Ep - 24 Battle Rhythms

0:02 Welcome back to another episode of the MRM Podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life, and legacy. It's business time. So today we're going to talk about battle rhythms. And we just kind of did our new thing, pre-gaming, doing a live thing on the MRM Facebook page. So if you want to join that. Yeah. If you want to come be one of five people. Yeah. It's brand new. Infant stages. But you know what? It's practicing what we preach, right? It starts with little steps and we just keep taking the little steps. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, if you want to follow that. So the pregame, it's kind of our warm-up where we kind of flesh out the topic of the day. We're going to do this moving forward. So on weeks where we're recording with a guest, I guess that'll be the exclusive place we do the guest reveal ahead of time.

0:49 So it'll be kind of a preview because we're always three weeks ahead in our production. We've got a long list of guests and topics lined up already. So if that's fun to you and you want to also maybe weigh in on the topic or the guest or you got a question for that guest, we have some epic guests on the horizon. And so anyway, if you want to be involved in that, yeah, look up MIT Resto Mastery. I think it's community. Anyway. I think if you Google it on Facebook and the little Google bar, whatever it's called. Okay. So anyway, I digress. The Fugle bar. Yeah. The Fugle bar. Dude, we got to do an episode on meta on whatever the heck there. Yeah. I don't even know where to begin. I'd have to Google it. I don't know what's going on. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do. The metaverse. It's a meta, whatever.

1:30 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. People are going to get bored and check out. So battle rhythms. So to unpack this, just the context of this a little bit, battle rhythms is one of the mental models or frameworks that we teach with our clients. And it's not fancy. It's not clever. This is just our word. We borrow from Brandon's military experience. It's just a way of us thinking intentionally and about the meetings in some cases, although we're not like pro-meeting, let's get to more meetings, but what are the essential rhythms of behaviors and communication that we build into our businesses? And we don't plan to stay there because I think this concept of battle rhythms really can reach into our personal lives and be a really healthy thing as well.

2:15 So I think we're going to talk about that. But I guess where I'd like to get started is, I know this is a challenging thing for most restoration companies, doing anything regularly. Yeah. Yeah, I think a good place to start is getting clarification on what they are. Like physically, what are we talking about? Okay. And then maybe diving into the values of them, because I think we get the utilitarian versus what's the bigger picture. I like that. Okay, so let's walk through the recommended battle rhythms that we typically recommend. And then we can unpack each one of those rhythms and describe some of the why behind it. And also maybe some of the how. Yeah. And again, keeping in mind that some of these are...

2:57 Most of these are probably things that you're doing some version of. And so it's not necessarily bringing this enlightening perspective to the conversation. It's more, let's maybe get a little bit more depth to why we're doing them. Some of these things that we've mimicked or seen other companies do or whatever. And then maybe that will even equip you to be a little bit more free thinking in your strategy and your deployment of some of these. Love it. But some of the basic frameworks, right? So what we're talking about here is consistency. So one of the things that we suggest is that there's a standard AM PM routine for our technicians. And again, this doesn't mean meetings. Not everything is meetings. But it's this idea of what is the expectation?

3:38 What is the rhythm of a normal morning within your shop? And things to consider would be, do you have your lead technicians or your senior technicians? Do they have kind of a specific tasking or list of things that they're doing in prep for the day? Okay. What about your newcomers, your technicians that are in training, the shotgun seat? What are they doing? And so for us, we don't want to burn a bunch of payroll doing nothing. That's not what we're talking about. But if our day-to-day rhythm is we're out the door by 8am... what time then are your technicians showing up and doing their morning routine? Okay.

4:18 And let's just consider this for a second. We're not talking about cleaning trucks and taking out the trash that should have all been done as part of the closing of the day routine. Because right, we're a 24 seven business. What if we get that big call in the middle of the night? We don't want to all run to the shop and then start doing the things that we need to, to prep our vehicles that should have been done the day before. So that's an example of that PM routine as well is, What is the rhythm that your team's expected to do? So first thing in the morning, what vehicle inspections are they doing? That preventative maintenance. Are they getting marching orders and then doing some customization of gear based on the specifics of that job site or that job assignment?

4:59 Maybe doing a bit of an after-action review of yesterday's activities. Maybe we hit a choke point somewhere. Maybe we had a stumble based on a job. And so this is that opportunity in the morning since you have everyone that's at the shop at a specific time carrying certain tasks out and prep for the day. This is that platform that you have to touch base on a miss. to give the team kudos based on yesterday's activities or something that you got feedback from a client on. So it's, again, this is really up to the individual entity to tweak that, to make it fit their business, their business size, the number of departments and number of personnel they have.

5:39 But here's the point of the morning and afternoon routine is... Your technicians should have an expectation. And that expectation should be, we show up, we conduct these tasks, and we're all interacting with one another, rubbing elbows, getting face time, experiencing the other employees of the organization in a proactive, defined manner. We get our stuff together, we're all in trucks, and we roll out for the day. But there's all these things that are going to happen as part of that routine. So we'll probably dive into those more in a minute. So that would be a real standard rhythm that we should establish. What does it look like? What is the expectation for your technicians in the morning and at the close of day?

