Ep 80 - "Inspecting What We Expect"

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and 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. Man, I love this industry. How you doing, buddy? I'm feeling really good this morning. Well, that's great. Why? Well, I've switched up my schedule a little bit lately, actually. I just found I was missing my morning coffee times with my wife. Oh, yeah. For a while, we went through a season where we'd have coffee together, bulletproof coffee with butter and all that stuff, right? And then eggs. Like I do eggs. Right? Because we're on this whole animal-based diet.

0:48 Animal and fruit, right? And so it's like my morning breakfast is like four or five eggs and always a banana. And that's what it is. And then coffee. And Kara and I were in a habit of doing that almost every morning. And it was great. And then we stopped and we started going to early morning workouts. But then it was super crunch time. Like we get back from workout. It's like jamming, shower, head to the office, whatever, pack the breakfast with me, take it along. And I just like... I prefer it not to be that hurried. And so we've been switching that up and I've been back to that coffee and breakfast routine in the morning. But it means then I have to work out in the evenings or early evening. Yeah. And so it's kind of pushed back our nights a little bit. Yeah. But right now I like it. Yeah. It's working. I'm kind of a change guy.

1:29 I'll probably have to change it up in a few months anyways. Yeah. I can be going back and forth myself. I'm kind of in an afternoon routine, which I like it. There's benefits to both. I do too. Yeah. I don't know. I'm the same way. I think I do it for a while and I'm like, I get bored of it in order to stay disciplined. I'm like, oh, I'm going to start morning. So yeah, it's like working out the mornings. I like that. It feels good. Yeah. I'm getting pumped up. Yeah. But I also find too, when I do in the evening, if I work out one, I can eat right after. Like I'll just roll back home. Dinner's the next thing. And then we have whatever is left of the rest of the evening. Yeah. I feel like it de-stresses me a little bit. Yeah. You know, getting in there and grinding out, sweating and whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So feels like a decent threshold to begin. Okay. I'm going to stop the work part and start focusing on family sphere, those kinds of things.

2:14 A lot of ways to skin the cat right now. This is working. Yeah. Hey, I got a topic for us. Well, I guess before we jump into that, let's point towards our sponsors. We've got a couple of premier sponsors. I kind of use up the topic preview space with my little morning routine. Oh, with your, yeah, your jazz there. Yeah. Yeah, but let's talk about our sponsors before we dive in. Our first sponsor is Liftify.com. Liftify, gosh, these guys are great. We were just having a conversation with another industry peer of ours yesterday and brought them up because it just makes so much sense. In fact, we had a client, I think just a couple days ago that mentioned, holy cow, yeah, Liftify, our reviews have been going nuts. Huge impact. Not surprised because every single client that we've suggested it to has seen massive lift in their Google reviews from Liftify.

3:02 Listen, Liftify, there's other competitors in the market. And you and I have tried them with previous businesses. And they work. They just don't work as well as Liftify. And in our experience, they cost more. So... It's the double threat, the triple storm, the perfect... I don't know. Liftify has figured it out. It's a very reasonable price point, less in our experience than other platforms that do the same thing, and better conversion rate. They're pushing 20%, 25% conversion, which means if you're a good size restoration company, you're doing 1,000 jobs a year. We have several clients that are doing that kind of volume. You should be expecting 200... Or more reviews a year.

3:42 And how many of you are doing that kind of volume, but you're stuck at 90 reviews or 150 reviews and you've been in business for five, six, seven, eight years? It's probably time to up your Google review game, right? Yeah. Partner with somebody. Partner with somebody. Make it turnkey. And it is with Liftify. So check it out. Reasonable cost. Go to liftify.com forward slash floodlight. There's kind of a cool promo thing that we worked out with them. But seriously, at full price, with no discounts, it's still well worth it. They're great. Zach and his team just really do a great job. 100%. CNR Magazine, Shel Blevins, just a total bad A crew over there. You guys have seen it. I mean, the proof's in the pudding. She is driving a media team that's just a force to be reckoned with.

4:25 They are all over the place. They're consistently bringing topics and training and focus on the things that move the dial and the things that help our businesses grow. And certainly a voice to continue to help unite us, our voices in the industry and how we represent ourselves and our brands and our team. So please check them out. CNR Magazine. If you're not a subscriber, do yourself a favor and get it done. All right. Let's get into this. Okay. I felt like I wanted to jump in and say something. I'm like, no. Wow. You're just hitting it all. That's awesome. So, okay. My topic, dude. Okay. So I've been wrestling with this a little bit. So you and I are huge advocates of, and we talk about it a lot, but I think we've always brought this up as maybe a passing moment or something that's integrated into a different conversation.

5:12 I just wanted to focus on it. And that's this idea of really creating a process, a system, or a behavior that really focuses on inspecting what we expect. And again, this is a phrase that comes up a lot if you're used to listening to any of our episodes or if you work with us on a consulting basis. But again, today, I just want to unpack the concept and how in our companies we can integrate that mindset across the platform. Yeah, another way I've heard some other leaders that I've worked with talk about it is in a creating accountability loops. Oh, yeah. That's a good way to phrase it. Right? Where there's clear expectations set and there's a mechanism, there's a process by which we automatically circle back and check where the expectations met, right?

