Ep 4 - You're Not Really Working 80 Hours A Week

0:02 Welcome back to another episode of the MRM Podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life, and legacy. It's business time. I've got an idea for today. I want to talk about this element of business culture. And we'll just see where the conversation goes. But I feel like in spite of the fact that working smarter, not harder is a concept I think all of us believe in, we value, and we're starting to rethink how we do work. I feel like there's a glory. And I don't think it's just in the restoration business. It's just business culture at the We glory in how hard and how long we work. I mean, I still routinely, when I'm talking with my other business buddies and stuff like that, we get into the typical exchange of, Hey, how's things going?

0:49 How's business going? It's like, Oh man, it's wild, man. It's like 70 hour work weeks. We're just busting our ass, just grinding. I just hired three more people and There's almost like there's glory in that hustle. And it gives off this impression. I mean, I know when I come out of those conversations, there's part of me that is like, maybe I should be working harder. I'm not putting in 80 hours a week. Maybe I'm not grinding enough. And I think there's guys like Gary Vee, although he's changing his tune where he's just always on. He talks about the 18 hours a day. And his tune is changing now, which is kind of interesting. I don't know if that's because of his stage of life. And he's realizing that that's not actually sustainable and or healthy.

1:31 I don't know. Yeah, it'd be interesting. I haven't been following enough of his content because honestly, I just got burned out on that hustle game. The hustle language. And I'm a hustler. I'm a builder. I'm a starter. I'm an activator. I'm in all those things. I'm driven. I want to grow. It's like there's no stopping for me. And I think the same thing obviously is true for you. But I don't think there's much honesty in that. And I guess this is where I want to start. I was reflecting on this this morning and kind of over the weekend as well. If I'm honest, if I'm really honest, I'm at my best. creatively drive energy, just all of that. I'm at my best for four or five hours a day. Sure. Yeah. Primal production.

2:12 Primal production. And you know, it's like, I've been in other roles and I don't think that's a stage of life. I'm 41. I don't think that's because I'm slowing down. I think I'm getting more in touch with what my real capacity is and how I work. And I'm also realizing too that I'm in a creative role. And I have been for like 20 years. If I really look at the work I've been doing... Now, of course, a lot of my career has been small business ownership, sales, marketing, customer experience. It's highly customer-facing, people-facing work. I got out of the labor, the hands-on labor role in college. By the time I transitioned into sales, business ownership, I was out of the hands-on labor role.

2:55 And I was into that creative work. I realized this about myself. For me, my best time is from 8am until 2. Yeah. Or 9 to 3. Yeah. Right? It's like, those are my golden hours. And the more honest I get about myself with that, the better I prioritize and leverage my time. Yeah. And when I look at my crappy days, it's because I failed to take that into account. Yeah. I just got to moving on my list and I was doing the grind thing. And those are my least productive days. My most productive days are when I go into the day saying, okay, I've got what it takes to hit two or three things really hard and with excellence.

3:38 What are those two or three things going to be? Now, of course, we have clients. So sometimes that answer is, I really need to engage with this one client about this one thing. Absolutely, yeah. That's my priority for today. Sure. And this other piece of content that really needs to be birthed, that needs to happen today too. And then this block of admin stuff that I hate, but I need to do well and I need to accomplish. Okay, that's my third thing. Everything else I know is going to get 60 to 70%. Mm-hmm. of me. I can only give 100% to those two or three things. What are they going to be? Oh, yeah. The hardest thing I think about what you're talking about is the honesty in quotation marks piece.

4:19 This could spiral into a million different topics. We are going to stay on track with this specific idea, but it's that honesty piece that kind of changes everything about what we deliver and how we deliver it, right? Because it's that honesty component that affects relationship quality. It affects our leadership capacity. The more time we spend just looking at the realities versus buying into these generalities that the culture puts on us, that the business culture puts on us, whatever makes our buddy... want to be us, right? All these things. But I think you're right. Like the reality of it is, we've all been in this positions.

5:00 I've done this as a GM. I've done this as business startups where we just go, yeah, it's, you know, when your buddy's telling you, yeah, it was like 70, 80 hours a week. And you know what? Honestly, I did grind those hours. I've spent years and years grinding hours like that. But you know what's so helpful for me to see this in the correct light? And I didn't see this correctly most often when I was in the seat. is when we get to objectively look at our clients' businesses and ask them the question, guys, what does a day look like for you? Because we're struggling. And this is not a negative to any specific client. This is not a negative to any of you listening because we've been in these shoes and we are often still in them.

5:41 But it is so easy for us from the outside, just because of our separation from the situation, to be looking at a shop, a company, looking at them in dollar revenue-wise and saying, man, you've got a lot of heavy hitters on the team. You guys should just be rocking and rolling. And really seeing that there's a lot of tire spinning. There's a lack of traction, even though we're doing the 80 hours a week. And it's hard to get to that honesty because even as I share this about myself... I'm really good for four or five hours a day. I'm great. If I've eaten well, I've slept well, like four or five hours, that's really hard for me to say. There's some embarrassment that I'm feeling right now. Yeah.

6:21 Because I think our business culture wants to say, like with these icons of industry and stuff that we all read about and listen to. Elon is 22 hours a day. All that stuff. And it's funny because even he is starting to change his tune a little bit. I've noticed over the last few years, but it's a little bit embarrassing because I think, again, we glorify the grind, even though I think all of us deep down, we recognize while I might be working 70 or 80 hours, I'm not actually working. 70 or 80 hours. A lot of times I am staying at the office late because indeed there are things still to be done. But my capacity to actually accomplish those things is severely diminished.

