. When I say scorecards, I don’t mean a dashboard per sale, the number just a very clear, let’s say Google Doc, the outlines has the KPI at the top, right. And then obviously there men are very, very clear roles and responsibilities beneath it. Oftentimes, I’ll be given the roles and responsibilities which paves the way to the processes, which is kind of in tangent in tandem to what you say in their duck. But it’s I’m always surprised how many lack the KPIs for the individuals and if they have them how for you also actually provide proper accountability of American Charlotte, that person is actually delivering on that particular outcome, because it’s not about them being busy. It’s about them ineffective, and too often people get caught up in dealing with symptoms instead of root causes. And too often as well, great question within this, which is kind of a little bit off topic, but kind of goes to the third point of leadership and culture. When people are performing and they’re on track with it, a question you’ll have to ask is what’s working is really important to identify for that individual to identify the root cause of what’s working is leading to them being on track because it could be something totally unrelated to work. It could be that they’re going to bed earlier than they’re getting up early. And then they get in time to work out before work. And they’re more productive in work. But unless you support them in really getting clear on what’s working, it’s hard for them to continue to reproduce it. And obviously, you want them to be producing the good result, right? So it’s very easy to drill down and focus when things aren’t working. And very few people drill down and focus when things are working.
Doug Holt 20:23
It’s very true that we call it the gap versus the gain, right? What’s the, it’s easy to look at the gap as a business owner, you’re talking about focusing on a gain, which I love. What we did, I think taking a step back, as I think about this, you know, this is something we’ve done very consciously we look at a 10x growth was begin with the end in mind, where do you want to get to? You know, for us, it’s all about, we calculated the average man has two kids, let’s just say, and the men that we’ve served last year, we serve the 1000 children, right? So you can do the math that how many men came through, said, Hey, I got what I came for, through our initial program. Now. It’s just our initial programs, not the other programs we offer. Our goal is, hey, let’s help 10,000 kids. What does that look like? And so we did is we had this goal of 10,000. Children saved, right? That’s a big goal, right? We we saved children by first saving their fathers. Right? Where our belief system is, is that a child is going to grow up in a better home if they have a powerful father, loving supporting them, showing them as a role model. So then we work backwards, what does that look like from detailed financial forecasting? Right? How many men do we get to serve? How do we get to serve them? What’s our what’s our acquisition pipeline look like to serve that many men? Shoot? If we have that many men coming through the groups? How many coaches do we need? Right? Where do we find these qualified coaches? We get more coaches applying to be coaches here than we can take. And we can’t find enough qualified coaches that fit our parameters. So we’re looking at staffing, what staff does it take to deliver this so we can maintain? or increase the level of quality? I told you a 4.9 out of five, I want to be a five out of five, right?
Don’t we all 100% of the men love it. Now, you’re never gonna get 100% some of you guys are buggers. And you don’t give five stars, regardless, because you always see room for improvement. I love you guys. And we want to know, how do we get there? What’s our marketing? Do? What’s our detailed plan to scaling the marketing? Right? People need to know about us. This podcast that we do for you guys is our way of giving back. But it’s also a way of getting out there. How can we get guys to share this more to talk about it more? What are ways in which we can do that. So we can affect 10,000 children this year, which is a 10x scaling for us. So I think you really want to begin with an end in mind and then backtrack to a detailed plan. Right? What is your financial forecasting? What is your staffing needs to or fulfillment? issues? How do you fulfill Then what’s your marketing going to be? Is there anything else in operations legal, that needs to be done sales, etc. And really work backwards with a plan that can be executed? Because when you do that, you can find gaps? Right away? Right? What are those gaps that are in there? For us at TPM? The biggest gap that we always have? Is finding quality coaches, because we just don’t We don’t hire anybody, you can’t you have to have world class coaches to get a 4.95 Every time when you run programs, right? We’ve had this for years, right? Our quality standards are extremely high. So that’s our gap. So how do we fulfill that, and then you start working on a strategy for that element, okay, to Tim’s point, diagnosing, and fixing constraints. For us, it’s coaching, but maybe for you, it’s a machinery or it’s financial, there’s something else that is your constraint to hit that 10 to your number, whatever else it is, is your scaling. Great, identify that constraint before it happens. And so you can work backwards to today or this week, or what you can be doing to implement to make sure that you don’t run into those issues.