6:22 Let's just dive deeper into this one by one, and then we'll move on to the next thing. I think there's probably quite a lot of people that might be listening to this. There's a lot of these smaller restoration companies that either one, don't have a shop. Maybe they're working out of more of a storage unit where they keep all the materials and equipment. Everybody takes their trucks home and they deploy from home. And we hear this. In fact, we've had clients that we've worked with that have been in that scenario, not necessarily because they're really small, but that's just how they were set up. And we hear, well, yeah, but we're not all coming into the office every day. And I think part of what we're saying is there's an immense amount of value in having your technicians report to the office. And it's not just to load special equipment they need for those jobs.

7:06 It's a lot of the other soft... The stuff that we think of as soft stuff... that we've seen over time are the things that really have the biggest impact. Because can you have your people deploy from their house, send them through Service Fusion or some of their work orders for the day, blah, blah, blah, and they just leave and go meet up on job sites? Well, yeah, of course you can. That can work. We're not saying it functionally doesn't work. We never operated that way. We were tempted to a few times. We thought, let's send people home in their rigs. In terms of after hours deployment, we'll just have them deploy straight from their house. And then you start to go down the path of, well, shoot, we don't need to burn more payroll by having these folks come into the office the next day.

7:47 Let's just send them straight. We thought about it strategically. And every time we ended up coming back to, but then we'd miss on this collective engagement on a routine basis. And we've seen it in some of the teams we've worked in where they don't have FaceTime with one another sometimes for days. What's the impact of that? Yeah. There is opportunity cost associated with not having a consistent platform to communicate with your teams. And I think that's what we're talking about here. It is easy, especially with the technology that's coming to the market space. This whole remote response and a lot of administrative estimating project management scenarios... it is very easy for folks to never really see the office.

8:31 And there's a lot of great reasons for that, like in terms of productivity and efficiency and all those things. And I think what we forget to do is to weigh into that decision making the opportunity costs associated with a team that's so disconnected from one another. It really, in a lot of ways... And guys, listen, a lot of this stuff that we talk about, we're brainstorming a bit as well. Like this is not a lot of the things that we talk about during our shows. It's we want to have a conversation. We want to turn the thing over and look at all the sides. It does not mean that our opinion is concrete or that we have all the answers. And so this is an exploration of some of these ideas.

9:12 Oh, it's evolving. I mean, right now with technology and so forth and the cost of labor and all the things that are changing. It's like, yeah, it's a moving target. Yeah. And, We still find ourselves camped out right now on just the importance of connection. Yeah. And I think that's the thing that we lose track of. It's like we can look at it and we say, okay, well, we save a half hour of payroll times seven guys or this and that. And it is great. And all those really sound ways to make choices, collect the data. But I think what's harder to measure is the opportunity cost. And that is what is happening if we have this fully disconnected workforce that rarely connects with one another in a meaningful way, And has become very transactional in nature.

9:54 Marching orders, I do my job, I get my truck shut down for the day, I go to sleep, I wake up, I get marching orders, I do... Right? And what we lose in that is that we lose a workforce that's excited to have a relationship with our client. We lose a workforce having this excitement or this motivation to look out for one another. Yeah. we get all these silos developed of, that's your problem. That's not my problem. I'm a technician. This is what I do. I'll get my orders via whatever software program on my phone. And as long as my phone's telling me what to do, I'm good to go. So anyways, I don't want to beat that up too hard. But the way to consider these rhythms is that it's far more than just the utilitarian exchange.

10:37 It's not just having a production meeting because we've got to go through KPIs. Yes, absolutely. But there's this culture influence relational development piece that's vital if we want to retain people, if we want to attract new players, if we want to steer the direction of our entity. So just keep that in mind as we talk about some of these battle rhythms. I think we've all learned through this COVID experience. And, you know, depending on where you work and what part of the country you're in, you may still feel like I'm still really in the thick of this COVID experience. I think we've all learned that there is a difference between virtual interactions and physical. And listen, this is coming from business people that primarily interact with our clients and our partners via Zoom and other virtual platforms.

11:23 But we also have our physical. And in fact, next week, we're headed out to go visit a client for a client on site. And what we found is that in the three days that we do a client on site, it's worth two months of virtual work just because there's something about us physically interacting with one another. Yeah. There's just something about it. And I think too, in this age where it is so hard to find and recruit talent, there's something about these physical daily interactions and that level of team building that is kind of like glue. Yeah. Yeah. it really solidifies people. Whereas when we don't have that meaningful interaction with one another, it's so much easier to leave for the better dollar.

12:04 That's right. Yeah. Relational depth is critical to the success of a business. I just don't think there's really a way to skirt that. And listen, some of us have businesses that have really rallied behind that already. And that's been a consistent theme. And that's awesome. My hat's off to you. But I think there's also going to be folks that are listening that for a myriad of reasons haven't had some of these normal rhythms to their business. And it's going to be a bit of a culture shock. It's going to be that introduction of some new ideas. And I would just say, hey, just dig in. You can do it. The teams will eventually over time understand the value, especially if you're communicating the value. Yeah, one last thing on this morning tech stand too.