7:06 I am not bringing the same genius, the same creativity, the same discipline, the same focus in that 11th hour at the office or at that last meeting with a client at 7pm or something like But somehow we just perpetuate this limitless idea of just double down, grind it. Even David Goggins, right? I think it's just like, press into the pain, press into the fatigue. And I don't think that's necessarily his message, but I think that's what we're glorifying right now. is the grind, the hustle. I want to add something to this. And I'm interested to get your pushback or your observation of this. When I'm hearing you say this, what's coming to my mind is, we're not talking about an either or.

7:51 So we're not looking at this and saying that if you're in a startup scenario, if you're growing a small business and you have a vision for where you want to take your company, and we're talking significant growth and scaling What I'm witnessing or what my observation with this is, we're not saying that the 70 hours aren't going to happen or that they shouldn't. But what I'm hearing you say is there's an honesty about what can actually be done and how effective we can be so that we prioritize and or manage our time more competently. That's exactly... Yes, that's a great clarification. Because like you, I've been through business startups outside of restoration.

8:35 I've been in technology startups. I've been involved in retail and B2B service business startups. Ground up. Start with nothing. And getting from zero to one is really hard. It's hard in that it's so undefined. You're figuring things out as you go. And I think people even listening to this, I mean, that was certainly a major part of my experience coming into the restoration businesses. I had to learn it all from scratch. I didn't grow up in construction. I didn't grow up in the service sector. So it's about what do I plug into my magical four or five hours? What do I need to give my absolute best to? And I think that's where the honesty piece is so helpful is, okay, I can't bring my best to all 12 hours of this day.

9:17 So what am I going to spend the four or five hours on? You know, we recently met with a client and we did an activity audit with them. Because they were struggling with the same thing. They just felt like they're always on. They're always working and they are. And they've got tons of irons in the fire. They got multiple businesses that they're moving forward. And it was very difficult for us to make progress with them at different points because we didn't have a clear picture of where is all their time going. Mm-hmm. And I don't think they had a real conscious picture of it either. That is the issue. Like, I think we're all in this position where... There's so many moving parts. There's so many moving parts. There's so many plates that you're attempting to keep spinning.

9:58 So many people dependent on us. Oh, man. It's just nonstop. And so you just go from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. all day long. And the next thing you know, at 12 hours has gone by. You weren't in control of most of it. And you're not even 100% that you could look back on that 12 or 14 hours spent and go, boom, that was successful. That was done. That was accomplished. Yeah. How many times do we go from the office, right? And our spouse or... Even my kids are now getting the age with, hey, dad, how was your day? And I'm like, sometimes even now in the work that we do, because there's a lot of moving parts to what we do, But certainly all those years in restoration operating, I'd have to pause. How did the day go? Right? There's like two layers to that, right? So how am I feeling?

10:38 Stress level, happiness, like did the day go well or did it go poorly? Was it challenging or did cool things happen? So there's that layer, but then it's like, what did I actually accomplish? I had that meeting. I had that other meeting. I had that phone call with that person. Like I have to go back and recreate because it's just a blur. It just oftentimes it feels like you're bouncing from one urgent matter to the next. Yeah. I got to be transparent with you about something. Here's what I've experienced in this. It is the most demotivating cycle that I can get into. Like you go home at the end of... And dude, there are so many people listening right now that get this. They feel it in their bones.

11:20 And again, we're not trying to get all macabre here. There's just this reality where we're out just busting our ass trying to move this machine forward. And you do get back at the end of the week or the end of the day or you're taking part of a Sunday off that you've given yourself the freedom to do. And you just go, oh my God, it's all going to start tomorrow. And we all hear these stories about if you're doing the right work, it's not work. Okay. I think there's plenty of moms out there that have birthed children and they're in love to death of their kids. It doesn't take away from the fact that that was a really painful experience, right? I can only fathom. I feel like that with business endeavors too, and things that we're trying to create or push into new levels, new heights, whatever.

12:01 It's like, dude, there's reality that you're just... grinding your face off and it's tiring and excruciating. And Mondays are scary because you're like, oh hell, like I got to go back into doing this again. It starts again. And it's not that you don't love your work. It doesn't mean you're in the wrong business. Right. Exactly. It doesn't mean you're in the wrong business. I think this is the thing that I've learned because I've had an eclectic sort of business career in the sense of insurance business for a big block of time and different roles in the insurance business. I've been in retail. I owned a retail business at one point. I was in the ink remanufacturing cartridge business for a while. And the feeling follows you. It doesn't matter what business you're in.

12:41 It's funny because the feeling actually comes of it. Am I doing the right thing? is this really what I want to be doing for the rest? But the reality is in some ways, it's kind of like the feelings we get around marriage. Sometimes we have these moments of truth, moments of truth or just moments of confusion where we're like, it's a lot of work. Can I do this for the rest of my life? If my wife's listening, my wife and I've talked about this. We've had these thoughts. We both have these thoughts. Everybody has these thoughts. Do I want to have another one of those conversations? Do we want to have that argument one more time? I don't know. It's the same thing. We all encounter, I think especially the higher you rise in leadership, the more it's those mundane, repetitive, consistent tasks that actually get us progress and move us forward.