Tim Matthews 24:02
Yeah, well said, I love building out the accountability chart with the end in mind, you know, when the thing is when you’ve got a lot of data as well, I just love the cloud. I love the clarity. I love geeking out on it as well, and just having that level of clarity. But it’s great, right? Because a lot of those seats on that chart are going to be in red. So for Rosa see on the chart in red is a question mark, it means we don’t yet have anyone occupying a seat. But to your point, Doug, when we’re clear on when we understand the certain numbers, for example, within the advisors, the people that advise people on what they should do to fix the marriage, essentially, before they come into the program. They have a booked ratio, right? That’s their number. We’d never want it to be 100% Because I’m gonna burn out as a sweet spot that you can track to optimal performance equally with the coaches as a coaching capacity number as well. So when you understand when you’ve got these kind of metrics, whatever they are for you with any particular company, it then enables you to be able to build out something like the accountability chart understanding the capacities of each and each seat, really not the person seat. And then you’re going to know, roughly, as you take that plan for the year, not only who are you going to hire, but when do you need to hire them? While the trigger points right, and those trigger points won’t be a point in time, there will be certain outcomes on numbers being hit. Because, you know, one of the faulty assumptions I often hear is, oh, I need to I need more people. Well, do you need more people? Or is it the people you have not been effective? But did you just think you need more people because it tells you you need to need more, you need more people, because they’re busy.
Big difference between busy and effective, big, big difference. But without the proper, massive, without a proper leadership LMA in place leadership, management, accountability, you don’t know. Right? So it’s key to really have the eye on the detail there. I just think there’s so much value in reviewing the game tips. In spa, they always review the game tips, they after the game, everyone’s in review the game tips. I did it last week with with a business owner, I reviewed one of his meetings, his l 10. Which was an LMA call he was doing with one of his members of staff. And he never done it before. And it was really pleasantly surprised. Like if you didn’t often do, you do tend to do that. And you loved seeing himself in action and seeing how he delivered the leadership to that person and seeing their response. Because how he remembered how he conducted the LMS versus what actually happened on the LMS are very different. And when you’re reviewing those game tips, not just for your own performance, but to track and monitor the performance of your team, it becomes very revealing as to whether they have been busy or effective. And as a result, whether or not you need to hire somebody, because you don’t want to get trapped in the position of having a bloated team. That creates a lot of chaos, because you have too few of the right people. And the other thing, just while I’m talking about this is how often we as business owners spend far too much time talking about the wrong people. And no, I know no one near enough time talking about the right people. Yeah,
Doug Holt 27:31
another thing that’s really interesting is I’ve never met a manager doesn’t want more people on their team that doesn’t want to hire more people. And I think you can scale yourself at a business point. And that’s why you need those financial projections. And who do you need in the seat to your point, and I know you love your accountability chart is, you know, what does that look like when you’re at that level? So for us at TPM, if we’re gonna, we’re gonna save 10,000 children, how many men is that? What programs are they in? And who’s delivering them? How’s fulfillment? How are all the our success team, you know, we want to deliver our white glove service to the men that go through our program, we want them to have an amazing, first of all, they need to get the result. You know, they need to have an amazing experience with us as well. So we want to make this, you know, five star thing. So who, who’s who gets it to be involved in that. And that helps you there’s going to be you know, road bumps along the way. But you know, now when you’re in q1 or at the end of q1 is we’re coming up to now when you know your client services says, Hey, I need three more people. You go wait a minute, when we make this roadmap together, you didn’t need three more people back then what’s going on? And you can start looking at it and you can look at your diagnosing and fixing constraints, dashboards will we use? We look at all the numbers, think of it as a normal dashboard.
But when we see a number that’s off, we can drill down and find out what’s going on. In traction language, it’s keep its KPIs, you drill down to the critical drivers, right? What are the things that drive those KPIs? That’s super important. Another thing that’s often I think, not talked about, and this came up really big for me, Tim, at the inner circle retreat. So the inner circle is our high end mastermind group, they’re men that have been through our program and have invested a significant amount of resources, time and money to be there. And so they get to stay on for private events at the end of our other events. And so they’re much more intimate, much more laser focused, focused and that those those are kept out. And our one on one clients join us too. And so at that one, what really was interesting is we had one guy who had a business situation, it was a scaling issue. And so he asked me and I gave him an answer. He asked another guy gave him the same answer. Yes, another guy, he got a slight tweak on it. And but it resonated right. He was like, Okay, I heard the same thing three times. This makes sense. Like these are smart men, and it’s the idea of iron sharpens iron. If you’re getting ready to scale surround yourself by other Men who have no skin in the game, who want you to succeed, now you can have a board of advisors and have people with some skin skin in the game.