12:45 And then maybe we talk about the next big one. You mentioned kudos, right? I think this is probably one of the bigger missed opportunities. And this is true for every one of our teams, not just techs. But it's getting in the habit as leaders, whether you're a mitigation manager, a repairs manager, a controller, whatever, GM. And it's coming loaded to those meetings with specific affirmations. And I loved your example of like... doing an after action review on a job the previous day. The cool thing about an after action review, right, it's not critical or affirmative. It's whatever the situation was. We're looking at what worked, what didn't work. Where were we on point?

13:26 Where do we miss? Where do we need to fine tune versus what do we need to double down on? It's like after action reviews are not a session where we complain about something bad that happened. And so that affirmation piece is so critical because it teaches just as much as the criticisms or the... I mean, that has such a negative connotation. Yeah, critical feedback, right? It's how we crow. But I think those affirmations are so powerful, especially when everybody is together live. Yeah. Because when Johnny does something that aligns with the company's vision of where it's going, and we spotlight Johnny, everybody, whether they acknowledge it or not, we're in kind of a tough crowd. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody hears and sees that and wants that same kind of thing.

14:08 They want to be a winner. And when the guy next to them was a winner, they want a piece of that too. All of us do. Oh, yeah. It may be super subconscious, but it's an effect that's there. And there's an opportunity to leverage that. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind with this is that it really is the platform for us to inspect what we expect as well. I mean, that's what these meeting rhythms, these exchanges, these key times and expectations that we place on our people. It's that opportunity to really take a look at things. And it's not out of the ordinary. It's not uncomfortable. It's not weird. It's like, if you've got seven trucks lined up in the front of your shop and people are doing the last minute prep for the day, guess what?

14:50 You've got seven trucks to walk by. You can see open doors. You can see how equipment is sitting in the vehicle. You can see if one's trashed. So someone clearly didn't do what they were supposed to do the day before. It reminds you that you had three teams out all night. And you can just say, man, guys, I just appreciate everything you do. I know last night was hardcore. So it really is, you as a team can decide, how much time do we want for this? Is it 20 minutes? Is it 30 minutes in last minute prep before we go out the door? What are the primary roles and tasks people should have during that process? Whether it be prepping trucks, getting a last minute wash on the vehicle before we go hit the road.

15:30 But most importantly, this is our opportunity as both the mid-level leader, so the manager and the owners to go catch their people doing the right thing. Yeah. Now, are we going to also find things that need to be tweaked before we go out for the day? You bet you will. But doing a recap on a uniform situation really quickly as part of a normal interaction with your team on a morning lands a whole lot different than I haven't seen you in 60 days and I just happened to meet you on a job site and stuff looks like a crap circus and now I've got a real problem. That's so true. That's so much different than Joe, where's your patch on your jacket? Yeah. Oh, well, you know, this and that.

16:11 Okay, great. Take care of it by Thursday, man. Yeah, figure it out. Right? It's not, that's not a big deal. That's just normal interaction. So I think that's the big thing to remember, guys, is that this is an opportunity for us to catch our people doing the right thing. It's an opportunity to fix little tweaks, make little modifications to the system and keep the train on the tracks. Yeah. And I think too, our businesses are so chaotic, mainly because the industry, there's a lot of industry drivers that keep it nuts. And so our teams having this consistency, I need to be in by this time, unless a weird job comes in, right? But I come in at this time, here's the activities I take, here's the people I'm going to see, here's my, right?

16:52 It gives them a sense of stability. They know what to expect. And that, my friend, contributes to a healthy culture. There's just a lot of benefits from a morning and afternoon routine. But again, be creative. You guys know your business. You know what services you offer. You tweak that system to fit your team's need. What's another one? We should talk about production meetings. Yeah. So EOS has been coming up a lot. We've onboarded a couple of one-on-one consulting clients just in the last couple of weeks. And both of them, in fact, three clients in the last several weeks, and all of them mentioned in some form EOS. Mm-hmm. And you and I are very familiar with it. We're not certified. We don't have any fancy certs for it.

17:33 But I've been reading through the book, Traction, and just reviewing some of the elements of it. And so when we talk about a production meeting, for those of you who are EOS, we're probably talking about the L10, the level 10 meeting, right? Where we're going to talk through, we're going to review our ROCs. We're going to review the KPIs. And then we're ultimately going to spend a lot of our time on, quote, issues. So if you want to look at it through this filter, I think you'll hear where our production meeting framework fits in. But I just want to say that because some of you are like, well, we don't do a production meeting. We do our L10. It's like, okay, well, I think it's fairly easily transposed into the production meeting that we're going to talk about. But yeah, hit us. What are the high points that are essential to include in a production meeting?