13:27 But the other edge of that knife is that we have to get comfortable with that feeling of lack of progress. So I think that's part of it is that we have to be okay without those quick hits. It's like when we were out being a salesperson or in the really early days of our business, we're out there, we can see the results of our efforts immediately. Yep. Like when you were out running and gunning doing projects, there was a very natural, organic result to virtually everything you were doing. You either got those sheets done and sent to the adjuster or you didn't. Whereas as we start to move into different levels of leadership, there's so much more ambiguity.

14:11 Yeah, in the result. Yeah. And it's such a slow burn, so much delayed gratification that I think that's a layer of something that's going on as well. That it makes it that much harder, I think, sometimes to prioritize our time to figure out what to put in that four or five hour time block for me. Maybe you're listening. You're like, I got eight or 10 hours a day and me, that's fine, whatever. Yeah. That's awesome. You are awesome. And I wish I was you. But I think that's another layer to it is that there's a slow burn to the most important work we do. Yeah. And that can make things fuzzy as well. Like we really have to step back and say, okay, is this important or is this urgent or is it both?

14:53 And I think that's the magic is when we can get really, I'm still figuring this out. It's a total skill, right? It's funny as I say this, I'm having deja vu that I think we've brought this topic up before, but it's the magic of what is the most urgent and important. And those are my two or three things. These have to get executed on period. Yeah. And then the rest is I'm going to do what I can. I'm going to give it my best, but I know my best on these other things is going to be probably 60%, maybe less if I'm having a rough day. So in my mind, this is what I've experienced before in a lot of different ideas or themes, right, that you and I wrestle with. And I think that there's an opportunity to take this conversation this way too, is that awareness gives us a different ability to solve the problem.

15:40 So for instance, is what we're looking at. For most of you, going from 12-hour days to eight is not necessarily even a reality. And that's not what we're saying. Yeah. Although if we're being honest, I think at some point from a health and sustainability factor, maybe 10 hours is the appropriate level. Maybe it's eight, maybe it's six for some people. Who knows? It's eye of the beholder. It's not really the point. But it's this idea that there may be long days required of you. Okay. But how do we spend and or prioritize and control that time being spent? So through honesty, it gives us the tools to maximize what we're doing with our endeavors. So again, we're not giving black and white time limits to your day or any of those agendas or any of those contributing factors.

16:26 It's just a reality of if I can be honest with the fact that I may work 12 hours today, but I'm going to be awesome at six of them. And again, like you said, then we just get to prioritize what goes into those time blocks. So there is ways for us with this awareness to be able to manage our time differently. I would go as far as saying, here's possibly the reality of this. If you practice some of these behaviors long enough to where they become the new default, you'd be shocked by how much progress that you're able to make in your business. And then by making that much progress, how sustainable the grind becomes. It's like, oh, I'm actually making traction Versus I'm bleeding 12 and 14 hours a day, six days a week.

17:08 And I really don't feel like we're getting the company any closer to our goal than we started. Yeah. You know, my guess is, and I would go so far as to say this, you show me your 12 hours and I'll show you at least three that you're bullshitting. Yeah, that we're probably essentially time- We're either bullshitting ourselves or you're bullshitting me when you say you work 12 hours. I know there's outlier events. We all have those times of catch up. We just came out of tax season here in the last couple months, right? Where we all had to scramble to get all of our stuff in. And we all have those times too. Where like in the restoration business, we get a cat loss and it's like all bets are off. That doesn't change the fact that we still have four or five hours where we're really bringing our best.

17:51 Yep. Monster production time. Monster production time. And so figuring out how do I leverage those four or five hours or seven or eight or two or three, whatever your number is, right? I think that honesty with ourself is only going to help us be better regardless of what your capacity is. And I do believe, I do believe that the capacity that people bring is all different. All of us are unique. Yep. And I do think that there's small incremental things we can do to grow our capacity. There's no doubt about it. Our health, our nutrition, there's mindfulness strategies and things that I think we can become better. We can build our capacity. Well, and I think you get more motivated by finding successes. Yeah. So if we're engineering our time blocks better and we're seeing more wins in the day, like manageable, measurable wins, I think you also get increased fuel from that.

18:37 And it's like, man, maybe I can throw another hour at this because it's focused and I'm being proactive. I'm planning intentionally. Yeah. And I think too, we tend to use the resources that are allotted to us. Mm-hmm. Let's say I'm buying an office chair. If I give myself a budget of 500, I'm going to spend 500. Likewise, if I've got a training video that I need to film for a client, if I give myself the day to do it, I'm probably going to finish that video and send it off by three, four o'clock. I'm going to use the day. If I give myself an hour, the chances of me completing it in an hour are very high. We tend to use, it's why deadlines are just so powerful. I don't know what it is.

19:17 It's been very powerful for me. It's what I think helps me manage or overcome my ADD tendencies. Sure. Yeah. Right. Where it's like squirrel. If I say, okay, I've got this thing to do and I'm giving myself 30 minutes. It's not an open-ended thing. I'm giving myself 30 minutes to do this thing. 99 times out of a hundred, I'm done in 30 minutes. You can nail it. Yeah. I've seen that be really effective with clients too. Oh yeah. Where it's like, decide how much time you're going to spend on that. And sometimes I surprise myself actually. I've joked a lot because we do a lot of content production right now for teaching and training clients, supporting them and stuff. And it's really hard. We did a previous recording, I think, on just learning new skills and just how awkward and stuff that feels.