5:57 I love that. I love that. So before we get into this, I kind of wanted to set the stage with the principles, right? The four principles of execution. Again, this isn't something that Chris and I made up. I think this is a Cubby. Yeah. So this is Cubby input. And of course, I mean, many of you have seen and heard or been exposed to their leadership development stuff. Certainly a longtime leadership. Four Disciplines of Execution. Great book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to say it's Cubby's son. Oh, is it? It wrote it with somebody. But it's part of that Covey leadership organization. Yeah. But a great book, Four Disciplines of Execution. I just love how they can simplify concepts that a lot of us are exposed to on a regular basis, but we just have a difficult time turning into a strategy.

6:39 There you go. We're proactively hanging in the pocket on those things. So let's just go through those first. And then I think it would be fun to have you just jump into from your perspective... maybe we start with where you've seen the positive impact of this kind of inspecting what we expect. And then we're just going to deep dive. I think we're going to ping pong the concept a little bit. All right, so here's these four disciplines of execution. The first one is focusing on the wildly important. And you're going to see how this ties in to the inspecting what we expect. Because ultimately, you're not going to be able to strategically live in these disciplines if we don't have a methodology for inspecting what we're building. And so for me, this focusing on the wildly important, I think the tyranny of the urgent, right?

7:25 All of us can see, experience, and have probably spent more time caught up in the tyranny of the urgent than we do normally proactively running our business. And that's part of the reason folks come to us and need help from a consulting firm. It's part of the reason why we do what we do is to help teams kind of get out of that space. Yeah. Wildly important, though, are those things we measure. It's the mission criticals. Sometimes it's KPIs. Sometimes it's core behaviors, attitudes. It's the things that when we spend attention tracking, measuring, and deploying, they will move the business. They'll grow. They'll create some scalability. They create a strong foundation.

8:06 I don't know from your perspective what you've seen that and where that's played a role in your career, Chris. Yeah. Yeah. I think that my first exposure to forward disciplines, by the way, was 15 years ago. Yeah. Because I think it came... The book's been out around that time. It came out around that time. And I was actually working with a state farm agent. I was getting into state farm business around that time. Jim Kuhlman. Hey, Jim. Still a good friend of mine. Jim Coleman, he's a top State Farm agent in the country, let alone here in the Pacific Park West. And I worked with them in the early days. And that was a key framework. In fact, the last time I connected with Jim, he's still very much operating through this 4DX framework in his office.

8:53 And he's incredibly successful. It's driven a huge amount of success. And... It was my first exposure to, okay, within sales, because if you're a State Farm agent, your business is selling policies, right? And of course, servicing clients, but that's what you're doing. And it was my first exposure to somebody walking me through, what are the wildly important things? things that we need to be hyper-focused on. And since then, I think that that's been a process that you and I have been focused on in sales within the restoration industry and so forth. But that was my first exposure of what really do we need? What are the priorities that we need to be zeroed in on?

9:33 And of course, he did a really great job of identifying those things for each area of his team. Yeah. And how does that stuff feed up to accomplishing the BHAGs? Yep. Right? The audacious goals we set out for ourselves. Yeah, I know. I like that spot on. I think that's a perfect example of once you see teams get really focused, on the most important stuff, and they do what's necessary to handle the loose ends, to address those other kind of miscellaneous up-and-coming things, you see traction. I mean, these are the companies you see them making ground, right? I think the other thing, too, about this whole conversation and that book, that framework, is that you don't have to get everything right. That is probably the most powerful lesson is there are no perfect businesses, but the really high performing ones that we come across, that we see, they have figured out what are the most important things and they are clocked in on...

10:26 I mean, they are absolutely locked in on those things. Yeah. You could find all kinds of other faults in their business. Like, oh, they could be so much better at this and that. And they'd agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. And be like, and we're winning because we are hyper-focused on the most important things that drive our business. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's the mistake I think a lot of us make is we think we got to shore up everything. Yeah. No, really. And I think, honestly, if we zoomed out and look at what we do in our consulting company, it's we hyper-focus on a few really mission-critical loops of behavior. I think ultimately, we help teams identify what the wildly important it is. And then once they get that, then mountains get moved.

11:07 That's right. I mean, if we think about it, our businesses are constantly a work in progress. They're just in a constant state of iteration. I mean, that's a growing business. That's what's required. But the reason that you can have that creative freedom to be in that constant state of iteration and development, the whole good to great kind of concept is because the team is already focused on the principal things, the core things, those wildly important things that keep the business in a positive trajectory. And then you can have that freedom of, you know, this is getting a little better here. We're spending some time shoring this up. We're developing, you know, competency over here. But the primaries are in focus all the time. I think the second one here that I, this is, dude, actually in full transparency, I feel like every day, the more companies we work with, the more leadership training and support that we provide, that this act on the lead measures, this concept has become so important.

12:04 And I find myself becoming more and more of a... I don't know. Almost like a... You're a true believer. I'm a true believer. Like a religious zealot when it comes to this idea of acting on lead measures. And the real concept here is, I think a lot of companies and businesses in general have identified what those KPIs are that we can measure and then look at or report on. So really rearview mirror type stuff. So think about your P&L Think about quarterly financial reviews. Think about, in a lot of cases, sales, sales volume. A lot of times, these are numbers that you look at. But once you read it, once you look at that number, you're not going to affect change in it.

12:46 Now, it may give you some things to consider in the next push or in the next quarter. It's great. And they're vital. Mm-hmm. But I really love the idea of teaching companies to be very centered on, if you look at it right now, you can still take action to affect it right now. Meaning that when you do look in the rear view mirror through these lagging indicators, these measured KPIs, you're going to have a high chance of success. Yeah. So here's the other way I've been thinking about this, acting on leading measures is control what you can control. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Because there are so many things in business and in life that we have, if we're honest, zero control over it.