18:15 Yeah. Well, I think the first... And who's there? Yeah, no, that's great. Again, it's going to be different based on team dynamic, team size. But the idea here is you want your key influencers, right? So this might be like if we're doing our production meeting for a smaller team, we're going to have probably project managers, estimator, and a key leader of some sort. As your teams get bigger, you may see production meetings happening at a division level. So the MIT leadership or the construction leadership may have their own, where they're looking through WIP, where they're looking through collection activity, things of that nature. So anyways, here's the point of our weekly production meeting. This is the space where owners and key leaders get to inspect the activities of their teams.

18:56 And here's the kinds of things that we want to be focused on. We want to be constantly reviewing and talking about our collection activity. So we're reviewing that aging report. We're identifying where we've got some things that are stuck. We're pulling other team members in to assist on something that's been choked up somewhere. So there's just this nice, transparent accountability when it comes to our collection activity. We want to be reviewing our work in progress. We need to see what's happening to our live book of business. Where are our margins? Where's our collection versus our spend? These key triggers that help us from leading indicators identify that we are likely on the right course. Right.

19:37 That's the real special piece here. And then, of course, we are going to have some opportunities to review things like issues, troubles. Where do we have a client that's off the rail a little bit? Where do we have a situation where because of resources, we're struggling? And we're allowing these team members, these key influencers to participate in that conversation. We're helping each other. We're navigating some of the struggles that we have. And we're highlighting some of the wins that we're getting. Those are like those normal things that we're identifying and going over during our production meetings. We should be identifying key relationships, movement and referral opportunities. Again, we're not going into weeds level detail.

20:17 We're just hitting the big critical elements of the main parts of our business to include monitoring and reviewing our scoreboards, our KPIs, those things that we've deemed mission critical. That's the nuts and bolts of it, right? Yeah. But again, just like our morning tech meeting, what is this? This is that opportunity for key leaders to have relationship, to be interacting with one another. This is that space that the week can be nuts. We could all be running and gunning at a million miles an hour. But we all know we've got this one day, this one morning, whatever, for an hour, hour and a half, whatever the timeframe is that makes sense. where we're collectively getting together, we're brainstorming problems, we're updating one another on critical elements to the business, and we're reviewing a really transparent and public scoreboard.

21:06 Are we doing what we've said we are going to do? And that consistency, again, is so important because there's going to be plenty of things telling us that we can't have that meeting. And the reality of it is, is the world doesn't know what's happening in that one hour to one and a half hour timeframe. Protect it. That consistency is probably the most critical element of it, right? Yeah, it really is. I think part of the value of consistency is it places a weight of significance on coming prepared to that meeting. Because I think we run into this a fair amount in the industry. I mean, I think it's just really normal in the industry is that things will get crazy. We're like, oh yeah, that production meeting we normally have at nine o'clock. Well, let's just all connect on the phone.

21:47 Let's just do a three-way call. Let's chat. Of course, nobody has their... Some people have their laptop open and they can actually see the reports that we're looking at. Others can't. And so they're just biding their time. They might be driving during the thing. We can say, oh yeah, we all had our production meeting, but we did it by phone because we had this big fire job come in. But the reality is you didn't end up having an actual production meeting. The real value of it, of everybody looking at the numbers and being accountable for what's going on That can't happen when you got two out of the three people driving. I mean, let's just be honest. Yeah. It's probably better than nothing, but it's not half as good as everybody sitting down in the room together, their laptops open, looking at the same Google Doc or the same Dash report or whatever, right?

22:33 It's like, I mean, we hear that a lot and we get it. Totally. We get it, right? Yeah. Yeah. But there is something really important about just having, okay, we do our production meeting every morning at 9. And this is the expectation. This is the information I'm bringing. This is what I'm going to talk about. And there's some amount of preparation that each person is bringing to that time. Yeah, no, that's huge. And then the other thing that we hear all the time is that everybody's on their phone. Everybody's texting everybody. Right? We're still in a million different places. And we're not wholly present. And that's hard. This is a difficult thing to rein in and get a grip on. And then so as leaders, as you're stewarding these types of meetings, this production meeting, there's two things that I would suggest.

23:17 And these are things that I did really good at times. And there's times where I just went on long runs of doing it really bad. And that is don't be the talking head in the room. And this is an area that I have always struggled with. If we're delegating professionally and appropriately to our team leads, when we're in those meetings, they should be leading their part of the pie. So if your admin, for instance, or your office managers participating in this, let he or she run the review of our agents. Let them own that. Like, Hey, here's how we're doing in these zones. We're staying on target here. You can see from this column, the majority of our accounts receivable are on less than 60 days. Here's my two hotspots.

23:59 Hey, Jim, project manager, can you give me a hand on this one? We're really struggling to get this initial draw in or this initial check. But let them own that. That's their space. They live in that space 24-7. Let them bring that and own that part of the conversation. And I think you just do that throughout production. When you guys are looking at your WIP and you're talking about your construction projects, let your restoration division manager, construction division manager lead that part. What are they seeing? Where are the areas that they know they've got struggles? But that's huge to that engagement piece is having the team expected to show up ready to support and report. Whereas if one person's doing all the talking, it's very easy for all of us to go in a million different directions.