20:00 I joke with clients all the time. I'm like, do you realize how many takes it took for me to... Give you that 15 minute training video. Yes. I literally did like 27 takes. For a 15 minute video, it took me two hours. But what I found is when I'm disciplined to say to myself, okay, I got an hour. I need to record this before my meeting with so-and-so. I get it done. Takes less takes. I'm more focused. There's another thing. That's a thing that's worked for me. It works so good, I rarely do it. But when I discipline myself, this is as much a reminder as we talk about the subject, I need to be more deliberate in budgeting the time that I'm spending on certain things.

20:42 Well, let's go there. Let's get a little tactical. You had already mentioned this, and I think we need to circle back around it because I think it's a great way to get this portion of the conversation started. But the time audit, right? What does that look like? Yeah, let's dig through that. So anytime we talk about a time audit... In fact, I had an executive coach do this with me years ago. But anytime I think of a time audit, what it reminds me of is when you decide to take on the initiative of getting healthy and how if you're working with a coach or something, how they make you start writing down your meals from the day. And it's everything. They tell you, it doesn't matter. Stick a gum. You write it down. And the exercise, if you're honest, what you inevitably see is there's a massive difference between what actually happened versus what in your mind happened.

21:27 So when I'm telling, I'm eating pretty good, but then you actually write it all down in black and white fashion, you realize, oh my gosh, I'm eating like shit. And I think the same with this time audit, it's the same concept. In our minds, when we're communicating what we're doing, it's like, yeah, man, I was working my face off. We did this. We got all sorts of things accomplished. But then when we do a time audit, wow, is it telling. So unpack that, I guess. Dive into an example of that. Yeah. So with an audit, it's not easy to do this. But I think when the pain to stay the same exceeds the pain to change, that's when there's enough motivation there. And I think a lot of us are finding ourselves, especially coming out of COVID, COVID brought its own challenges. And now coming out of COVID, a lot of business owners are really, one, businesses accelerated.

22:10 A lot of stuff that was deferred over the last 12, 18 months, people are getting back into buildings that have been unoccupied. All the things, right? It's like our businesses are back and things are happening, a lot of us are starting to bend under the pressure. And so I think what it takes to do an effective, useful audit is to have a notebook, a notepad that you carry around all day. And you've got your pen attached to that notepad. Everything's there. And it's just every single time you get back in the truck. So you're out doing job site visits or whatever your role is, you have that with you. You carry it all day and you document every conversation that happens in the hallway. You document every phone call you take.

22:51 You document every phone call you make. You document the emails you send. You document the snack box. breaks you take where you pull into the fast food joint on the way to a job. It does not need to be exhaustive, like taking notes. This isn't a journal for your day. It's a list. I did this. I spoke to this person. I had this meeting. I stopped and made coffee at the coffee pot. I went to lunch with so-and-so. It's extremely detailed and extremely tactful. It's just one, two-word things on this list. So by the end of that day, you've probably got at least a full Things and moments that you had throughout the day. Here's kind of the sweet spot on this is enough detail.

23:34 Like don't leave out the events to include those short conversations because here's what we're looking for, right? Or here's the opportunity of what to look for. is these patterns that look really normal of having same kinds of conversations with multiple different team members. Oh, man. Same kinds of conversations every single day. Here's an example, because this used to happen all the time. When you and I, we were with a company for six, seven years together, right? Right. We worked so well together, and this is true of a lot of people, particularly on our leadership team. We were just so in sync for a lot of it. We would have tons of these side conversations.

24:14 You'd be on the road. You just left an appointment. You had a thought. You'd call me. Me do the same. I just got out of this meeting with a referral partner and I had this idea. Rather than me documenting that idea... throwing it in my Apple notes or throwing it in my Google doc for our weekly team meeting, I just call you. Right. Hey dude, I got an idea, man. Do you got a second? Listen, I just talked to this customer and I think if we did this, like, what would you think if we started doing this as a part of our process? Like I think it could create, and we just go into it. We go into that idea, but unfortunately the rest of the leadership team is not present. So now you and I are taking 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. 20, 25 minutes to dig into this potentially exciting, strategic or tactical subject that potentially can move our business forward.

25:04 But then what happens? We have to spend another 25 minutes bringing it to the leadership team. Whereas I could have documented my idea and my thought process and that, and then bring it up at once and all of us engage on that topic. We bat it around, we make a decision, and we do something. Right. Then we execute. Yeah. But what's the reality of that same conversation looks like? Is you do that 14%. 15 times a day. That's it. It's like you and I have it. Then you go to so-and-so in the hallway and you're like, oh man, Brent and I were talking about such and such today. And then you spend 15, 20 minutes downloading the concept to them. Again, all of this is happening under we're an effective team. We're agile. Our communications is good.

25:45 The doors are open, right? Yeah. It's motivating to talk about these subjects. Right. And it just happens over and over and over, right? Yeah. Yeah, when we did this last audit we did with the client, right? We're looking at, in this case, this business has multiple owners. Okay. Both active in the business. This is very typical. Sometimes it's husband and wife owners. Restoration companies, very common. Sometimes it's brothers. Sometimes it's a, I just met a brother and sister that own a restoration company together. So in this case, it was so funny. We had both of the owners audit their activity. And it's so interesting to see the same kind of activities, the same conversations with downline employees. There's a lot of redundancy that we discovered.

