Ep 104 - Rabbit Trails, "Fighting Time"

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brennan. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. Man, I love this industry. I almost did a what's up brother with my mic. I know, here we go. The ceiling. That would have been, I don't know, that wouldn't have worked very well. Am I the only one that... Probably. Like I open up Spotify. You don't even use Spotify. I know. I'm like, dude, listen, do not look to me. I am a... I was so surprised when you said that. I'm a budding chat user, chat GPT user. Okay. Okay. But technology in general, I don't know if I'm lazy or what the thing is, but I tend to wrestle with wanting to advance my skill set in certain things.

0:54 I mean, you know, you have to give me like Apple help like every other day. I feel like I'm like a grandpa. I was going to say, am I the only one? I can't be. That I open up my... This is... I'm so simple in some ways. Yeah. I opened up Spotify to see, did Rogan upload a new... Oh. Is there a new Rogan episode? There's a thing. And when you go to the home screen, the ones that you're subscribed to, it'll have the little blue dot showing there's a new episode for that. So I have several. So what are my podcasts right now? Like in my... featured or what do they call it in Spotify? Like ones you follow or subscribe to?

1:35 Anyways, so Rogan, I think I talked about it in a previous episode, the Tao Te Ching, which is a, it's a Buddhist thing. And it's this white dude that... Well, of course. It's just like he's, he's, he got into Tao and he has just this really cool way of talking about Buddhist things that I'm like, oh, this is very interesting. I find this useful. Yeah. It's this monk-looking guy. The icon for the podcast is this monk-looking guy with Bose headphones on and these dark aviator sunglasses. It's so funny. Anyway, so that's one of mine. Lex Friedman, I really like his stuff. Jordan Peterson's in my shortlist right now.

2:18 And Theo Vaughn, who's one of my just favorite comedians right now. He just makes me laugh so hard. And then lately, I've been getting into these sleep podcasts Remember how I recommended that to you when we were on the road? It is really useful to me, helping me get to sleep, man, at night. My thoughts, I just... I think a lot of people can relate to that. I just get in my head and I can't get to sleep. And this particular podcast is called Get Sleepy. Oh, yeah. And one of the things I like about it is it's a British... So they actually have a whole bunch of different voice actors that produce these stories. Okay. They're bedtime stories for adults. Oh, okay. Listen, it's the goofiest thing ever, but I always pick the British ones.

3:01 So they put like a British flag or an American flag to the accent that you're going to get. It's the British thing. I don't know what it is, but anyhow. So I just... I do that. It's like, oh, blue dot on one of my podcasters. I got a new episode. So anyway, this is another Rabbit Trails episode. And this is something we've been experimenting with. Partly, I mean, just to be totally honest. And I know sometimes if I say Joe Rogan, some of you are like, oh, Rogan, everybody's talking about Rogan. Well, yeah, I like it. I like his shit. I'm way into it. I'm a total fan. Not every show. Like some shows are boring. Oh, yeah. Some shows. Yeah, like the fight companion shows. That ain't my thing. Not so into it. Some of his comedian buddies, not as into.

3:42 But I just... Anyway. So I thought as part of this, just kind of... I was looking back over the different podcast episodes and stuff I've been listening to for like cool shit that I've... been thinking about or it's forced me to reflect on. Before we do that, though. Well, yeah, what we should do. I mean, before we do that. Yeah, we got to thank our sponsors, don't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm dropping, man. Yeah, so... Liftify.com forward slash floodlight. I feel like we need to come up with a jingle. Well, yeah. That's next year. We're doing jingles. That was the thing. You remember like when I had my state farm business back in the day and before that, even with Rapid Refill, we'd get these radio ads. Oh, yeah. People would come and like, look, you know, we could... That's right.

4:24 We could come up with a cool jingle. We have this music partner that'll actually make you a dedicated song. And I think of Albin's Plumbing here in Corvallis. There's like these... And Fitzpatrick Painting also has one. I used to know a couple. At Home Furniture. I can... Oh, yeah. It's legit. These theme songs. What about like old school? What was the guy? It worked so well, I can't even remember. He had the high and tight, like old school furniture. I mean, this is old school. I saw this guy like when I went to my grandparents. And it was his wife. I think it was he and his wife. And he had this old school high and tight, like from the late 50s. I know. I know who you're talking about. You know what I'm talking about? Sold furniture.

5:04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. He was all jingled out. That was a big thing. Yeah, I don't know that. So how do we go down that road? I don't know. We need to thank some sponsors and get off that thing. I know that. Liftify.com. But part of the reason what we're trying to do, by the way, our faithful listeners, is we really try to keep these ad reads as interesting as possible. So maybe you don't even skip ahead, which of course we all do at times. I do it sometimes when Rogan is doing his. So we try to keep it fresh. Listen... Liftify.com forward slash floodlight. You owe yourself a demo. Just go do a freaking demo. Yeah. Check it out. Check it out. It's a one hour investment for your business that potentially is a useful lever.