13:26 Yeah. Zero control. And we see this, I mean, in just every area of life, most things we can't control. Yeah. What can we control? Yeah. We can control the expectations and the standards that we create in our company. Yeah. We have control over to choose what are we going to tolerate in terms of now behavior? Yeah. What are we going to expect out of our people? All those things. What are we going to expect out of ourselves? Yeah. Right? Yeah. We cannot control how people respond to that. And whether they choose to execute to those standards. But we can control what we allow. Yeah. Yeah. And we can control as leaders and owners as to what is the standard that I'm going to operate by and people that I decide to pay and associate myself with.

14:12 So those things we have control over. But we don't have control over outcomes. We also have control over what we say to clients or potential clients and what we promise them. Yeah. The kind of conversations that we choose to engage in with them. But we can't control when or if the client's going to say yes. Right. Right? We don't have any control over that. So it's helpful for me to think about this on the leading measures. Another way is control what you can control. Yeah. And don't try to control. Don't put a lot of energy into trying to control outcomes. Yeah. I think that's great advice. I think too, if teams are really ping-ponging this principle around this idea... The thing here is, this is really leadership behaviors.

14:54 So if you as a team, so think about department management, team level management, of course, executive and upper echelon management. The idea here is the way that you parse your time on a day-to-day basis, the lanes that you stay in, is how much of that time is being spent where you're inspecting, and this is kind of the big arching theory here, inspect what we expect. How much of your leadership, energy, time, resources, and bandwidth is going towards this proactive guidance and inspecting of the team's core activities and behaviors, knowing that those will influence those lagging measurables. And so, you know, things like, and we talk about this a lot, things like the way our MIT teams start their morning stand to.

15:39 You know, affecting things like the preparedness of your team before they leave your shop. Well, there's all these lagging financial effects. Consistency and service delivery, the way that we leverage our time, meaning that we're doing it in a profitable way, that ultimately affects the kind of customer experience that our team delivers. And it all comes back to... Us just really dialing in on how good is your morning stand to and are you inspecting it? Are you influencing that? That is the very first step our team will take to execute the rest of the day. And how we guide that is going to have financial, cultural, and branding impacts.

16:23 But we can control it. We can affect it right now and have sincere impact on it. We talk a lot about this with sales. Do we value the lagging indicator of how many leads you generated and how much revenue you produce? Well, of course. It's a business. But it's hard to lead that. What you can lead, what you can focus on is the leading activities. leading activities for you and I is like, what's your weekly cadence? How many cold calls? How many leveraged events are you participating in? You can control that every single day. You can have a very sincere influence on that as a leader that then gives you, right? Let's pause on that because I think it's worth... A lot of people that are listening to this own restoration companies or they lead sales teams, they have salespeople they work with, What have we found to be the wildly important and also the leading measures that we can control when it comes to sales?

17:21 Our clients have heard me say this, but whenever we're not getting the sales results we want, there's two reasons. There's two potentialities as to why. why the business isn't coming in. And those two reasons are either the quality of the activity we're doing, the behavior, the conversations we're having with clients, the quality of it. What are we talking to people about and the quantity of those physical, social interactions we're having with our prospects and our clients? It is always, our success is always going to be predicated on those two things. So you may have somebody who's a really genius, natural-born salesperson.

18:05 They're so good at connecting with people. They're curious. They're having the right kinds of conversations with folks. And yet they're not producing much. Well, and it should be obvious, but it's not to us. It's taken us years to really drill in on this. They're just not talking to enough people, likely. Yeah. Right? Or the quality that you think is happening based on the way they interact with you is not actually showing up in the field. They're not being disciplined in terms of the quality of the conversation they're having. So they may say all the right things to you, which is another thing that happens with salespeople. They tell you what you want to hear. Hey, so talk to me about what your kind of conversation... And they know all the right things to tell you in person, but they're not exercising the discipline to deploy that in the field, right?

18:48 So again, it goes back to quality. It's always... But of course, the piece here that you just brought up is the inspection. How do you know? And this is really hard with salespeople because I even get duped. I get sucked into the personality of salespeople. And we do this also with our ops folks. They talk a great game. And then when you inspect their actual field behavior, there's a gap of discipline. And it can come from a variety of things, right? There's no use or there's no value in judging why somebody has a discipline issue. Because sometimes they're going through a divorce or they had a big disappointment in their personal life. Or maybe they started a side hustle selling Mary Kay and it's distracting them from their day.

19:32 Who knows? There's all different reasons. Yeah. Yeah. And finding out the reason maybe is helpful or useful, but it really just comes back to inspecting. Are the behaviors that that person is saying they're doing actually happening? And there is no... And I think this is true of sales. It's true of ops. Going out with your PMs. There is no replacement for getting windshield time or field time with that person or individual. It's just... you cannot figure out what's really going on without seeing them out in the wild. Yeah, I agree. Period. Walking a job with them and asking them questions about what their process is that they're deploying, I think that's universal. And it's probably one of the more frustrating things, I think, in managing salespeople in this business.

20:14 Probably any business is, is that when the sales aren't happening like you expect them to, the only way for you to really truly inspect what's going on is to get out in the field. You have to carve out time as a VP of sales or a general manager or an owner, whatever your situation is, to go observe your salespeople. And it's universal. I think the reality of it is that what you're hammering on right now, it's the thing that we can do with our time as leaders to affect change. And the sooner and the more consistent you are in that shadowing, in that inspection of what we expect, the faster you'll net the results you're looking for and or the faster you identify where the holes or weaknesses are so that you can address them.