26:28 And they saw it too. And it was just immediate and obvious. Now, I don't know if that results in an hour of wasted time. Now, is it wasted? I don't know. You can argue about it, but it's not efficient. There's a loss of efficiency and there's a distractedness. Think about it. If you can remove 45 minutes in your day, an hour of wheel spinning in your day, what does that do for you? Every day, five, six days a week. Every day. What does that do for you? Here's the other thing too. If we can agree that we only really have four or five hours of our best work to offer, whatever that number is, but that it's somewhere less than 12, right?

27:09 It's somewhere less than the Gary V 80 hour standard or whatever. If we can agree on that, what are we sacrificing for? When we go into the red, when we just think we're going to grind it and we're going to seven or eight, 12, 15 hours, like what are we giving up? When we go into the red, I know what I've given up. I know I come home carrying more anger, frustration, irritation to my wife and my kids. Absolutely. That's the opportunity cost for me. Mm-hmm. And I don't know how that hits with everybody else listening, but that is the harsh reality. Is when I'm not conscious of how I'm spending my time, how I'm allocating those four or five hours of genius, my wife and my kids are the first to lose every single time.

27:59 Yeah. Period. Period. Well, you could argue that my own mental health is really what I'm sacrificing. But the byproduct of that, when I'm not stewarding my time and my genius and my brain space effectively, effectively, And honestly. And honestly, it's definitely taking something from my mental health. Oh, yeah. It's negatively affecting it. And the byproduct, 100% of the time, is I have less to give. And what I'm giving to my wife and my kids is often the toxic residue for my day. Absolutely. Because they understand, they're family, they get it. And I'll be honest, like that again taps into that's embarrassing. It's embarrassing or I'm disappointed in myself, right? When that happens. And it's sad to me because I think there's been a lot of years.

28:41 I think it's becoming better for me as I become more aware of this. I'm doing it less. But every time I have a shitty day, it's almost always because I wasn't thoughtful. I didn't make an agenda for myself. I wasn't a good steward of that time. And then your teams get it. Oh, your teams get it. It's funny. We go back to this example. Dual owners running what is definitely a team with momentum. Sky's the limit. Lots of opportunity. These guys have done one hell of a job recruiting some A-list hitters. Big time. Very capable individuals. But because we, I'm not even going to point a finger at these guys, just at myself.

29:23 is when you're in this position where time is managing you, no one is getting the right time from you. So they're getting it. But then these cycles, these inevitable self-perpetuating cycles kick in where you're not giving proactive feedback. You're getting last minute hair on fire feedback that comes too far and in between. Yeah, it's reactionary. It's completely reactionary. So what they're getting is kind of okay. Then what we see, you guys, and I don't know if we have to do too much dot connecting here, but then what we see and we experience, and I do it, is that you get into this massive self-perpetuating cycle where you realize, or you don't realize, and that's part of the problem, your time is running away from you because you're spending all of this time just managing the most recent fire in front of you.

30:11 There's zero proactivity and engagement happening with your teams, which means they just keep experiencing the things that causes you to put out yet another fire. And you look backwards and you go, I am going nowhere and I am going there quickly. So again, this time audit, it's just such a powerful opportunity for you to hit pause for a minute and just go, whoa, let me look at this with factual data. And again, we talked about this, I think in a couple episodes ago, don't come in with good or bad value. Just look at it. Give yourself the moment. Don't prejudge yourself. Put all the items down on the piece of paper, all the snacks, all the pre-meals, right? Put it all down on paper and start looking for those rhythms.

30:54 This is repetitive. This is repetitive. I know I can really only do this from eight to three. Why do I keep allowing this to happen at 6.30 at night? then what we have an opportunity to do, and you can do this in isolation as an individual, or reach out to a peer, a business partner, a coach, and start looking for ways to re-engineer the day so that you're capitalizing on things like, you mentioned this before, are we taking notes and saving those conversations for the pre-scheduled operations meeting that we have every week? Did we schedule a once a month strategic leadership meeting with both owners?

31:34 And we say, we're going to protect each other. And when you come to me with this item, I'm going to give a little pushback. I'm going to go, man, I want to engage in that conversation. But you know what next Thursday is? It's our strategic meeting time. Dude, you just... Boom, bring the note, right? Dude, oh man. Because I was the guy often, I was coming to you with that stuff. And you were, you were so disciplined. It was great. And eventually I got the message and I started to put it in my notes. And to this day, that is a way more sticky strategy for me because we practiced it so much when we were in the trench working in day-to-day operations. It's a new discipline. Oh, yeah. You know what this makes me think of? Like to create sort of a word picture. There's this thing and it just went through my Facebook or LinkedIn feed.

32:15 This concept of Aristotle. Aristotle had this thing called the golden mean. Yeah. And it was this idea that virtue sits right smack in the middle between extremes, between vice and what's the other word that I'm looking for? Virtue sits between excess and scarcity. How does this apply? I think... We oftentimes, when we're not stewarding, when we're not intentionally picking where we're going to allocate our time, like how we're going to use that four or five hours, what tends to happen, the behavior we tend to default to is one of the extremes. Micromanagement. We're so scattered. We're fighting one fire to another is we end up calling and checking in on our people.