24:41 So that's a big critical thing. I think the other thing here too is just constantly being willing to provide the why and reminding people. Because over time, we might start ready to go and our first 12 production meetings are just spot on and people are engaged and they're excited and they get it. And then by that 13th one, the more texting is happening, more laptops are on a YouTube channel instead of the whip report, whatever. And it starts to get loose. It's just like, hey, it's okay. Don't scrap the whole model. Just remind everybody what we're doing and bring them back to center, right? I, for one, have never watched YouTube during a production meeting. I'm not saying I've done that.

25:21 So I appreciate being transparent and vulnerable there. I never noticed you watching YouTube. reruns of Full House on YouTube. But anyway, PewDiePie or something. PewDiePie. All right, let's take a minute to recognize and thank our MitResto Mastery sponsor, Accelerate Restoration Software. And I'm fully aware, by the way, that when I say those last two words, restoration software, that that instantly creates heartburn for some of you out there, right? Because we probably all fall into one of two camps when it comes to software. We've either cobbled together kind of a version of free website tools and spreadsheets just to make our business work.

26:04 Or we're in the camp where we've adopted one of these existing restoration platforms, you know, one that has all the bells and whistles and supposedly does it all. But we can't get our team to consistently adopt it and input information to it. Yeah, and that's really where Accelerate has honed their focus. They've created a system that's simple, right? It's intuitive, and it focuses on the most mission-critical information, i.e., guys, your team will actually use it. Let's talk about sales, right? After years of leading sales and marketing teams, the biggest trick is getting them to consistently update notes about their interactions with referral partners and clients.

26:48 And the essential piece there is there's got to be a mobile app experience. And in our experience... the solutions that were previously out there were just too cumbersome and tricky to use. Yeah. Imagine guys, how your business would change if your entire team was actually consistently using the system. Do yourself a favor, go check these guys out at xlrestorationsoftware.com forward slash MRM and check out the special offers they're providing to MRM listeners. All right, let's talk about actionable insights. Owners, GMs, you can't be your business's expert on all things estimating. You might have been three years ago when you were writing sheets in the field, but the industry is always changing, and so are the tools.

27:33 If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate Matterport, how does that scale? You're the bottleneck. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is where actionable insights comes in. They're a technical partner that can equip your team with the latest bleeding edge information and best practices and then update them with webinars and training resources when the game inevitably changes again. For this reason, we recommend actual insights to all of our clients. Yeah, three of the kind of big things that stuck out to me when being introduced to AI and their team. First off is this consistently updated training. I mean, at the end of the day, these guys are the experts. They're out front all the time. They're constantly learning new trade secrets and ensuring that your team's got access to those things.

28:18 A 3,700 plus page database of Xactimate templates. I don't know what else to say here other than don't reinvent the wheel. It's already available. Download it, copy it, use it, bam. database of commonly missed items. I think this is huge. So many of us can change the numbers by just moving the needle a couple points and those commonly missed items can make all the difference in the world. So go check them out at value.getinsights.org backslash fcg. Okay. So something that comes to mind is some of the larger teams. So at some point, the scale and size of your business will be such that you have maybe not just an office manager, but you might have a financial controller.

29:05 You've got a general manager, maybe you have a repairs division manager, a mitigation manager. And you might even at some point, especially if you have multiple locations, have an operations manager. A leadership team is formed. And a leadership team that's not predominantly out in the field anymore. Is there anything worth saying just about how that leadership meeting differs from a weekly production meeting and what the value is? What's the why and the targets for that? Yeah, I think the data that you're going over tends to be similar. It's just at a higher level that you're looking at it. And what is required then prior to those leadership meetings are these production level activities happening down line.

29:46 Yeah. So if you have a large mitigation team, mitigation department, there's a strong chance they're not necessarily doing a specific production type meeting, right? Because their staff is predominantly technical. They're out running and gunning. And so it's a matter of when that mitigation manager shows up and we start talking collection activity, we start talking closing rates, we start talking about our WIP and what we're doing. They're coming prepared to report on that, but they may have not necessarily had to have some kind of production level meeting on that team. Now, construction teams tend to have a different rhythm. You've got project managers and estimators. So in addition to your technical staff, if you have in-house labor, or maybe you don't, maybe it's all subbed out, you have these higher level conversations that need to take place and be looking at the production activity for the week.

30:38 So they may very well get together, pull up the whip and go through those jobs, right? Those major construction projects and talking about collecting activity versus cost, those things. So again, that restoration manager, that construction manager then is coming to the leadership meeting ready to report on things that are happening within their division. But again, when we're talking about a leadership meeting, there's kind of just... And again, these are suggestions. Here's the handful of areas that you should absolutely be touching base on. Again, we're talking about aging. We're reviewing our aging. We're reviewing our closing activity. How many leads come in the door and what are we doing to actually close the door and keep the job? We want to be looking at our WIP process, our WIP progress.