20:56 And so I think this carries over to everything. I mean, we've been talking with teams that have fairly good size coordinator staff, right? Because they're doing a lot of volume. And we're literally working with teams to help them develop processes for their leadership to inspect and dive into and affect change in these leading behaviors, even on an administration level. Like the principle there on the act on the leading measures is I really encourage people that your week, your day-to-day activity should be as focused as possible on the way that you look at, inspect, and influence those leading activities. And this is kind of an interesting thing to do as a leadership team.

21:47 and begin looking at the business and then look at what are the things that are most important as far as a lagging measurement. Okay, so think about gross profit margin, job lifecycle times, collection aging, AR aging. And then ask, go backwards. Yeah. So start with the result you want. Okay, I want X GP percent on my mitigation jobs. Okay, great. That's the landing place. Now walk backwards and say, what behaviors or activities do our teams conduct that ultimately have the impact on that number. And then begin finding ways for you and your day-to-day cadence to lead to and shadow those activities. Because if you're inspecting those and they're in place and they're happening consistently, guys, you can almost start celebrating.

22:29 Because the likelihood of you getting the measurements that you want, the gross profit margins, the numbers you want, It's very high. Oh man, they're increased substantially. So, all right. So hold that whole act on lead measure. Are we doing the right things and are we doing them enough? Yeah, that's it. I mean, that's it. And again, we're kind of hyper-focusing on this. It's probably one of the most important things to me that I'm centered on right now in terms of these four disciplines is... When you have leadership staff that is just really dialed in on leading activities, and they're focused on the consistency of those leading activities, they're winning. They're just, if you look at the numbers, they're winning, you know, because they're actively affecting that.

23:11 Okay, the next one, the third one, super vital is keeping a public scoreboard. Chris and I are just massive believers that the more transparent we can be in the things that we're measuring and paying attention to, we do two things when we're very transparent with those. One is we empower our people to take ownership of the same things that we're focused on. And then the second piece that we do is we make it very clear that we are not trying to hold the keys to progress, keys to success. These are things that we're doing. This is our state that we're in right now. And we have opportunities to improve or we have opportunities to celebrate based on how we're scoring. So I think there's something very empowering for our staff when they can very easily see, how am I doing?

23:56 Mm-hmm. How is that in comparison to the goal or the strategy, right? Yeah. And then have a partnership with your leadership staff to know when and where to ask for help. Yeah. So they can continue to succeed. Well, it's something too that I feel like is really relevant in the type of work we do in the restoration industry and construction services overall is finding ways of how do we make that whole public scoreboard really natural and organic. Yeah. Yeah. How can we build into our battle rhythms, our meeting structure in such a way that people always know how everybody else is doing? For example, in a production meeting, as we're going through work in progress, we're looking at the profitability of those jobs, cost versus income.

24:42 And we don't often think of those things as the scoreboard. A lot of times when we say create a compelling scoreboard, it's like a thing on the wall that says somebody's number one, number two, number three. Oh, sure. But there's these other layers of scoreboards. There's these other ways you can build scoreboards into everything you do. Here's another example. Our after-action reviews. That creates an organic scoreboard, meaning... When we take the time routinely to break down a job or a situation that we just went through, a good or bad one, it doesn't matter. Right. As you start to walk through the process, because an after-action review is just simply comparing, okay, here's our standard or our expectation compared to what happened.

25:23 Where are the gaps? Where do we succeed? It's not emotional. It's not blame assigning. It's just, let's walk through, let's get all the players that were involved and let's walk through each step of the process and let's just identify where were we on plan and where did we go off plan and, Whether in success or failure, everybody can see the components that each person brought to the process. And if you do that consistently, everyone starts to identify the winning behaviors. They can see who is consistently winning at their role and their activity in the process. And it also becomes, in some cases, painfully obvious that...

26:04 who continues to fail the team at their portion of the process. That's right. That's a scoreboard. It is. It's a scoreboard that everybody can see and feel that's real. Yeah. You know? Yeah, I think what you're kind of highlighting is this idea of public. Yes. And this is going to lead to the fourth discipline, which is funny. I mean, these are all very symbiotic. I mean, they've done a good job of identifying why these are important and how they work in conjunction with one another. But the whole piece with the public is you're creating a sense of peer-to-peer accountability. You can't hide. You can't hide. You have to create a business where people can't hide. That's right. And if we're honest about the kinds of companies, or I should say the kind of players that we need on our team in order to create those companies that don't just survive, but thrive, you've got to have good players.

26:48 And the reality of it is, is that players know when they're partnered up with peers that fail to deliver on a consistent basis, that don't meet or exceed the demand and the standard. And when we have a public scoreboard, there's kind of this syncedness. I don't even know if that's a correct term. But it's this idea of synergy. It's this idea of we identified what winning looks like. And then as a team, we've committed to knowing if we're winning or not. And the reality of it is, is it has a real clear tendency to drive those that can't win off the team and reward those who consistently win to remain on the team. And ultimately what happens with this is this peer piece where it's like you're starting to cater to the winners.