32:56 Hey, where are you at with this? Hey, what's going on with that? We tend to micromanage and bother our people to try to feel like we're staying on top of everything. So that's one extreme we go to. When we're not proactively and intentionally managing that four or five hours of magic, like our best time. Or we end up being totally hands off and stuck in our head, just kind of flighty from one thing on our list to the next. And we're disconnected from our team. Our team doesn't know what's happening. And we see both of these. Oh, yeah. We tend to fall into one of those extremes. I would even say that the same person can fall in both extremes in the same day and week. Certainly in the same week.

33:37 We just flip flopping. And it just depends on the day and the stimulus. How's your day start? Oftentimes we'll determine, am I going to just calling around, checking in on this and micromanaging my team or am I disconnected? So to me, that's like, those are the extremes that we tend to default to versus the middle. And I have this word picture or I have this archetype, this friend of mine, who to me is just, he's the model I see when I think about the middle there, that intentionality, that purposefulness of what are my two or three things that are most important for me to accomplish today. His name's Steve Bittner. I don't know if Steve will ever listen to this, but Steve, he's an educator. He was actually the principal of, at my high school right as I was graduating.

34:20 Anyway, he's now getting ready to retire. Steve was one of those people. I really admire him, but more than that, I like to be around him because he is so steady. When I'm in a conversation with Steve, I feel like I am the most important person in the room. Steve is in the conversation with me. He's 100% present. I trust Steve. So much so, it's a private school and we're getting ready to enroll our kids in this private school. And a big reason why I want them to go there is because Steve is there. I just want them to have some interaction with Steve. He's like the uncle that you want your kids to spend more time around. Yeah. Seriously. And to me, I think that's such a great example and model for what I think we can be to our people.

35:04 When we are disciplined in focusing our day that way, it allows us to be less on fire and to be more grounded for our team. Yeah. And I think this is the other piece we were chatting about beforehand. When we're able to be that, we're not going to be able to be all the time. And I'm sure Steve has his moments. Sure. Yeah. One of the things we're doing is modeling that way of being for our people. Mm-hmm. And I really think, I know it's hard, but I really think this conversation doesn't just apply to us as owners and leaders and department heads and stuff. I really think these principles can apply to our downline, despite how chaotic this industry is. I think it's possible for us to apply the same principle to all the different roles in our company, regardless, again, of the pressure and the stress and all the moving parts and stuff.

35:52 I think we can really coach and develop our people to approach their day with the same intentionality. Mm-hmm. how do I apply my energy, my focus, my physical capacity towards the most important critical things? And we can, over time, introduce a calmness and a stability to our team. Yep. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. I've felt it. We've felt it. We've had seasons of that. Yep. Where when we're modeling that as a leadership team, it tends to trickle down. Oh, yeah. You got to stay in it for a while. It doesn't happen immediately. Yeah. No, and I think it's an excuse remover too. I mean, time and time again, how often do we hear like, oh, yeah, we really want to work on that initiative or that's a great idea. Man, we've just been so busy, just been so busy.

36:33 And really, if we're honest about an assessment of that organization, it's because from the top down, that's the same dialogue that's happening. Which when you see a key leader or a key influencer within the ranks begin to adopt this concept of being more honest with the way and how they're spending their time, and you start to see them gain some objectivity and some proactive skill set in that. that you begin to see the same thing happening. Even if it just starts by the way that people are dialoguing within the team, that now all of a sudden the excuse to fail to make progress is based on being busy. And when that starts to fall away from key leaders, then you begin to see your downline personnel also not use that any longer.

37:17 Yeah. Yeah, when you start to take a look at this, like we've been spending, well, however much, 30 minutes or so talking about this subject. The more I think about it and we talk about it, the more you realize the foolishness of a lot of the conversations we have in our industry. We are in the disaster restoration business. Yeah. Of course, we're going to have crazy busy times. It just is the business. It's the nature of the beast. That's not an excuse. Like our whole business is responding to unexpected unplanned disasters. Yeah. That's the whole business of what we do. So using that as an excuse of we're really busy right now, you're supposed to be really busy from time to time. It ebbs and flows. It cycles. It doesn't matter how good or successful you are.

37:58 It doesn't matter if you're a Belfort and a $3 billion company, or if you're a XYZ mom and pop restoration that's doing a million bucks. Yeah. That's just the nature of what we do. Like the Buddhists say, be like water. You encounter the rock, you keep moving around it. The rock doesn't stop you. It's just what water does. It's what it does. Can we work through an example or a couple maybe examples? Yeah, let's do it. And then let's do that. And then let's give some tactical stuff. Because there is some things- Well, I think that's what I mean here. Let's go, let's dig into this. Because I'm thinking in my mind, we probably have anything from owners to, you know, I'm just imagining even a project manager. I'm thinking back through all the conversations that we have with time blocking and booking in your day.

38:39 So let's dive into this. Let's grab a mitigation department manager or equivalent, something in that line. Inevitably, they're going to feel or exist in a space where incoming workload drives the majority of their busyness right through the day. And we get it. We understand there is some element of truth to that. But the really powerful thing to remember is that our clients do not know our schedule. They do not see it. They don't know what's in those blocks. They don't know what clients, non-clients, internal, external, and really at the end of the day, they don't even care. So we control that portion of the conversation. We do control our schedule regardless if we're busy. We're not going to use in this example, we're not talking about cat event or maybe something where just something really out of the extraordinary is happening.

