Ep 29 - Hurry Up And Slow Down

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. I don't know. What'd you think? I don't know. It was kind of serious. Should we laugh? This was maybe three or four weeks ago and I just wrote it down as a note and it's something I've been mulling over my shower time and my drive time. But anyway, the last time you did that, you talked about the toilet time, I think was where you... So it's good. We've advanced beyond the John into the shower. I don't remember talking about that publicly, but thank you for... Oh, thank you. I made that up. Thank you for introducing that.

0:49 So you and I have an office downtown here and it's a big historic kind of building house thingy with, I don't know, there's four or five of us tenants in it. And it has the Wi-Fi door locks, keypads. So we just have a code, we don't have a key. Anyway, one of the things that happens to me is I'm all anxious, I'm in a hurry. I get to the door, I punch the thing, and one of two things happens. One, I either fumble it and I punch in the wrong code, and then I'm sitting there for it feels like 25 eternal seconds. For it to reset and go back to where I can enter the code, right? Or I click the code and that's right, but there's this pause.

1:30 There's like this three-second pause that also feels eternal, where I wait for the little checkmark where the door is actually unlatching. Well, if you preempt it, it stops the unlock process and you got to wait the 25 eternal seconds to then do it all over again. So when I'm in a hurry, and I most need the door to open, if I get too hurried with it, it makes me wait even longer. It doubles the process. And I was just... Somehow, as I'm walking up the stairs to our suite this one time, I was just reflecting on the analogy there. I mean, it's kind of in that same category of tripping over dollars to pick up dimes.

2:11 It's like, how often in our haste, in our aggression, in our drive, do we end up actually slowing ourselves down because we didn't have the patience? And I just thought that might be an interesting analogy and word picture for us to dive into a little bit. Because I see this in myself. I create messes for myself in my speed, in my haste. I end up creating messes sometimes. When if I just hang back a few more seconds or for more minutes or take a little bit of time before I jump into that conversation with somebody, whatever the situation is, right? I could have avoided that mess or I could have been maybe more efficient with my execution, etc, etc.

2:54 Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally does. It's like the inevitable thing where the more in a hurry you are, it feels like everything else is taking longer. It's dumb stuff too. But I just imagine to myself, I'm trying to get from one room to another, let's say at the house. And I... I'm in a hurry. So I'm like, Oh, I'm going to grab these four things since I'm going that direction anyways, because I'm in a hurry. Well, then you just basically fumble, drop, re-pick up, fundle, get frustrated, set something down. So literally... And now that we're in our 40s, you might break something along the way too. Yeah. You're slamming your shoulder into the hallway wall. It's so ridiculous. But it is true. It's like you feel that pressure of being in a hurry.

3:35 And then it just seems like mistakes get made. You trip over yourself. Whatever. You're dropping things. It slows you down. Back in the army days, if you will, we used to do training around kind of this urban warfare. And so the idea was this concept of you're clearing buildings, right? So you have a target that your unit is approaching and there's everything from establishing a foothold. And then you're just basically in this very methodical way, you're moving through this territory and securing space, if you will. And one of the things that happens in this chaos is that in your mind, you're thinking, okay, the faster we go, the more likely we'll take the enemies by surprise, right?

4:16 And so in your mind, before you actually get this experience and this exposure and you train, you're just thinking, okay, it's brute force. It's rush, rush, rush. It's fast, fast, fast. And what we learned right out of the gate was this saying that our cadre would teach us prior to this training beginning. And they would say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And you would see it like before... Because they would let you really screw it up, right? So they would kind of give you the basics, the concept, and then they would allow these young teams to go try this room clearing. You would just see us fumbling all over each other and tripping and doing these things. And then they would just slow everybody down and they hit reset.

4:57 It's like, look, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And basically the concept there is, it's the whole crawl, walk, run. And it's this idea that the teams need to slow everything down to a crawl, learn the methodology, establish the strategy... create depth and understanding of how it works and why it works, then do the process in a slow, methodical fashion. And you get faster as you become more skilled and more smooth in your execution of that process. So the speed actually does not come from brute force and grit. It actually comes from a comprehensive understanding of the process.