27:33 You're starting to gather more winners on the team because they can see at any given time when we're winning. Right. So the fourth principle here or the fourth discipline is this create a cadence of accountability. Hmm. And you can tell, okay, think about this. Focus on wildly important, act on leading measures, and then keeping a compelling scoreboard. Well, what are all these things doing? They're ultimately working together to create this cadence, this sense of accountability. The value in that is, and there's all sorts of tools that you can deploy to help create this environment. We talk about that. You just said the after-action review. I think there's other things that we can do in terms of cadence of accountability, like...

28:14 We talk about creating a feedback-rich environment. This is that place. The idea is as a team, we're constantly evaluating how we're doing against goals, expectations, and standards. And it's not to create an environment where people feel oppressed or this weird pressure that there's a constant state of a witch hunt happening. No. Because when you have the right people on your team, they want to know... that there's accountability. They want standards. They want to have expectations. They want to know what a winning formula looks like so they can be a championship member. And this is how we can do that. And we refer a lot to Clint Pulver and some of these other leaders.

28:55 Joey Coleman has got a new book out. I know he's doing stuff centered around this, but it's just this idea of creating a marriage between accountability and connection with your staff. Mm-hmm. But you can't survive without the accountability piece. And I think what we do is, like often how we address our clients and financials, is we're kind of afraid to talk about the numbers. So then we inadvertently create a space where talking about the numbers is uncomfortable or it creates a friction point with our client, whatever. We can do the same thing with accountability. We can treat it like something nasty or it's this thing that we only put into place when people fail to deliver. And it's just so backwards.

29:36 It's so backwards. Championship teams are made up of people that have a clear set of expectation standards and they're constantly iterating to meet or exceed that demand. So there's nothing wrong with accountability. And at the end of the day, it's the backbone for you to create a company that consistently repeats success. All right, Head, Heart & Boots listeners. Want to stop here just a moment and thank our underwriting sponsor, Bloodlight Consulting Group. As all of you know, right, you know, Brandon and I, this is our passion project, Head Heart in Boots is. But it's also a way more and more that our consulting clients find us. And in effect, they interview us, right? Those of you who've been listening to the show for a while, you get to know who we are, right?

30:18 What we're about. So if Head Heart in Boots is valuable to you, one of the best things you can do is share it with your friends. And it's been incredible to watch. Just the audience grow and we still get text messages from many of you about shows that you really like and impacted you. So that's number one. And please keep doing that. Many of you have been huge advocates of the show. We also just want to remind you too, if you're a restoration company owner and you're interested in a partner in your growth, you want some help building out systems, developing your leadership teams, helping set up the infrastructure for you to scale and grow into the company that you're trying to build. That's what we do. That's what we do is we come alongside restoration company leaders.

30:59 We help equip them and we help support them in that growth trajectory. So if you're looking for that, go to floodlightgrp.com. Potentially, we could be a great match for each other. Another way that we really do serve our client base and our sphere of influence is through our premier partners. We work really hard to vet those folks that we believe bring a level of value to the industry, that it can really be leveraged in a way to have a sincere, positive impact on your business. We take that very seriously. The folks that we create those kind of ongoing partnerships, that's not a check-the-box kind of scenario. It's we really see strategic alignment in the value that they bring. We see value in the way that their leadership teams and their partners are developed. And we've done very sincere work of ensuring that these folks that we introduce our clients and our sphere to can actually create vetted value.

31:46 So go check out floodlightgrp.com forward slash premiere slash partners and go to the next slide. and see if there's some folks on there that you can connect with and begin developing some other resources to support your growth and your business. There's nothing wrong with accountability, but I think also all of us. You and I talking and everybody listening to this, there are times where it feels super shitty. Oh, sure. Because our ego... I think all of us, to one degree or another... we derive some of our value about what other people say about us. Yeah. Right? Other people's affirmation of our work product, our success, all that kind of stuff is a big part of how we see ourselves.

32:32 Yeah. And so at times, when we're getting that critical feedback of you weren't awesome this go-around or this quarter, your results have sucked. Of course, that's it. It's not the appropriate language for us to engage in. But you know what I'm saying? That's what we hear. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we hear. Oh, sure. I think sometimes it's very easy to get caught up in that accountability, that feedback. And what we hear is, you sucked on this. Yeah. And our ego wants to leap to the defensive. Hold on. And we're looking for all the ways we didn't suck. And it's difficult sometimes for us in those accountability moments. But I think within companies, and I've seen this in my own businesses that I've run, is you almost have to be willing to go through that awkward, shitty feeling enough times to where you and your employees realize, okay, just because Chris is calling me out on this bad behavior or lack of performance, whatever, doesn't mean he doesn't like me and he's going to fire me.

33:32 Sure. Right? It's like getting through that awkward stage of, look, this isn't a firing conversation. This is, we got to figure out what went wrong here. Yeah. Yeah. so that we can change gears. There's a quality or a quantity problem here of what we're doing and we're focusing ourself on. Let's get to the bottom of that and then keep moving. You're right. You're spot on. And I think this is the tension that we wrestle with as leaders and we get uncomfortable. But again, this is why this four disciplines is so freaking amazing. So think about how these all overlay on top of each other. So one of the things that when you point out something I can't fix.

34:12 Ah, good point. Okay? So again, it's like, if you think about it, it's like, okay, I look at the financials at the end of a month, and we just missed the mark. And you come in, and you tell me how we missed the mark. There's just this overwhelming sense of, I can't do anything about it. I'm a victim to what I just experienced, and we can talk about that principally. But right, we've set the stage for, you did a shitty job, and there's nothing you can do about it. Mm-hmm. But when we, okay, come all the way back to the top of these, okay, focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures, okay, and keep a compelling scoreboard. What are we doing here? And when we talk about the scoreboard, again, we're aligning that with all these things come together. If the scoreboard is predominantly focused on how we're acting on lead measures...