39:25 But these concepts do still apply, really. Let's think about our day as a mitigation department manager. The very first thing that's happening is this rush of activity if we're doing our job well, where we're receiving our team, we're preparing them for the day's missions, and we are stewarding them out of the building onto their missions. And we teach consistent AM-PM battle rhythms. And part of our AM strategy that we like to see happening is, We are not talking about getting your trucks ready in the morning. That should be done at the close of day when you finish your job. That's one of the PM. And it's one of your PM activities and those hours are being logged to the last project you just finished, right? So anyways, AM activities start. That AM activity looks like vehicle inspections, preventative maintenance.

40:10 Morning. Right. Morning stand to is what we like to call it. And it's this idea of we're talking to our team. We're ensuring that our vehicles are maintained and that we're proactive in the management of our equipment, our gear. We're doing some spot checking on the specifics of the jobs that we're going to that day. And so we might need to tweak our basic gear out to fill the needs of that specific job. Maybe it's safety training that day, a little bit of housekeeping, whatever. That happens. So as a mitigation department manager, you need to be there in that moment. Not you're so busy because you didn't catch up on an estimate that you're writing an estimate when you should be in the stand too with your team. Yep. So for that half hour block on your schedule, and I use the word block, you're not doing anything but being engaged with your team.

40:52 You're not scheduling anything. You're not scheduling anything. You're not planning an adjuster call. You're not doing... anything except for that. That's what you do. You're present with your team. You're looking for opportunities to coach. You're looking for opportunities to affirm, to point out exceptional behaviors that you're marrying across your team. You're using that opportunity to equip your team for success for the day. Be in that moment. And if it's blocked out on your schedule, no one needs to know what that blockout is. You're there. You're present. Here's where the discipline or the freedom from discipline comes. You don't need to be bent out of shape and distracted by what you need to get to because you already know you will get to that next thing in the appropriate time block because right now what you're doing is exactly what your job is.

41:40 And that's prepping your team for success. And I think the reason why we suggest or we mandate that our clients take on that battle rhythm is it's the most important, highest impact role of that mitigation manager. Even more so at the end of the day than managing the mitigation log of jobs and work. Like that FaceTime is so valuable. It communicates so much the regularity, the stability of we have this rhythm in the morning that the boss shows up for. He or she sees me. He sees my vehicle. We talk through what the day is going to look like. What are our priorities as a team for the day?

42:22 Like there's so much that happens in that moment. Massive amounts. And not the least of which is the affirmations. Yep. At the beginning of the day, we were talking about how sometimes the stress of ownership and starting new things and changes, those sleepless nights, you wake up at 3am in the morning and you're just spinning out on all the things that are going wrong. How does that start your day? Then you get up and you're up and out on a coffee at 6am. What's the mind space that you're beginning the day with? And the same thing is true of our employees. If we can start their day off with affirmations of what they've done well, it makes a difference. Right, and it's all part of that just being present.

43:04 So by controlling your schedule and being intentional with that time, what you are bringing to the table is so productive and so beneficial. Because remember, we talked about perpetuating the cycle When we do the things that we need to during this specific block of time, we're actually preparing our teams to help remove some of that instability out of our day-to-day activity. Because you are affirming, you're delegating, you're teaching, you're growing, you're equipping them to take on the additional responsibilities so that now you're not doing the same level of micromanagement that you were doing before. You're not fighting the same kind of fires that you were fighting before because your team's now getting equipped to handle that kind of stuff on their own.

43:44 So again, there's so many benefits to this proactive engagement. Here's the other thing with that too is how on are you? For a lot of us, this is that time. We're fresh. We're hitting the day. It's like, boom, touch on the major critical things that you need to help your team be successful. Okay, that thing is done. Then what we like to say happens in this space is there's this lull. We've kind of made the joke, I guess, that for those of us who have firearm training, especially long rifle training, you realize that when firing from a prone position, for all you military folks out there, that there's this natural pause that happens in the human breath cycle at the base of your exhale.

44:28 And it's in that moment, actually, that snipers are taught that that's your trigger pull. It's at this natural pause. And believe it or not, actually females tend to have a longer pause and actually equips them to be better snipers. That's interesting. Right? Interesting. So anyways, there's this natural pause that happens organically in the breath cycle. We kind of look at that in the day's activities too, is that you get the team out the door. There's this natural, almost calm that happens for just a few moments where the team hasn't got to their objectives yet. So job specific questions and feedback hasn't started. it's still early, fairly early in the morning. Normally, if we're doing our timing right, we're still talking at 8am at the very latest at this point.

45:10 And so what we encourage our leaders to review in their time blocking is, is it realistic then for you to have an hour to two hours in that organic lull? Again, we're protecting the time. We're not allowing anything and everything to fill that gap. But we say, this is a really strong time for me to get admin time accomplished. You've focused on your team. You've equipped them. You've got them out the door. Now I've got this hour, maybe two hours, where I'm just going to buckle down, focus in on getting some sheets written, getting some invoicing packages out, following up with adjusters, whatever the case may be, but block it out. So when a customer wants to meet at 8.30... They don't need to know why you can't be there until 9.30.