But surround yourself with other entrepreneurs that are operating at a high level that can give you the insight. I do not think and do not agree that you should be with people in the same industry. I think that’s a mistake that most business owners make. They think, hey, if I’m the H back business, I should be surrounding myself with H back owners. And that’s it. It’s good to have some industry insights. However, if you’re in the H vac business, and you hang out with someone who runs, I don’t know a manufacturing plant, you’re gonna get insights into business that they are using, that your competitors are probably having thought of. Right, they’re 10, gentle, the end of the day, businesses business, for the most part, everybody’s gonna have a unique thing. But most of the five foundations hold true. A TPM, we started off more as a business coaching company, and that’s morphed over the years, we still apply business coaching to all the men that are in our brother, our mastermind programs that commit for a year, we do we do deep dives into business, we love talking about it. So you got to make sure you’re surrounding yourself with people that you respect people that are going to give you the no BS answers, right? The no fluff, they’re going to tell it to you and shoot you straight. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s why I think that they’re gonna give you opinion. And ultimately, as the owner, it’s up to you to decide which ones you execute.
Tim Matthews 31:30
On the day, you’ve got to trust yourself as well, which goes back to the point of just having routines. Now we didn’t speak about in the beginning, but you were talking about doing what you love and going all in, right. Even within that you’ve had points of reflection points where you’re, you thrive when you’re away from the computer only got thinking time, however that goes down, right. And one of the key things we get the min ARS, just use that as an example. But if you’re scaling, you’ve got to have those moments where you zoom out, you just have to, otherwise, it’s very easy to get lost in the weeds, it’s very easy to then lose touch with what your gut instinct is kind of telling you. Because you don’t see things as clearly. And I think that’s a huge part of this, like you said, trusting yourself. iron sharpens iron, and been able to zoom out and zoom back in. It
Doug Holt 32:30
is. So I think at the end of the day, regardless of what you’re looking at, guys, you know, if you’re thinking, hey, look, I’m ready to scale, I’m ready to do this. First you got to conduct an audit of your business, conduct an audit of your business, also your processes, and identify the key areas of improvement, plug the holes, because as you scale, those holes are just gonna get bigger, right, that means you’re gonna have more volume coming through these bigger holes. Instead of having a bowl catching all the revenue and clients, you’re gonna have a colander with a with 1000 holes in it, and everything is going to leak through. So conduct your audit first. And the second thing I think would go with Tim is, is have that detailed plan. Think with the end in mind and come backwards, right? Look at your financial forecasting your marketing, right, because marketing people are the best. And then your staffing issues. Think about that. How are you going to get there? Where do you need to do with the end in mind? What are your constraints going to be? And again, seek mentorship, you know, and advice from other entrepreneurs who have done this, we’ve been there done that not just the theoretical, right? It’s one thing to read all the books, it’s another thing to actually apply it and actually be in the trenches doing it time and time again, because you just learn more, right? You just there’s no wings you have when you’ve done this so many times that other people just aren’t going to get you know, you said that gut feel, and to know what to look for coming through so surrounded, that’s the number one man surround yourself with other like minded individuals.
Tim Matthews 34:00
Love that point.
Doug Holt 34:02
Awesome. Tim, I love this topic. I’d love to. I know we keep talking about to having more and more business conversations here on the podcast. And I think we should bring some more of those to the forefront. You know, you and I think very differently. And also similarly when I think the guys will get a lot for it from them. Yeah, I think we would. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, as we always say in the moment of insight, take massive action. Where are you going to change in your business? What are you going to look at? Are you really going to look at the data and the numbers are you going is going to keep running things as they are? Now I get it. If your marriage is crumbling around you, it’s hard to stare your business truly in the face, fix that first fix home base, which is your home, fix that first, then come back to that business and start looking at what would happen. What would happen if my business 10x What would break first? That’s a good way of starting guys. What would break first, if I gave you 10 times the customers today was the first thing that would break. And that’s a good place to start in looking at what that constraint is and alleviating that Gentlemen, as always a pleasure to be with you. And we’ll see you next time on the TPM show. Alright guys, that’s a wrap for this episode. But as I always say, in the moment of insight take massive action. You see, there are two types of men that listen to a podcast like this. Those that go on from one podcast for show to another, just hoping things are going to change and realizing that they’re going to be in the same place month after month, year after year. You see, I was this guy, so I completely get it. You may just not be ready. But there’s also a second man, a second man that listens to a show just like this. And this is a guy who takes massive action so they can shorten the learning curve, compress time, and get results to be the wolf. The WOLF is an acronym for wise open, loving and fierce. Now ask yourself which 1am I and just be honest with yourself there and there’s no judgment on my end but if you’re ready to move from Deactivated DEER Mode, which is defend excuse explain react to activated WOLF wise, open loving and fierce, then go over to thepowerfulman.com/grow and go there now. In fact, I’ll make it super easy for you. I will even put the link right in the description here so you can just click it and go over there now to learn more guys in the moment of insight take massive action go from deactivated to activate it because like I said, Life is too short for average and I’ll see you on the next episode.