34:57 Every time I'm having an interaction with my person, we have the ability to right now focus on something that will give them the highest chance of when that final score is posted, the end of the month, end of the quarter, they're going to be a winner on that board. Because what we're talking about, the feedback that we're giving while we're inspecting what we expect is... all in this space where they still have the opportunity to impact and make a change. And I think that makes accountability get easier to participate in over time when the team is looking at the things they can affect change in right now to ultimately succeed at the end. And here's another way to think about this.

35:37 Winners want to know they're winning. The only people on our team at the end of the day, if we're honest, and I know this is a bit of an oversimplification, but those that don't want to see the score, it's because they don't want to be accountable for our performance. And I understand that not everyone's competitive. And I also understand that not everyone that's competitive necessarily is winning. And those that aren't necessarily super competitive doesn't mean they don't know what it takes to win. Mm-hmm. But there's a reality that when you have the right players on the team and they're fully aligned behind your mission, your vision, your goals, what you guys want to accomplish, they want to know the score. They want to see it.

36:18 They want to talk about it. They want to know how to influence change. They want to know how to up their game and increase their skill set so they have the highest likelihood of making it to the championship. Like these things feed one another. And the other thing too is having this kind of clarity, because this all builds clarity. Sure. Yeah. Having that kind of clarity, it really goes a long way to reducing drama. Oh, yeah. And anxiety on the team. Sure. Because when we don't have clarity around what the winning behaviors are and what it takes to win and get promoted and get recognized and get rewarded in your business, then there's a whole political layer. Mm-hmm. of how stuff really happens in your business.

36:59 That's right. Right? When we're unclear on how people are really performing and we inadvertently reward people that actually aren't doing the right things in the business, but they've just positioned themselves in the right way or they looked good... but underneath it, there was dysfunction and they weren't actually aligned, it creates a lot of anxiety and drama on the team. For sure. Yeah. But when it's really obvious to everybody who's doing the right things and winning because of it, it creates so much less drag. Yeah. So much less anxiety. When people know where they stand and they know what goes into it, it's like more and more people start to realize internally, shoot, I got to get my shit together.

37:39 Yeah. Yeah. I'm being lazy on this thing. And that's not going to produce anything good for me. That's right. And there's no way for me to hide it. I look bad. Yeah. I looked bad at that meeting because I wasn't prepared. And everybody knew it. You know what I mean? Yeah, right. It's like when the bad behavior is when everybody can see it because you've got the light of day shining on everything at all times. Yeah. Yeah. There's nowhere to hide. Yeah. Well, and I think for all intensive purposes, and this is where it becomes, it goes from uncomfortable to actually very supportive in nature. Yeah. And that is we make it easier to do the right thing. At the end of the day, when we have good people on our team, most of us, Most of us want to do the right thing.

38:21 There's not very many people in our sphere of influence that literally walk out of the gate with malicious intent. Rarely do we have employees on our teams that intentionally want to fail, miss the standard, and produce a subpar product. Yeah. That is so rare. Right. Right. The reality of it is, is they want to succeed too. And so the reality is when we set that light, like you said, on the stage and everybody kind of sees exactly what's happening, we remove those paths of least resistance and people become more successful. So, okay. So real quick recap. And then I just, I want to parallel this then with how do we inspect what we expect? Because that's really what a lot of this is pointing to. So focus on the wildly important. Act on lead measures.

39:02 Keep a compelling scoreboard. And then create this cadence of accountability. And here's how you do that. Like, here's how this turns into action. inspecting what we expect. Chris and I are huge believers. And if you've come to any of our two-day operational leadership seminars, if you work with us as a consulting client, you're going to hear us really focusing in on where leaders should be spending their time and how leaders create value for the company and their position. And it has very little to do with their technical expertise and the doing of things. And it's far more centered on their ability to implement, promote... To do these things. Exactly. Yeah. Force multiplier. These are force multiplier type of activities.

39:44 This is high level leadership. Okay. Well, one of those cadences, one of those rhythms is, how am I inspecting? How am I engaging my team on a consistent basis to ensure I'm in touch with my client's needs? I'm in touch with my team's needs? I'm in touch with our brand's persona in the field, the way we deliver customer service. All the things, when executed well, create something that we measure and we go, oh yeah, we hit it. We hit the target. So inspecting. Okay. Sales-wise, from your perspective, how are we inspecting? What does that look like? Hmm. Well, there is no replacement for windshield time. Yeah. There's just none.

40:25 There's no replacement for going out on a cold call with your salespeople. There's no replacement for you attending sales meetings with them. And it's not going to be a perfect representation of what they're doing in the field because you're there. And it's intimidating when the boss is tagging along. But what you should see... is you should see them over-indexing on the right behaviors. You're going to see an exaggerated view of what they're really doing. Yeah. And you also, like, they're going to be on their best behavior because they want to look good. Yeah. And so you're going to see an exaggerated version of the expectations and the standards. Yeah. Yeah. And so you can take that into account, right?