5:49 You know, it's... Worth a million. It's a force multiplier. Could be. Literally. Literally. Literally worth millions. And that's not an exaggeration. That's not tongue in cheek. That's not us being funny. No. Right now, of all of our clients that are using it, George and Michelle Gutierrez. I don't think there's anything wrong with highlighting them. Big Surve Pro team over on the East Coast. Awesome people. Really great, great folks. Doing a lot more right than just their Liftify account. But holy cow, they're number one in the ServPro network right now. And actually, as far as I recall, out of like 1,300 operators. Well, no, I think there are 12 or 1,300 reviews. And clocking. It's unbelievable.

6:30 Yeah. And they were at like 570 or something when they started with Liftify just three months ago. And now they're at like 1,300. Oh, it's unbelievable. I'm not sure. They were number one in the ServPro network to begin with. And they've just continued to widen their margins. And this is against... I mean, listen, guys. They're competing against... When we say they're number one, that's amongst SurfPro operators that are doing 50, 80, $100 million of revenue. And George and Michelle, they are number one in terms of Google reviews. It's incredible. It's unbelievable. So... Crush and crush. If you want to crush... Go do a Liftify demo.

7:12 Yeah. How's that? Yeah, I love it. And props to George and Michelle for making yet another great choice in their business, right? Onboarding Liftify. But you're not biased at all in that. I'm not biased at all. Yeah. Answerforce. Answerforce.com forward slash floodlight. Guys, answerforce. Bolt on partner to ensure that we have redundancy, professionalism, and consistency to our call intake process. God, that was so... Boom. Sincere, man. Boom. Do it. Get it. Okay? And then last... but not least, our dear friend, CNR Magazine, Michelle and her team. It's actually getting to the point where we're going to have to stop using, starting with Michelle and her team because she has become an outstanding leader and is building a fantastic team.

7:56 And that team is now... I'm not giving an insight. What's bigger? They're badass. They're doing the do. They're taking care of us as... as industry participants and continue to raise the bar in terms of being a friend to our industry, bringing top-tier knowledge information. She has podcasts too. Podcasts. And not only does she have a podcast though, but she iterates consistently to do these series where she brings in total studs and studettes. You got Phil in that mix. You got a bunch of other just fantastic names of people that just are so quality. Oh, she's had every who's who. Yeah. On her podcast, on LinkedIn Lives.

8:36 It's remarkable. She's serious. That actually reminds me. We have not had her on for a really long time. I know. Famous plug. It's time to get them on. So CNR Magazine, guys, if you're not subscribers, you should be. It's essentially free information that comes to you and your team. And then more importantly, it's just another resource helping unify our voice in the industry in terms of information and expression of what we do and how we do it and getting better across the board. So, all right, there we go. Rabbit Trail. So you started us off on this whole podcast deal with... You know what? I'm not even going to let you go there. I'm taking over. Okay. We're going to go down to Rabbit Trail. All right. Rando here. This is almost like Friday Live. Okay, guys? We have been doing a boatload of stuff with folks lately on time management.

9:20 I won't hang here forever. I won't hang here forever. Okay. Okay. Time management. Here's the story. All of us, regardless of the position or the role that we play, time management is probably our Achilles heel in most cases. And I know some of us are awesome at identifying as multitaskers and all the things. And I would still say that most of us, if we don't get a grip on creating some real tools around owning our calendar and owning time management, we are going to suffer the consequences. And I have just learned over the years that not that it's because I'm a monster at this because I'm a work in process. But man, I have met some folks over the years that absolutely have their calendar in a stranglehold.

10:05 And they are powerful producers. What they're able to accomplish in a consistent way, day in and day out, the level of productivity, the level of accomplishment that these folks can achieve is unsurmountable. And at the end of the day, it literally is not their skill set. It's not necessarily that they're better at the role or they know more than their peer or their counterpart. It's because they've developed a skill set around owning their calendar. And it's hard not to recognize the fruit of that endeavor. Power of discipline, man. Power of discipline. So here's just the one piece I just want to kind of lay on everybody. Think about this. When we allow white space to exist in our calendar, and this might sound a bit counter, when we have these big open blocks, or if you're one of those people that runs off of a to-do list instead of calendars, like actual blocks of time on your calendar, you run a great deal of risk of not knowing when to prioritize what.

11:01 And inevitably, what happens with that mobile, that to-do list is that it just kind of keeps rotating. Yeah. Because the tyranny of the urgent takes over. You don't do anything to actually actively manage your calendar. And when you get to the end of the day and you look at that to-do list, you realize that even though you had this awesome list of functioning priorities, you got to two of them and the tyranny of the urgent took the rest of your day. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I've seen people do is when they get really good at removing the white space from their calendar, meaning they intentionally put in these blocks of time that they're going to focus on two, three, four handful of items or priorities. And they commit to that block.