31:19 But we may not get really hyper-focused on individual job activity. So maybe what's happening is we pull up the whip. The construction manager's already been through that as a normal production meeting. And so they're just reporting on some of the highlights. We're losing traction on jobs this size. We've had some struggles with some of this commercial activity because of this. This is what we're doing to solve that problem. Or you might note we've got a lot of triggers here where things have slipped out of gross profit margin. But here's what's happening. Here's what we're doing to fix that. So it's going to be that, not us going through every single job on the whip. So those are examples. But again, the idea with these meetings is that teams have done their homework, they've done what they've needed to do at a strategic or a tactical level, and they're coming prepared to report on that activity.

32:07 Now, for some, the leadership meeting may not need to be a weekly piece. At minimum, should we be doing one a month where we're reviewing our P&L, we're going over these big critical elements? Yes, I think that's the bare minimum. But sometimes every single week can just be way too much. There's just not enough time for us to be executing on things and creating enough data to sit down and review with one another. And that meeting more than any of the others is the one where that business owner, that general manager cannot take up all the airspace in the room. And I am absolutely terrible at this. I would just be transparent with everybody.

32:47 This was the biggest struggle for me. You've had seasons. Come on, give yourself a chance. Well, I've had seasons. I've done better at times. You've had some really good seasons. Yeah. But this is challenging for me. So any of you drivers and eights and all the different personalities out there, this can be tough. And sometimes your team member shows up and they're not prepared. And here's something to consider. I feel like you just gave me a sideways glance. Maybe. Here's something I've learned. And this was not from my experience. In fact, I think this was us talking about other leaders that do this well is where this comes from. If a team member comes ill-prepared, don't make a scene. Allow the uncomfortable feeling to sit in the room for a few minutes based on the fact that one of your key leaders has shown up not ready to support their peers.

33:32 Let it sit for a minute. Yeah. And then the suggestion I have on this is asking that leader, when would you like to be able to send this information out and provide an accurate update for your peers this week? We're not getting gnarly. We're not throwing our hands in the air. We're not doing the things. But we've clearly set the precedent that not coming prepared is not an option that we've noticed. And that we're asking you to commit to a time that you will step up and fix the problem this week. And that's all that needs to be done. And everybody can move on with their life. You move on to the next person. You don't make that a scene. So anyways, it's just a piece of advice.

34:12 Again, how many times did I live that out? Far less. Far less than I did. But that is something to consider. Let's not tear our people down in front of each other. But let's not ignore the fact that we depend on you to show up ready. And you didn't. So anyways, a bit of a sense of attack on that. That's good, man. Yeah. You know what this also makes me think of with regard to leadership meetings is it's where we're focused on the strategic, right? You have this doc that you created that's like the three lanes of... of leadership. There's technical leadership, which is really field-based. We're doing the stuff. We're doing the right stuff. And then there's the tactical, which is how do we organize ourselves to do the right stuff?

34:55 And then there's the strategic, which is what do we want to do more of? What do we want to do less of? How do we get there? What's the roadmap? Right? And that leadership meeting has some tactical bits, but a lot of the tactical should be happening in those departmental production meetings and whatnot. So we really tried to focus on that high-level strategic, are we on point with our pro forma goals and plans? Are we on point with where we're heading qualitatively? What kind of company do we want to be? And where are we at relative to that? In terms of what are some hot issues or trends we're seeing in customer experience delivery?

35:35 Are we having struggles? Why? Is it staffing? Are we struggling because we have low staffing levels right now and we desperately need more bodies to deliver on the promise? Do we have behavioral issues? What do we do about that? How do we coach to that? One of the things I really appreciated about our leadership meetings was there was a fair bit of handholding we did for one another. Because none of us at the time were these level five leaders that sort of had... We were all kind of learning as we went. And I think that's true for a lot of restoration companies listening to this. Most of us weren't CEOs before we got into that GM seat or owner seat. We had never run a large organization, most of us. And so that was the time for us as senior leaders to... Hey, if there was personnel problems that we were struggling with...

36:19 to get those coaching tips, get that outside feedback from one another. But then we spend a fair amount of time talking about what could be. Here's the conventional wisdom on what we're supposed to do, but how could we do this differently? How could we be more efficient? How could we make bigger gains? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about the leadership meeting over a production meeting. Production meetings tend to be more inspect what we expect. I think the opportunity in these higher level leadership exchanges is that we also have an opportunity as the owner of the business to continue to breathe the why, to reflect on and remind our key leaders, our key influencers, why the things that we're doing are so important, reminding them of the why behind the vision.

37:02 Where are we headed? What are we building together? What's critical? What's not? And it's not just an accountability component. There's this supporting component. And it's just an absolutely great place for leaders to just really communicate and uphold this kind of direction of the team as a whole. And that's the piece as the owner or the GM that you want to have and let the teams bring their ideas, their concepts, their experience on the ground to you, and then use your time to really breathe into and support those leaders and attach them and tie them back into your bigger picture of what you're doing as a company. And you're going to have these different tiers like you talk about in terms of experience.