41:05 You know, if you've got the right person that's oriented on the right behaviors, they may organize and plan and be ready to do 20 cold calls that day, plus a couple meetings, because they want to look awesome in front of you. And so you can kind of assume that on a typical day, they're probably doing 14 cold calls. Yeah. Yeah. But the point is, is that you have to get out there and observe what is the quality of the conversations they're engaging in. And of course, those that understand our master course model, you've listened to our other stuff, it's all predicated on humility and curiosity. Sure. Right. It's less of the rah-rah, let me tell you all about our XYZ company. And instead, hey, I want to understand your experience with restoration. I want to understand what, if any...

41:48 pain points or unmet preferences you have with your current vendor, we can see that. Are they engaging those conversations? Are they leading by passing a flyer across the table? Let me tell you about how big our fleet is and we're IICRC this or that and blah, blah, blah. And hey, we can do CE credits for you and da, da, da, da, da, da. Are they pitching or are they discovering who that client is and what they need? Right. So we're checking the quality of the conversations. And then we're also checking what is the actual performance? quantity of activity that we're getting in. Yeah. Because most often, it's really easy for sales reps to get into a rhythm of... Especially the successful ones, in my experience. They start to get some jobs flowing in.

42:29 And it's really easy then for them to shift their focus and attention to stewarding those inbound jobs and letting go of that business building activity. Right? So this happens with your great salespeople and your lesser salespeople. Both. But it's always inspecting what's our quantity of activity and then what's the quality of it. Is it the right kind of activity done in the right modality? Because another thing too that we see with sales in this industry is sales reps will over-index on email and phone outreach. You've heard me talking about this lately. Because I'm troubleshooting this with some sales leaders in our network, in our consulting portfolio that their tendency because of maybe they used to sell software, different sales methodology does not work in this industry.

43:20 You cannot major on email and phone outreach in this business. You can't. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Maybe someday it will, but it doesn't right now. And so it's what's the modality of the outreach and what's the quality of the conversations that person is engaging in. And you can't see that just by asking them questions. Because salespeople are great at telling you what you want to hear. Well, no matter what, no matter what, there's always filters. And there's just something that breaks down when you begin having human-to-human connection and interaction with each other and really getting in and experiencing from your team member's perspective what real life looks like. You got to see it. You got to see it. You got to see it and hear it, yeah. Yeah, we see this in operations side.

44:01 This translates really well. And like an area might be, for instance, let's talk about construction, okay? Let's talk about our recon teams. Well, what are one of the ways that as key leaders overseeing that recon department, what can we be doing? Well, we go do field inspections, right? We take a chunk of time during the day on a consistent basis and we survey, this word's very important, we survey a portion of our active projects. Am I telling recon manager, department managers, they need to see every project? No, we do not have the right staff in place if you have to see every job to ensure that it goes off successfully. Okay. But we need to audit. We need to, just like we would take a population survey.

44:43 You don't ask the same questions to everyone. You survey enough of that population that gives you a good perspective on themes, issues, and consistent patterns that you find in your business. Same thing. So if we go out to inspect a project, we have an opportunity to really dive into the entire project. And what I mean is we do a 360 degree review of all the parts, pieces, and people that affect that project. You really maximize your time. That was slick, dude. Parts, pieces, and people. There you go. It's like triple piece. All right. So here's an example. Okay. I'm a GM or I'm a department head over a recon team and I go out and inspect a project. Well, my tool is with me, i.e.

45:24 my laptop, my iPad, whatever you use. Not only am I physically seeing the project, but I'm going to administratively audit that project at the same time. Documentation. Check your documentation, check contract values, look at notes. Do we know what's going on in this project? Are we communicating consistently? Look at gross profit margin live. Look at POs, look at work orders. Take a peek at the project as a whole. I also highly suggest that you make connection with the subs that are on that job. Reach out to them, talk to them. Hey, how's payments going? How's invoicing and billing going? How are work orders? How's clarity and communication, proactive communication with my PM?

46:04 And then I'm going to connect with my client and my referral partner associated with that job. And the idea is when I do that on a consistent basis, I'm able to affect change positively in the project right now if I see an error or an issue. But also what it's allowing me to do is I'm surveying my body of work. And if I do that day in and day out on a consistent basis, I'm going to have a real firm grasp on how my team performs in the field. And we change it up. We see different project managers projects. But here's what I think is really valuable with what you talked about and what this example means. It gives us the ability as leaders to create a relationship with our people that, yes, we are going to look at the things that we believe are important to our business.

46:48 But as we do it, I'm here to coach, support, equip, and provide resources for you to continue to gain skillset, competency, and see success. And I think that's what's so important about this concept in general is if this is breathed into the business from the entire organizational chart and it's done all the time, our teams just get used to knowing that when we inspect what we do, it gives us the opportunity to grow, gain insight and competency. It's not a witch hunt. This isn't to find new ways to discipline our people. If anything, our A players begin learning, hey, if my leader... shows up on a project or gets into my files or does a ride along with me, there's an opportunity for me to learn and get more support.

47:37 It's not just a show. There is that too. It's an opportunity for me to show off and show my key leader that I know what I'm doing and get the kudos and get that But it's also, hey, if I'm just honest, if I deploy the way that I deploy, my team's going to see how they can make me better. And that's really important. 100%. Really important. This is good, man. Okay. Gang, I think we hung in the pocket a pretty decent amount of time on those topics. Again, we could probably do an episode on each one of those disciplines. Well, you know, it's like, in some ways, man, I feel like we're on the therapy couch together. Because, you know, listen, I mean, we're a work in progress. This is a journey. And it's been really incredible for me as we've kind of changed seats at the table, so to speak.