11:42 When they then look at a to-do list, they realize how much more of that list they actually got accomplished. Yeah. They didn't react. They didn't bleed into something because it just was the thing that popped up next in their mind. They actually did the priorities based on the blocks of time they committed to. And when they get to the end of the day, they're often more of a scenario of winning than being frustrated. Well, and then I think it's worth saying in that context too, how do you time block when you're in our business? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because we just had a little bit of a workshop that we did over in the East Coast with construction teams. And you talked about some of the natural cadence of our business.

12:27 Talk about that, dude. Because I think it's really relevant. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people are like, well, how do you do that in our business when every single second of the day you potentially have something tugging at your sleeve? Yeah. Something that was unplanned, you couldn't have predicted it, right? And yet there is a natural ebb and flow to our business. There is. That we can take advantage of, right? There is. And I think a big thing for us to kind of always hold on to is although our industry can feel or present itself as being chaotic, The power of being restoration contractors is that you learn to control the chaos. You learn how to maneuver within it, around it, leverage it to your favor, and ultimately filter our customer from experiencing the chaos.

13:14 That's kind of our job, right? That's our role. This is the biggest thing we all forget is if I commit to having, say, a morning stand-to... from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. I get my guys out. I get my guys and gals out. I have an agenda. I have objectives, things I want to accomplish in that morning stand to. In the back of our mind, we know that there's customer calls coming in, customers that want to meet with us, customers that want to call back, all that kind of stuff. And our tendency is, we don't have time for morning stand to today because we got to get out to the Joneses. Right. Right. And it's like customer request or inbound call trumps everything is how some people operate.

13:58 I think all of us, every single person listening to this and saying this has been in that mode at one time or another, right? And we forget in the midst of the urgency and the desire to go claim the dollar, service the client, do the thing... is that if we tell them, hey, we're busy between 7.30 and 8.00, and so therefore I can't call you back or I can't meet with you until 8.30, 9.10, whatever, for all they know, we're meeting with the president or we're visiting another customer job. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right, right. But somehow we don't feel the freedom to intentionally schedule our time because we have to be able to react and respond to every customer opportunity that comes, you know?

14:43 Oh, yeah. That's so true. So again, like with everything, when we talk about time blocking or time management, it's not something that can exist on its own and it solved the business's problems. Right? All these things, they're layers of opportunity and tools for us to deploy to help make sure that we can do what we need to do. But you're right. So, you know, some of the pushback that people will use in terms of reference to time blocking is that I can't control when somebody calls me with a new loss. Okay, well, okay. So let's actually jump into that right now. Okay. I'm not asking technicians to block out their morning for administrative leadership responsibilities.

15:24 Yeah. No, I'm expecting them to get in a truck and go deliver service. Department heads, project managers, key leaders, I don't know that it's realistic or appropriate for you to be reacting to everything that happens. If we're designing a team, training a team, and equipping a team to do their job, a lot of our reacting or the immediate execution should be getting done by our team members that are field staff oriented. For leaders that need to be proactively managing our teams, their clients, and their referral partners, you're going to need to slow down a little bit. It is your job to give yourself the space to think about 10 minutes from now, possibly tomorrow and maybe next week, and lead out of that versus reacting.

16:10 So when people say, well, I could get a call for a new loss at any moment, you sure could. But did you design an intake system? Do you have field technicians that are properly qualified to do the job? Yeah. then fucking let them do the job and you don't need to react. You stick to your time blocking. Yeah, stick to your system. Stick to your system, stick to the leader standard work, right? Another thing to keep in mind with this is that the busier we get, the more important it is to adhere to the time blocks, the systems, and the processes because that's what prevents us from allowing our system to come off the tracks. Yeah. When we punt consistent systems because we get busy, we've literally unleveraged the very tool that is supposed to help us prevent the chaos in the first.

16:50 Yeah. Like we shoot ourselves in the foot. Yeah. So remember that. So just big picture time blocks. Basically what we're saying is, okay, if you think about our business, there's a little bit of this weird moment in time in the morning. It's not overtly obvious. And if you're not paying attention, we miss it. But if you just slow down for a second, look at your company, there is a time... And it's not exactly the same depending on how you deploy your teams. But it's probably around, let's call it 8am, maybe 9.15. And it's this idea that we've done all our morning stuff. The teams are deploying from our shop, but we haven't gotten to enough jobs and done enough things to really start firing up questions, concerns, issues, problems.

17:34 It's this natural, we're traveling out to get the work started. And there's just a natural lull that happens in our business. Well, those are one of those times as a key leader that you should be maximizing. to get in to do some of that proactive leaders work. Dashboards, getting into our WIP. If you're a JOC tool user, our friend Chris Hill and his team, this is what I get into that pulls all that data for Dash. Get into your dashboards. Look at the book of business that you're responsible for. Take advantage of that lull. Again, I use the term lull very loosely here. But this kind of almost moment of less chaos is... Leverage that into your favor, your benefit to ensure that the majority of the rest of your day is done in a proactive manner because you've stopped long enough to take inventory of what's going on around you, looking at the book of business and ensuring that what you had planned to do that day is still on point.