37:45 You might have just really strong veterans on your team somewhere in that mix. And you orchestrating and being more of a steward is the key leader of getting them to give their input and provide insight. And sharing that as a community among your leaders is really powerful. This has been a deep and wide subject, man, already. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we've just... In some ways, we've scratched the surface, but all company meetings? Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that. You know, these... So for some of us, these are our favorite. And for others, it's not so much. If you're the one that's calculating the payroll expense of it... Yeah. Yeah, like for all the controllers out there, they're like an all company meeting is just like lighting dollar bills on fire.

38:27 Listen, though, from my perspective, I felt like all company meetings were one of the most powerful platforms to keep our teams united. Yeah. You know, so much activity throughout the month is happening at a team level or is at individuals, one on one, whatever. Yeah. And we lose sight. We lose sight of the size of the team. We lose sight that all the parts work together to make us all successful. And I think the really neat thing that we have by doing an all-company meeting, whether it be once a month or once a quarter, that's all dependent on you and the rhythm of your company. But I think what we want to focus on is a handful of different things. And the vast majority of them are unifying us as a team.

39:08 Kudos. Mirroring those successes. Talking about the things that are going well. And I would really encourage folks to be very, very careful to be using that platform to deliver critical fixes that need to happen or failures to perform. Now, at times, it's a beautiful space to talk about some cultural issues, like, i.e., provide some training or communicate some theories or some concepts or some processes that feed the greater culture of your team. But I would really caution you not to use that space to do any kind of disciplinary activity.

39:50 It's dangerous to do that. That's hard because I'm a challenger by nature. And so just... I don't necessarily always see challenging people or myself as a negative, but that can get lost in translation. And the last thing that you want to do is have 50 people in a room and put a turd in the punch bowl. It is very, very negative and the ramifications of it go farther than we want to. And you set this stage of you basically have crapped on everybody. And now for the next 30 days or 90 days, all they're going to do is associate these team meetings of a giant crapping on. And that's not beneficial.

40:30 want to rally. This is where we want to build people up. Again, if we're going to be discussing a topic or talking about good conflict management or equipping our teams with a tool, let's do it from the super proactive, hey, this is great. This is a benefit for us as a whole. Not we suck at this and this is why we're doing this training. You know, one of my favorite things that we deployed was we created some open space at the end of our meetings and we would open up the floor And this at the time, gosh, we were pushing 50 plus people in the room, right? And we would have people that would just... Sometimes the shy people would raise their hand and just because they kind of wanted to just have their voice heard.

41:12 Other people would stand up. And they would spotlight one of their team members. And at times, it got emotional. It made people feel really good. That was a special, special time. And of course, sometimes it was awkward. It's like, no, one person would get up and that was it. But we had a few times where it was one after another. We'd have six or seven people stand up and offer things. Guys, we got to close this down. Yeah, we had, I mean, and it wasn't just managers and supervisors and leads that were highlighting their people. That happened too. And of course, we encouraged that, right? To stoke the conversation with leaders doing that. But oftentimes, it was just peers. Yeah. It was peer recognition, which was just the best.

41:53 Yeah. So awesome. Yeah. So let's seed some ideas here. So what are we doing during an all-company meeting? Again, this really is probably the most powerful opportunity for rah-rah and kudos. Really highlighting behaviors, attitudes, actions that align with our bigger vision that clearly represent what we want to be doing as a team culturally. I think the other thing that we can do here is do some things like teaching training. Yeah. So again, most of the time we can't go hardcore, but this is really a great place for us to try some different ideas and concepts that make our employees' lives better. Not just at work, but stuff that'll carry home with them, that'll impact the way that they parent, that will impact the way that they do life with a partner, like...

42:39 We taught the story in my head principle. We did. Yeah. Like Brene Brown, there's so much information. It's not like you have to come up with this stuff. But as you're reading, as you're listening to podcasts, if you experience something, you're like, oh my gosh, this would be so great for my people to understand and have access to. Bring it. Do a 15 minute segment on a tool or a resource that would just be powerful for them. That's a great thing to do with this platform. Another thing that we like to do is that throughout the month or quarter, you can design little systems where people can be recognized for behaviors and attitudes that mirror what we want to be seeing that will give our client the best experience, putting their name in the hat. And a lot of this is done through peer engagement and peer activity.

43:21 And then what we do is we spend two or three company meetings looking at this prize. The 50 inch TV, the PS5, a new smoker, whatever, something fun. And then we get to do that drawing maybe once a quarter where folks that have just been kicking butt and taking names, they've had their names being thrown in the hat. We get to draw that and everybody gets to watch one of their peers and get some fun stuff. Take on a new flat screen. That's right. That's fun. So stuff like that, we really want to use that time to engage, to create some cohesiveness and some unity with the team. It's much more about that than anything else. So I just caution you, try to heavy weight all of that towards that.

44:03 You know, another thing I just want to throw in, and I'm not sure that I even led well in this regard, but we did it kind of accidentally and sometimes intentionally. But there is something about not taking ourselves too seriously. Yeah. especially in that group environment. And I want to say, especially in our business, the blue collar trades, we tend to have this real macho, badass sort of vibe. And that's great. That's useful at times, right? It's hard charging. It's like, get shit done, that kind of thing. And I think there's something special of getting the team to a place where we can kind of be goofy a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And yet it was really awkward at first. I mean, like there were so many different things we tried.