5:40 And so I think about that a lot in terms of our businesses. It's like, how many times do we get stuck in this repeating cycle of we have an issue, we have a service delivery problem. but we're busy. We have a lot of work coming in the door. The calls aren't slowing down, but we see this inevitable issue. And so what we keep doing is some hurried version of fixing the problem, which feels just like what you're talking about. We punch the code in 15 more times and it's done nothing to actually speed up our process or remove friction or to create a long-term strategy for that problem. We just kind of keep doing the hurried version of it because in our mind, we don't think we can slow down long enough to fix it correctly.

6:26 And so we just suffer the consequence of it. Right. So that is something that kind of always I've had that in the back of my mind, even as a GM, even when I was doing that, because I'd love to say that we were so great that I never dealt with that. But I did. Like I was in the hurry. I was stepping over myself. I was doing those things. And there would be this thing in the back of my mind, hearing some cadre say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I'd be like, oh, damn it. I like that. I like that. Well, you know, it makes me think too. And I think probably a lot of people listening to this will relate to this. I certainly can. And I think you can too. We had a client we worked with a while back. where we, as a consulting company, struggled to get movement and progress.

7:12 Because every time we would bring a new behavior or a new process that needed to be implemented, This business owner was moving so fast. They would essentially chuck that new initiative over their shoulder. They had a team in place. This is not a small... I mean, a top line revenue? Great. These guys know how to sell. They do good work. And so business was coming in, but it was chaos. Everybody's hair was on fire. The owner was scurrying around, dealing with everything as it came up. And the owner had the presence of mind. We need help. Brings us in. And... They really struggled though with the adoption because they didn't want to slow their pace down at all to do what you talked about, which is, okay, let's look at this.

7:55 First of all, let's look at why this thing in our business is a problem, really understanding it. What is really going on here? What is this new process that we're implementing? Slowing down long enough to sort of explain it, right? Present it to the team in a calm, sort of intentional manner. No, I mean, this guy was like, I can't stop. We can't stop taking jobs. There's no slowing down. We just kind of chuck things over. Hey, just, you know, listen, you need to know anything? Just call Chris and Brandon. Yeah. And ultimately, it wasn't successful. And it wasn't successful because we did anything wrong. It wasn't successful because this person was inherently doing something wrong or there was a character issue or there was a lack of desire.

8:39 What there was a lack of was a willingness to slow down long enough. Just long enough. Not slow down forever. Yeah. You and I are not slow movers, but we did. I feel like that's one of the things you and I learned. Even just a couple of years into working together, the value of hitting pause just long enough to delegate well. I mean, I think there's another whole track there. Oh, yeah. We tend to, again, chuck things over our shoulder and just, hey, I got good people. Figure it out. Right, right. And I think you and I have realized long ago now that it doesn't work. And man, what's screaming in my ears right now is this idea of on-the-job training. And I think this has come up in different ways, obviously with different topics. But that's a perfect example that all of us really are susceptible to.

9:23 And it's this idea that yes, in trade work, in work service businesses, is there a substantial amount of training that happens through on-the-job training? Yes. But OJT, actual on-the-job training and throwing somebody in the cab of a truck and expecting them to gleam day-to-day enough to actually become proficient or competent in something, those are not the same thing. Yeah. So yes, I understand the value in on-the-job training for service industries, but most of us aren't doing that well because of this. We feel that sense of urgency. We're hiring people because we're behind, we have the work, there's things happening.

10:03 We've probably already been dealing with a crew that's not quite as full as it should be. And so we get a new prospect, we throw them in a truck and we throw them out in the field. And then what we end up doing, and this is where it costs us, is that instead of understanding that that person may not be super productive for, let's say, 30 days, what we get is a half-ass production for a year. Yeah. Right? So what we end up having to do is for the first 30 days, nobody knows it's all going smooth and or not smooth. It's all going fast. And we have these little excuses. Well, they're new. Hey, they're getting used to the process. We've been really busy. We haven't been able to do X, Y, Z, whatever. And this goes on for another month and then another month.

10:46 And then we end up in some place where we've got a prospect who now has been on our team for 60, 90, 120 days. They're about 70%. And we're now growing more frustrated over the fact that they're not 100% productive yet. Yeah. And they in turn, because of a lack of clarity and living in chaos, they don't know if they're doing well or not doing well. And they're getting frustrated with the experience. Yeah. 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?

11:29 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, 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.

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12:55 All right, let's talk about actionable insights. Owners, GMs, you can't be your business's expert on all things estimated. 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. If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate and 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.

13:35 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. 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.