18:29 Yeah. Right? Not getting overwhelmed, not reacting, but proactively looking. So again, we're not going to control what you do with your time block. But the idea is two, kind of three critical principles. One, consistency. Two, don't leave white space on your calendar because people will fill it. Things will fill it. The third piece here, guys, sorry, is bookending the day. Okay. And what that means is I want to start and finish my day with some kind of sense of proactive engagement in my dashboards, looking and reviewing at my work and process and ensuring that I'm starting and closing my day proactively, intelligently, right? Doing my summaries, doing the different things that I need to, to keep the mission moving forward.

19:11 So we're not breaking up every moment into a specific task. We're simply blocking out our calendar to have space for types of tasks that make sense. So the way we promote it is AM, PM routine, bookending your day, and then spending that 10 to 3 timeframe, the majority of your afternoon outbound with your clients, your subs, your vendors, your people, but really protecting that opener and that closer to make sure that you're being proactive and remaining as proactive as possible. The last piece there, and we'll move on, is day-to-day consistency. All the time. I did this. I still do it from time to time. I make the mistake of saying, oh gosh, Thursday's the day.

19:54 I'm going to lock myself in the office on Thursday for five hours, and I'm going to get all the things done that I need to get done. And inevitably, that's the morning that a sweet loss comes in, an employee quits, a sub craps out on you. You then punt that five-hour block that you, in quotes, were so locked in on. And now I've literally made the mountain out of the molehill of things I was supposed to try to get to. And now I'm intimidated. Now I'm overwhelmed. Now the amount of time it's going to require to get me back on track is almost too much for me to bear. I don't have it, right? And so we really are huge fans of...

20:35 incremental progress every day. Administratively, every day we get into it. It doesn't have to be for four hours. It's just 20 minutes, an hour, 45 minutes, whatever you block out. You do it every single day. And what that allows you to do is the same way we eat an elephant. Yeah. One bite at a time, right? Good, dude. So that's my two cents on calendar management. Well, and I love that term that you used, a leader standard work. Do people, and you described it, you explained a lot of what that is, right? It's getting in the dashboards. It's looking at the things that, it's looking at tomorrow and the next week and the next month, right? It's dedicating time. That is the leader standard work.

21:15 is how am I looking ahead? How am I getting in front of things for my team? How am I being proactive and thoughtful about the upcoming things that I'm responsible for and need to influence, you know? 100%. And ultimately, when we do that well, that is the activity that begins to actually remove the chaos. Yeah. Because we solve problems instead of putting out fires when we do that. When we're more proactive in nature, we dive deeper into systems and processes that equip our team to do their job consistently. So now I don't have to get pulled into some of these different elements. Like this is how we actually remove the chaos is begin to own our calendar first and creating some level of bandwidth where I can proactively engage my role and my team.

22:01 and create systems and processes to pull those fires out of the system. Yeah. Yeah. That's good, dude. There's that piece. I talked about it in a previous... This is our second podcast today that we're recording, kind of getting ready for a lot of the holiday trips and whatnot. Right. Client trips and so forth. I was talking about that chat GPT session that Jeff and I did yesterday for RIA. And he told me, I have to, I just have to pass this along. Because of course, there was like, I don't know, there was a hundred or so people that attended that RIA conference deal. But so a lot of people didn't obviously hear it. But he had a really cool tip about ChatGPT that I had not even been turned on to.

22:45 All right, Head, Heart & Boots listeners. Wanted 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 and 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? What we're about. So if Head Heart and 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.

23:25 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. 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.

24:14 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. So go check out floodlightgrp.com forward slash premier slash partners 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. He recently with one of his sales leaders, I don't know, like his VP of sales or whoever he was talking to, they were researching a property management client that one of their sales reps or something got into.

25:05 And just on a whim, they looked up that company on ChatGPT. Hey, tell me everything you know about... Oh, interesting. They were using it as a prospect research tool. Oh my goodness. And it spit out... Oh, I know what he said. He was doing it because he lives in Phoenix, Scottsdale area. And he said, tell me who the largest property management... Who holds the largest or manages the largest portfolio of real estate in Phoenix? Get out of here. And it spit out a ton of Intel, including total million square feet under management, total number of doors that they manage, the ownership, like this whole profile of it.

25:47 Now, I mean, I don't know if you can do it with every single question you asked, but I thought, oh my gosh, I have to dig into that. That's incredible. That is incredible. Okay, now here's another idea I had about ChatGPT. Yeah. This is a good one. I got some too. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So yesterday, again, when I was kind of dialoguing with Jeff about this, one of the things that I brought up during this session was how much I've been liking it for book reviews. When like his leaders, often we talk about that, like a cool book we read or, oh, I just got this awesome book and so-and-so recommended it. And the reality for me, dude, I have a... If you could see my office, you've seen my office. I have this bookshelf that's Right?