48:18 Gone from operating in the field to this consulting business that we built. The benefit that we have is we have lots of clients that are in various stages of adopting this. Oh, yeah. And there's just such a massive opportunity for self-reflection on how you and I even function. Oh, yeah. In our own business and in how we're training and advising and consulting our clients. We're still learning and getting better at this. It is all discipline. Yeah. It's discipline. It's discipline. It's discipline. It's not... None of us are wired... necessarily for this to be easier. I just believe it's a skill and a discipline you develop to focus on the right things and do them consistently. That's right.

48:58 And I think it becomes easier as you dial in the frequency of this. Yeah. The scary part of it for employees is when there isn't a cadence. Yes. When it's like a big... F up causes us to hyper-focus on an individual, that is scary. Because they're like, oh gosh. And then there's a whole pile of evidence behind them that you end up piling onto somebody because you hadn't been inspecting for months, for weeks or months. But when we have some kind of cadence that's weekly, every other week, three times a month, whatever, where it's just more like clockwork. Yeah. The boss is going to audit one of my jobs at any given time.

49:40 Right. And if I screw up, he or she's going to say so. And then they're going to redirect me back to, here's what needs to happen instead. Like when that's the cadence, there's nothing to get super scared of as an employee. And normally what you see in those kinds of environments is we are as keyed in on, dude, great job. Yeah. Affirmation. That was a win. That's what we're looking for. That's excellent. Excellent. So it's not one or the other. Things don't have a chance to pile up. That's the big thing. And of course, all of us, maybe, maybe it's just me, people, we do this with our kids. We do this with our spouses. We do this in all of our relationships. A human, I think, instinct is, it's to hide, it's to cover up our failings. It's all that stuff.

50:20 But of course, the more... we just make a habit of clearing the table. It's another way I've said it to folks is we keep a clear table. That's right. There's nothing to get scared of. There's no piles of crap that we're afraid of somebody finding out. Okay. I had a personal disclosure. This is a funny analogy, but my wife yesterday, I had my wife's Honda pilot. I have a little Honda hatchback that I just love. And I drive it normally, but I was driving my wife's pilot and she had spur of the moment, had to run out and get one of my kids at his track practice. So she hopped in my car. I know the audience has no concept. I've been married to my wife for 21 years. Okay. And I was so embarrassed because I've just been caught up in...

51:05 I have my wildly important things. And my car is one of those things that I do not... That's not in that category. I don't index on. I am not one of those neat and tidy. My car is just pristine. Listen, gang. There's a few things that Chris and I can share. And there are lots of things that there's no way. Well, careful with the lots. Okay. Careful with the lots. My car is one of those things that gets me from point A to point B. And there are times where it just really starts looking like a hobo camp inside because it's not a personal focus. It's not. And call that wrong. I know. Who was it on the Shark Tank? I felt really ashamed of this. But I was watching a Shark Tank episode and he was like, before I ever make an investment, I always take a look at their personal vehicle.

51:47 Or when I go to hire... I think actually he said, whenever I hire a sales executive, I check their personal vehicle because that tells me what our company rig is going to look like or something like that. It tells me a lot about them. I'm like, well, whatever, you asshole. Oh, and by the way, they're right. No. But hey, listen, we all have things that could use more attention. But my wife, she takes the vehicle. I'm like, oh my God, my car is such a pigsty right now. I'm so embarrassed. And I literally texted my wife. I'm like, listen, I'm embarrassed you're driving my car because it could use a muck out. And two, don't go poking around because there's... I got to clean out the car. Okay, babe? Just return the vehicle. Don't mind that owner. I'm cleaning it this weekend. No. The window's open.

52:28 Come on. It's not like I... Whatever. All right. That might be. I don't know why. This is probably a mistake, me disclosing this. But hopefully there's somebody out there that relates to Nordyke that they're embarrassed by the current state of their personal vehicle. Where was I going? Right. Exactly. Right. I'm not sure what the application was, but hopefully I just made somebody feel better about themselves. Moving along. Listen, if this stuff is valuable to you, if you feel a little less valuable. ridiculous because you listen to me and you're like, well, Nordyke's even whatever, then it makes you feel better about yourself. Please share this with your friends. The best way you can thank Brandon and I for putting together the Head Heart Boots show is please share this with your friends.

53:13 If you know somebody who's trying to grow and scale their restoration company, Point them towards floodlightgrp.com. Tell them about us. Get them turned on to the podcast. It's a great way for them to interview us before they decide, are we going to hire these guys to come do a workshop? Can we relate to these guys so they have something to offer? Point them towards the podcast. Check out our website. Let us know if you want to partner with us. Other than that, I want to leave everybody with just a little project. Something that they can take away from this and maybe deploy with the teams. So here's a thought. So just really quickly, remember, focus on wildly important. Act on lead measures. Keep a compelling scoreboard and then create that cadence of accountability. Here's what I'd challenge you guys on. If you're a GM business owner, go meet with your team on the next offsite.

53:57 The next time that you get your team together for a quarterly or whatever it may be, some kind of strategic meeting, invite them in to gaining a deeper understanding of what these four things are, how they influence our business. And then I would say, go to work, asking the question, using your team to come up with the different ways that as leaders... they can remain in the correct lane and have an impact or influence the business through these four disciplines. Get them talking about it. Get them answering questions. Get their input on from their perspective and their part of the business, what they can be doing to create these disciplines and make the business really be influenced by these things, all right?

54:42 Okay, gang. Hey, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. 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.