14:19 So go check them out at value.getinsights.org backslash FCG. Not only that, but of course the other dynamic is not only do they have skill gaps, but there's a good chance that there was some bad habits developed. Oh, sure. There was some broken process that they interpreted because nobody was actually walking them through the mitigation process outline or the best practices or the standards of the company, all that kind of stuff. And ironically, I think part of the motivation, especially with smaller companies, is they don't want to burn payroll on classroom kind of setting or job shadowing where that person's not productive. Right. Right. Especially, you know, I think to now too, it's probably even, we're more at risk of that because we're having to pay up.

15:03 Oh yeah. I mean, it's like all of us are sort of reeling from, we might used to start, have started our technicians out at 15, 14, 15, $16 an hour. Well, those days are gone. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And many of us, depending on the market you're in, are paying up $22, $25 plus an hour for technicians. And so even more so that bell is ringing in our ear of, I got to get them productive. Yeah. I got to get them paying for themselves, get them out in the field. Yeah. All the while we end up, that money just is like, Oh, and it leaks somewhere. Leaking out the back. Right. Yeah. And then that's the thing I think that we lose grasp on in your example is the opportunity costs. Yeah. Now, how many jobs is that technician going to do at about 85%, whether that be proficiency or extent of what we could be billing for or tracking, right?

15:51 Or interactions and impressions with the customer, right? Huge, right? First impressions, the whole, how long are we going to fight crappy documentation coming in, which extends our billing cycle, which affects our cash flow, right? Reduces our overall profit, all of it. Here's the thing this reminds me of, man. And you and I were kind of talking about this a little bit earlier. So going back to this whole concept of urban warfare fighting, one of the things that they would have to really drill into is this idea of trying to get your mind to not take the path of least resistance. And the reason we would train on that, like initially, because what happens is when you start to do things to form muscle memory, which is the backbone to military training, is that we're susceptible to all the same mind games that any of us are susceptible to.

16:38 And your body, your system is designed to take the path of least resistance, meaning it doesn't want to climb over the chair or the couch or go through the blocked door or do this. It wants to just run down the open hallway or turn left because there's a pile of crap to the right. Like it wants to go the path of least resistance. And ultimately what's happening is if this team has done their job well to defend their sector, they're going to use the path of least resistance to funnel you into what they call the kill zone. So the idea is that I'm going to put crap in the battle space that channels you and your team into a zone that preemptively has been set up for kill.

17:20 It's where there's a crossing sector of fire. There's all these things that come into play. And it sounds so dramatic. But the idea is not very unlike what we experience in our own businesses. So what could for potentially... be harder work to get through this objective and around this corner to get a good sector of fire established, I may inadvertently go this path of least resistance and end up paying the price long-term. And I think we do that in our businesses, just like you said. It's like instead of us slowing down long enough to establish the training or the process out of the gate, we defer it. in a hurry, and then we end up ultimately paying a price much larger than hundreds of dollars in payroll that first 30 days someone's on the ground with us, right?

18:04 We end up getting funneled because we took the path of what felt like the least resistance in the moment into the kill zone. And then we end up suffering way higher consequences for that lack of preparation on our part or our lack of willingness to slow down long enough to establish a process. Dude, that is a rad analogy. And I just find this military talk so in my juices were like flowing. I'm like the kill zone, the diversions. But it's true. I mean, that's one of the things I really appreciate about military training is they are very good at taking someone from zero experience and turning them into someone that is operating at a very advanced level, even if they've had no exposure to it.

18:48 And it's because they understand the value that that training provides long term for those units, not just in safety. They are in the business of getting wins, right? Like the military is in the business of being successful in their area of operation. And so they want to win. Yeah. Right. And so they're teaching their players how to win. And I think we have a lot to learn as business owners to remember that cadence, that pace that the military is willing to take. Because that's come on the back of many, many, many, many, many years. of learning. Anyway, I love that analogy and it's stuck with me in a lot of different ways and different endeavors that I've had. It's good. All right, man. Is that a quick fire, a down and dirty? I think it's down and dirty. Yeah. Hopefully the next time all of you go to your little punch code door lock, right?

19:30 You'll remember this concept of say it again. What's the phrase? Oh, slow is smooth. Yep. Smooth is fast. There we go. Right. Slow is smooth. Title smooth is fast. All right, gang. Excellent. See you. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart & Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.