26:30 I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I look at the stacked books and I'm like, Oh, that's a good one. I remember when Seth Godin came out with that one. And I've read probably half of them. So my standard practice, my standard leader's work is when somebody tells me I have a book, I almost always open up my Amazon app on my phone. Yeah. And I grab it and at a minimum, I add it to my cart. Yeah. So then I punt the decision to actually buy the book till later. So I don't want to forget about this really awesome book, you know? And so I'll open up when I'm with the person. And sometimes, depending on the person and the book author, I'll just bring it by right there. In fact, we were at a workshop with a whole bunch of owners a couple weeks ago.

27:13 And the guy, we were at the happy hour having drinks. And he said... He said, hey, dude, give me books. What books are you reading? Yeah. Frank? Yeah. Frank was like, what books do you recommend? Like, what books do you guys always recommend? I'm like, well, we don't necessarily have a standard list, but here's one. And I opened up my Audible and my Kindle app and all this stuff. And I looked at my order history and Amazon, dude. I bought so many books. But how many do I actually read? Well, I've got a whole lot that I haven't read. There's a backlog, if you will. There's a backlog. And so, but of course, there's a lot of great insight and reminders in those books. Well, I started playing with ChatGPT. And instead of buying the book, I was like, ChatGPT, can you tell me all the important takeaways?

27:58 Oh, yeah. Of this book by this author? And within 10 seconds, I have a deep overview of that book. Bullet pointed with all the key takeaways and topics and themes. But then what I found is you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into the book without ever buying the thing. Now listen, I'm not saying... There's a lot of authors that have invested their lives into bringing this great content. And I'm not suggesting don't stop buying books because I think books are also an incredible gift to pass along and stuff like that. But... I'll tell you what, the future of ChatGPT is that there is no... It used to be that only the rich people had all the information, right?

28:41 The kings, you know? And just to think about how far as a culture we've come in terms of knowledge and availability. Like my 12-year-old son, man, is all into this ChatGPT stuff. He finds it so fascinating. And I'm like, it's so appropriate because in his lifetime, becoming an expert on how to utilize these tools. Oh. And how to take action based on the information that you glean from it. And how to leverage it to do tasks and to perform functions that, for most of us, we've had to do longhand all our lives. That's right.

29:21 is just... It's really mind-blowing, to be honest. It's mind-blowing. Because... Okay, so here's another idea from that. So obviously, book reviews. But then as leaders too, I think all of us, every single one of us wants to lead better. That's part of the reason why maybe some people are listening to this. It's certainly why you and I talk about all this shit. We want to be better. Even as you and I are doing these podcast episodes, we're learning things about ourselves. And we're recognizing things that... Oh man, if we leaned more into this, we did more or less of that. As we synthesize out loud, it's helping us, right? But also, along with these book reviews and how we use our books, you can use ChatGP to create discussion guides.

30:04 and meeting outlines. So I was at a client on-site in Southern California a couple weeks ago. And our consultant that I was with mentioned a book. And this particular book was called The Coaching Habit. I can't remember who writes it, it's a great book. And in The Coaching Habit, actually no, it's in Coaching for Performance, two books that we mentioned on that trip. It's a guy who's a tennis expert, but he wrote a book on coaching, it's very good. But he has this thing he calls the grow method, which is just basically a discussion framework for coaching somebody. Anyway, I don't have the book, but I just on a whim, I pulled it up in ChatGPT and had them do the whole outline. I'm like, oh yeah, there's the grow method.

30:46 It spit it out, explained it, even gave sort of a conversational example of how you do the grow method in a coaching conversation. Like, oh my gosh, this is great. It is powerful. And I can literally copy it inside ChatGPT app on my iPhone, and I could text it to this dude. Yep. As almost a leave behind for this conversation interaction, consulting interaction that we had. Yeah. And how powerful is that? Well, then he could easily use ChatGPT to be like, Oh my God, this grow method, this is incredible. ChatGPT, create a 15-minute chat. discussion outline about the grow method with some excerpts and story examples from the book Coaching for Performance.

31:30 And in 45 seconds... Oh, yeah. It does it. It would spit it out and all he has to do is print it out or freaking leave it on his phone and open it up when he's in his team meeting later on that day. Yeah. It's awesome. It's incredible. Now, here's another step for those of you that enjoy our podcast or that occasionally you forward it to your employees. Here's a little pro user tip. You can go in and you could download the transcript of our shows. You could plug it into ChatGP. You could literally copy and paste the transcript from our show. It's in our show notes. Paced it into ChatGPT and said, I'm a fan of this podcast. I'm a fan of this podcast. please produce a discussion guide for my upcoming team meeting that covers the two or three main takeaways from this Head, Heart & Boots episode.