44:43 I mean, one of the things just as an example is singing happy birthday to that month's happy birthday, you know, people like, and it's, it was so poor, you know, it's like we had people, half of us were singing off pitch and we had one team member who always let us out and it was goofy, but there's something special about being goofy. Yeah. And making it okay. Yep. And we always had our laggers that were just like, you know, they're staring at their feet and just, you know, just kind of negative, the not mourning people, right? Yeah. But I think there's something really special about letting our hair down, especially as leaders, and allowing others to see us being goofy and not taking ourselves so seriously.

45:25 To counteract the seriousness of our industry and the work and how hard it is. Yeah. That all company meeting is a time. Another time is doing a company breakfast event, which isn't a routine battle rhythm that we did all the time. But that was another opportunity for us to blast the music, put on the funny aprons. There's something about routinely letting our people see us in a not so serious... Oh, I totally love that. Not so serious. Not so hyper-focused mode. Kind of break down the barriers a little bit. Yeah. It's like, okay, like we're the same. We're human. Right. Yeah. We fool around. Yeah. Well, and you know, I think that breakfast thing is a great idea. And I don't think actually we should overlook that as not being a consistent rhythm.

46:08 I think those are also similar items and concepts that people can look at, explore and adopt. Like maybe we do provide a rhythm. Maybe a rhythm that we set is every Friday morning, we do a miniature breakfast bar. Right? And we think, oh my gosh, it's a couple hundred bucks or whatever. But that again, what is the point of these rhythms? Let's go over that. One is we want to find consistent ways to inspect what we expect. So that is one of the most important aspects of these battle rhythms, regardless of what it is that you build into your system and what it is that you dock. The other critical piece here is it's an opportunity for us to see See them.

46:51 Yeah. Like, put the face to the name, right? When you're five people, okay. But when you start getting into 50, 80, 100 employees, whatever the number is, there's a big disconnect between people that own the business and that person that literally is out setting equipment. And these engagements, these battle rhythms are the opportunities for us as key leaders to see our people, to show up proactive, to show up ready to engage them, say hi, ask questions, remind them of something that their MIT manager told you the week before about how they're doing. Like, that is beautiful. And a breakfast bar on a Friday might be a great way for you to build that engagement.

47:31 Awesome. Right? Get your team unified. Maybe it's once a month, whatever. One of the things that we did is all the leadership cooked. And so we would show up, we'd throw on. And we had a lot of fun. We had fun and it was great. And it was an opportunity for us to serve our people. Not metaphorically, but literally. Like, no, we're going to set up. We're going to tear down. We're going to do... How many events do we have and our employees do all the tear down and set up? Yeah. Right? This is our opportunity. It's like, no. Yeah. This is for you guys. This is for you. Yeah. It's not... This is for all of us. Those were very fond memories for me. And we did them... We got into a rhythm where we were doing them at least a couple times a year. Oh, yeah.

48:11 We were pretty close. Once a quarter or something like that. Once a quarter. Yeah. And I looked forward to it. I know other people on the leadership team had fun with it, right? I mean, I was in charge of pancakes usually. And I wore my hot Chili's apron. And it was... I think you melted a spatula one time. Sure I did. Only one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but those casual interactions are what really builds relationship, right? And it comes back to this whole no like and trust. In order to like somebody, you got to have some open space where it's not all business. Yeah. You know? No, I agree. Okay, so let's finish our summary here. So the point of these is... We might have to catch some of the postgame here because this has been longer than... All right. So we use these opportunities to inspect what we expect.

48:53 We really leverage these opportunities to monitor our scoreboard, take a look at the scoreboard. We really want to be developing unity. We want to breathe in to our day-to-day activity, the cultural components, the big picture, where are we headed? And then we want to hear our people. We want to see our people. This is that opportunity for us to take some of the chaos that's driven by our industry out, hold it at bay, and tell our people that there's things that are happening that are consistent, that they can trust, that leaders will show up proactive, ready to engage them. All those things are very healthy and creating a very attractive work environment, regardless of how hard we're working and regardless of all the things that happens.

49:37 And that affirmation piece, like in every single one of these interactions, right? You as a leader, one of the most powerful things you can do, whatever your role is. But if you oversee people and develop people, that's part of your role. There is, in a lot of ways, nothing more valuable. Aside from holding to KPI, all that stuff, that's a given, right? We all know we have to hold people accountable to our numbers and the things that drive our business. But coming loaded with specific affirmations that we've observed, that's one of our key roles as a leader is to watch for people doing it right. Yeah. And I think that took me a long time in my career to start to tap into because I think inherently, we're always looking for what's off as leaders.

50:19 Where do I have a problem? Where's a fire? And you'll put it out. Instead of really training ourselves to be constantly watching for people doing the right things and calling it out in front of their peers. That's such an important part of these rhythms as well. Well, dude, this has been fun. In fact, I'm feeling a little nostalgic. You want to hug it out? Yeah. Well, I don't know. Should we do a company breakfast? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. All right. See you. Both of us. Perfect.