32:15 And it'll do it. It'll do it. Oh, and then you can tell it, make sure that I'm subscribed and that I leave a like. Yeah. No, you can't do that. You still got to manually do that. Shout GPT. The robots won't do all of that. But I just, I'm just mesmerized. It's phenomenal. So in that same vein, right? So a couple of things. One example is you and I as a team, our team uses Fathom. Okay. And Fathom up till now has just essentially been a great recorder slash transcriber. Fathom.video. Okay. Yeah, fathom.video. And essentially what it is, is it's a recording device. It records our exchanges with our clients, our meetings, team meetings, blah, blah, blah.

32:56 Well, in its original iteration, it would record it all and it would break it up into some different kind of levels of AI. Using AI. Yeah. But it was like kind of rudimentary. Wonky. Yeah. Yeah. And so basically you got a transcript, which is cool, but it's a wall of text, let's be honest. And then you got the recording. And you got a funky outline. Yeah, and it did some sort of AI funky outline that was a little bit weird. And it was so bad we didn't use it. Right. Okay, but they just recently added their true AI tool. Damn, dude. So this thing, I've been like a zealot. I've been sharing this with everybody. And every time I share it with them, they're like, get out of here. This is automatic. So now when you click on that AI tool, of course, they haven't started charging us the updated rate yet.

33:40 We'll can't wait to see what that number is. But we'll record, let's say we're on a session for over an hour. And we've covered all sorts of items as we're processing through these conversations. Task items, to-do items, discussion topics. Yep, all the things. To-dos, like all the things. Well, this used to be this laborious thing where I would be trying to cram notes the whole time. summaries were amazing and laborious. But it's laborious. I'm trying to track all this information, take enough notes, and then simulate that into something where they can... Anyways, now it takes 30 seconds. I hit the AI tool. I tell it general session. Yeah. And it takes an hour's worth of conversation and literally turns it into a frameworked outline with a layout with section headers, bullet points, and...

34:29 No walls of text at all. It's incredible. It's even calling out the person that's responsible for the item or the topic. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's crazy. And the only thing I do now is I'll just take a few seconds to clean it up. Because sometimes they'll get a name wrong. Sometimes maybe a date, 11-11 instead of 11-10. A lot of times because I said the wrong thing. But a little bit of a tweak, boom, send. Okay, now here's another thing. Because... Once we start, we adopt this now, we do all our internal meetings with it. So that we can then in turn share with our team immediately afterwards. Get us all on the same page. Very powerful. Well, a big thing that we teach people is coaching. Coaching summaries as an example.

35:09 Like some kind of follow up to any kind of conversation that you have with your team. Most of us don't do it because it's laborious, takes time, we forget, blah, blah, blah. Well, now you could just very easily just run Fathom, even if you're not recording the video portion of it because you're both in the same room, who cares? Run Fathom, do your meeting, hit Click AI General, and in like 15 to 25 seconds, it'll spit out the summary of your entire conversation. I'm hung up on that. I love, in theory, I love the concept. I think if I'm an employee, it feels weird. Oh, no. Where things are at now. Frame it as an, it's a meeting.

35:49 Don't do it if you're talking about their wife. Maybe I just need to develop more confidence around that strategy. I get it. Well, listen. How dare you disagree with me on air? It's the one thing about Fathom that I'm disappointed in is they don't have a mobile app. Oh, sure. It's just for listening. Otter.ai. So a little history. Just for all y'all, we started with Otter. And thank you, Rachel. Rachel Stewart actually turned me on to Otter initially. Otter.ai has an app to where you can just audio listen and it'll transcribe. And there's a free version. And it was awesome. And for a while, we were using Otter. And it's, at the time, it's kind of the best of.

36:32 Dragon Dictation was sort of the first. They haven't iterated very fast. Otter kind of has been eating their lunch. Yeah. And then Fathom comes along. And from what I can tell, now we haven't been in Otter for the last few months. They may have a crazy new AI function, but they were really expensive. It was like 69 bucks a month or something per user once you get past a thousand minutes. And we clocked through that really fast. Oh, yeah. And so we hit a cost ceiling. And so then we hunted for Fathom. And I can't remember how we found it. But it's awesome within Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, but they don't have a standalone app version for just recording audio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I imagine at some point they will, you can hack it by doing a mobile version of Zoom.

37:16 Yeah, or just opening a session. Opening a session of Zoom or Teams or whatever, just to record audio. But so I'm not, look, I'm not saying there's not value in that. The HR application of like coaching summaries, I feel awkward around that, but probably just, it's all about framing. Yeah. Why are we doing it? Why does this serve you? You know, hey, this is... For sure. But you're not backlogging these into your home office. No. Yeah, that's probably important. So I really, I can't wait until there's... Maybe something... By the way, all of you who are listening, if you know of a really great AI recording tool that'll actually simulate the transcript and then summarize similar to what we're describing in Fathom, oh my gosh, please...

37:59 It's so powerful. Yeah, please tell us. Go find us on LinkedIn and shoot us a message. Yeah. The AI thing is so interesting. I mean, just the other day, I was 30,000 feet flying. We're in route somewhere. Yeah. I was updating and building an addition to a training outline that you and I were getting ready to prepare for. And I needed to update some content. And I had remembered that we had recorded shows or a video on it previously. So what I did was I went and grabbed the transcript from those previous videos, dumped it into chat and asked chat to pump out an outline. And then I was able to cut and copy that portion put it into my new outline that I was building for this presentation.

38:39 Boom, done. So it did all the hard work. You know how long it would have taken me to go back through all that content, read the transcripts and be like, okay, here's the key topics I want to translate and pull into this training. I'm flying in an airplane at 30,000 feet. I have an internet connection. I know for some of you, this is like old news, but for me, it still freaking blows my mind. And I'm using AI to take what could have been hours of labor and it turned it into about a 15-minute event for me. Dude, okay, here's another thing I just thought of. I think all of us as leaders who are thinking about how do I become a better leader? Well, one way that... One skill I think we all have to develop as leaders is public speaking.

39:21 Oh, yeah. There ain't no way around it. No. If you want to maximize your influence, whether it's in front of a group of 10 or in front of a group of 10,000, the more competent you become at speaking and communicating ideas, your influence grows, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the things I've always admired about some of the iconic public speakers and CEOs and leaders is they are so good at storytelling. Oh yeah. They're so good at weaving story examples. Oh yeah. And, and I've always felt a little bit, maybe all of us, maybe all the iconic leaders feel this way too. Like it, that doesn't always come easy to me. I don't all of a sudden like, oh, here's this really powerful story to example for this. Sure. And so sometimes when I'm delivering a talk and you and I deliver talks all the time now, I can't think of a good story example around something.

40:07 Dude, you're using chat. Chat GPT, man. Chat GPT. So and why I know this will work and I'm going to literally dig into this today. with some of the training outlines we do has helped me think of some real-life story examples from historical examples, whatever. Yeah. Because I did this as a thing for that session yesterday. One of the use cases that I was talking about is just this. Coming up with outlines, discussion topics for team meetings, all-company meetings, soft skills trainings. Yeah. Like how do we train on how to better empathize with customers? What does it mean for us to show empathy? Yeah. So I want to give a talk at our next all-company meeting about that.

40:49 Because I want my frontline technicians to help people feel heard and help them calm their nerves. Because all the things, right? Yeah. Well, I actually played around with it for safety meetings. Because safety meetings are just so boring. We have to do them. And everybody just kind of snickers. Now it's time to sign in and do the thing, right? So I punched in. I want to do a 10-minute training for my team. I'm a disaster restoration company. And I wanted to be OSHA approved, you know, da-da-da. And it spit out a five-bullet, 10-minute training. And this particular one was on ladder safety. I'm like, that's boring. Give me another one. I literally said, give me another one.

41:30 And in 10 seconds, it gave me another topic with five bullet points. And it's good. It's like, okay, what was it? It was like the importance of PPE and examples of why PPE is important and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, that's lame. Give me another one. And I did this like five or six times. And it just kept spitting out really good, strong, clear outlines for a safety meeting talk. And then I was like, give me three or four thought-provoking questions that I can pose to my team to actually engage them in this safety training. And sure as shit, it did it, dude. Sure as shit.

42:10 And I could have just... And that is one of the things that I find really useful is just how quickly and how well it iterates and goes and finds more corroborating evidence or information. It's a time multiplier. It is so extraordinary and amazing. So I'm really excited. You know, you and I did a keynote and I think it's a keynote we'll probably deliver in other groups in the future. But even with our trainings, like even just in our conversations, like there's certain things that you and I talk about, like time management, you know, we just went through. Yeah. Where I'm like, I want to become better as a leader at connecting principles with story examples. Because I learn really well that way.

42:51 And I think all of us as humans do, right? I think it's an incredibly powerful leadership skill. And yet, I think there's a part of me that, at times, the story I tell myself is, I'm just not good at that for some reason. In the moment, I have trouble synthesizing, connecting a story from my own experience. Sure. Sometimes I think of good ones. But I've also talked to enough leaders and CEOs and public speakers to know... that nine times out of 10, there was a lot of labor and investigation and research. Yeah. And exploring and book reading and note cards and bookmarks and scribbling and dog earing that went into them...

43:35 building that roster of story examples. Yeah. Like lots and lots of intentionality. I think of Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday, he's the author of The Daily Stoic. He wrote... Seth Godin wrote All Marketers Are Liars. Ryan Holiday wrote one when he was the head of marketing for American Apparel. It was kind of his launching point. He wrote something about like... Forgive Me, I'm Lying, or something like that about it as a marketing book. But anyway, he studied under the tutelage of Robert Greene, who is just an incredibly prolific New York Times bestseller. He wrote The 48 Laws of Power. He wrote The Laws of Human Nature. He's just written a ton of these really amazing books.

44:17 And Ryan Holiday talks about his process, how when he... Part of how these prolific writers write so much is they read so much. Mm-hmm. And Ryan Holiday actually breaks down how he sort of digests a book. He has this whole system for like note cards. And he has his note cards out when he's reading and he underlines and he usually reads books twice. And I feel so insignificant when I hear him talk about it because I'm like, oh my God, I don't read like that. There's so much discipline and process. I don't do that. So just all of you that are listening, I don't do that either. All that to say. To a certain degree, I think I've given up on myself many times. Like I just don't think that way or I don't read books that way. I don't do research that way.

44:58 And now there's this realization of chat GPT, I think, to level the playing field for all of us who care. Yeah. And want to put some effort. There's this new magic tool. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm really excited to dig into it to be like, all right, with the different topic areas that I routinely train, coach, lead webinars, do LinkedIn Lives like yesterday with Jeff, can I use ChatGPT to scour the internet and the universe and... for examples that relate to my thing. It doesn't take away from the intellectual work of like, you know what I mean? Well, here's another way to think about this. How many times do you read a book, you're really excited about the concepts and the content of that book, but life happens.

45:38 And as soon as you're done reading, you forget a bulk of those things that really in the moment triggered. So my thought now is, well, I'm going to read the book. I'm going to take the content and I might do some of the highlighting and things that I do to help me assimilate information. But the fact that then I can throw it into a chat GPT platform like that and get a summary of sorts and outline bullets to refer back to. Well, now it's a lot easier for me to leverage that learning to help my team. Because when you read it yourself at the nightstand every evening, and then you get busy and forget, and then it's difficult for you to translate that information. And then ultimately, I think a lot of what you just alluded to is you then don't do anything to leverage that because it's so much work.

46:20 And I think this really enhances that viability. I have to try something in the moment. For those of you who can't see... Yeah, we have our DoorDash just sitting here on our carnivore meal. And we got to wrap up pretty soon. But I got to just... All right. So I'm in ChatGPT. Now, some of you listening to this, I'm embarrassed to say. Why I'm embarrassed, I don't know. But I'm embarrassed to say, I didn't know ChatGPT had a mobile app. Oh, yeah. That's true. Until a few weeks ago. Yeah. Somebody told me about it. And I was like, oh, duh. I've been using this on my laptop. So it's incredible. In the palm of your freaking hand. So I have ChatGPT open. Yeah. Tell me the key takeaways in chapter three of Good to Great by Jim Collins.

47:09 Okay, probably many of you have read that book. I've read it a couple times back in the day. Let's see if ChatGPT has the capacity to do that. It's doing something and I see a checkmark. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, well, you know, we tried something. How powerful would that have been? It says, to provide the key takeaways from chapter three of Good Degree by Jim Collins, I'll need the text of the chapter. So anyway, apparently is not able to crawl that copyrighted stuff. But nonetheless... Nonetheless. So that could have been a really powerful... A little live moment there. Super stardom there. Oh my goodness. But somehow, I mean, it still holds, right? I talked about earlier book reviews. Hey, to give me the key takeaways of XYZ book.

47:51 That absolutely works. I've done that a whole bunch of times since I first tried that out. But... All that to say, here we are. We went on a couple rabbit trails. We did. We got into some time management principles, which I think that's maybe... Well, and here's the... ...poked people a little bit. This whole chat stuff, this is just leveraging different tools and disciplines to help... Help us use our time more effectively. Because the reality of it is, all of us are fighting the clock. We're always fighting the clock. There's always due dates. There's always timeframes, timelines, things that are going to get in the way, the chaos, tyranny of the urgent, all the things. These are just ways for us to leverage these kinds of practices in our favor to get some control back.

48:34 Yeah, why would we not as leaders, why would we not... want to stay at the front edge of these things. That's right. That's our role. As a leader, and I think you and I see ourselves this way, not as more important or any different than any of the clients we work with or other consultants or anything else. But you and I feel really strongly like we have to... stay at the front. That's what leadership is. I'm out in front. I'm out in front. I'm the one who's experimenting, falling on my face, trying things and them not working. I'm the one spending the money to try to leverage these tools and wasting money sometimes as you work out what works, what doesn't. That's our role. Yeah. That's our role as leaders.

49:14 That's your role as a leader. Explore the outer edge. Yeah, you have to be on top of this stuff. You can't slow roll adoption of technology. You ought to be at the front. Now, maybe you don't roll that shit out across your team. Yeah. Maybe you don't make your team an enterprise GPT. Oh, we're going to roll out bots and do all the things and start delegating that shit. But you as a leader ought to be exploring that stuff, right? There's got to be an investment on top. We have to. Yeah. Yeah. There's got to be in it. The extent to which you as the leader are getting out in front of the industry, of your company, is the extent to which the team behind you can be out in front as well, you know? Well, and I think it kind of boils down to this idea of if we're not happy with the current result we're achieving, then it's on you to be exploring other options.

49:58 Yeah. Other tools, other resources, leveraging other ideas and get the result you're looking for. Let's eat our DoorDash, bro. Do it. Later, gang. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and 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.