45:51 They just need to know, you know what? 8.30 doesn't work to my schedule, but I can be there at 9.30 sharp. Good for you. Good for me. Great. And nine times out of 10, that client is not going to have an unrealistic expectation because you just like them have a schedule. So we protect that time. We block it in. And here's what's happening with this. We actually encourage folks to do it AM, PM. And again, some of us can get work done in the late afternoon, but it needs to be certain types of work, kind of like what you were alluding to. I know that from an operational perspective, I can do box checking activities after 3 p.m. Mechanical, repetitive. Yeah. I could even write an estimate. I can do many things after 3 p.m. What I can't do is give a really productive interaction with my employee based on higher level thinking, culture development.

46:40 It's hard for me to be in that space after 3pm. I probably won't go out and do heavy negotiations after 3pm. It's the emotional and the creative. Yep. What do I have? What do I not? Just being that honest with yourself in terms of the gas and the tank. So again, we're encouraging folks, book in that day. Let's get some admin knocked out first thing in the morning at that organic lull in the day. Yep. And then let's do a little bit more at the end of the afternoon. You're kind of gassed. There's not a ton of client activity happening right towards the end of the afternoon. Let's give it another hour to two hours to do some proactive engagement of my administrative tasks. And here's what's happening when you do this. if we're looking at an 8 to 10 hour day, which most of us are working, you've accomplished some really vital things to the ability for your company to invoice and collect money.

47:28 You've done some really powerful things in terms of equipping your team for success, affirming their behaviors, delegating effectively. And then you really have this massive block of time during the day where we get to go out into the field Manage quality control, do spot checking on our projects, meet with a client, meet with a referral partner. But then what we're not doing is spending 10 hours every day chasing our ass and then Friday hits. And from Monday through Thursday, we kept telling ourselves, we're going to stay in the office all damn Friday. We're going to stay in the office all damn Friday. We're going to stay in the office all damn Friday. Friday hits, a catastrophic loss happens in a four-star hotel.

48:09 You spend all day chasing that. And guess what happens on Saturday morning? You look back over your week. You've done nothing to get your team started consistently. You've done nothing to get your sheets written and get your invoicing packages out. Now you have a collection issue. And now you're either throwing it all to the wind and then you're going to labor over it in your mind all weekend or you labor on it all weekend and you sacrifice your own rest and your family time. And I guarantee you there's people listening to this going, that is my life, not a week. Like that's my year. That's my last 10 years. That's always. Right. We're always working because we're not prioritizing our work.

48:49 Okay, so I feel like this is a topic we can just spend so much time on. One of the things that I think is just worth spotlighting is we've encountered a number of companies that they don't really start rolling until 8am. The 8am is kind of a soft start for a lot of companies. I think it's a mistake for what you're talking about. And it just seems like, well, it's just an hour or it's just 30 minutes. But in this business... That 30 minutes, the difference between a 7.30 hard start and an 8 a.m. hard start is what you're talking about. It's that margin. Because you think about how much you can get done uninterrupted in 30 minutes. Oh, it's powerful.

49:31 How many sheets you can look over, how many emails you can respond to, how much value you can actually generate in those 30 minutes. Absolutely. Because what I just heard you saying, you talked about all these things that happen in that morning process. You've connected with your team. You've affirmed your team members. You've identified the specific tactical needs and requirements of the jobs that are on the docket for the day. Then you've gone through and you've done critical path paperwork and communication. All of this before 10 o'clock. Oh, yeah. And so for the mitigation manager to close the loop on that role, if that mitigation manager has four or five hours of genius time where they can bring their best emotional and creative work, that very well may be their golden hours very well may be the 7.30 to noon 30 for the mitigation manager.

50:15 But it might look different for the controller or the office manager. Their best time is probably while the rest of the team is out in the field because they don't have people walking through the door, clicking the time cards, asking questions about benefits and logging time off sheets and requests and questions about health insurance. They don't have all of that random And so for some office managers, maybe their golden hours are 10 to 3 or something like that. It's a little bit different. So I think for every single role, we have to look at, okay, what are the most important things to accomplish? And what's the best time of day? Best time of day. For me to leverage that. Before you do your summary, let's hit on some of these tactics. And we've already touched on a couple.

50:57 We've talked about time blocking. Yep. And we'll inevitably talk lots more about time blocking. Yeah. We talked about doing the activity audit. Yeah. And huge. It's kind of like that's the table to be set, right? That's the first thing. Let's start there. And we haven't talked really about themes. And I think we should head on that. And I think you should talk about it from the standpoint of being a general manager. Is this where a lot of your time and grade has been spent is in running a full operation, big and small. You were a GM over a small company and also an 11 plus million dollar, 80 plus person company. So... I've watched you use day themes to kind of organize your time over the years. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So I think we kind of in general call it battle rhythms.

51:38 And we actually, I think in general, we look at it and say, these things are important for the entire team to get into a consistent rhythm on. And we start by teaching people just understanding weekly, monthly, and quarterly type meeting schedules. What are required? What's the minimums? And what we're doing with those is that we're talking about what are we trying to achieve? How much touches are we supposed to get with our team, with our staff to keep everybody on the same page, everybody rowing in the same direction? And there's certainly things that need to be looked at on a regular, like frequent basis. And then there's other things that it's not going to slow the development of our business down if we do them once a quarter, a couple times a year.

52:18 And so for me, what I've always looked at is prioritizing what is the frequency required to keep this portion of the strategy on path. And so for us, the main one that we looked at is the bread and butter is establishing a really consistent battle rhythm with your weekly production meeting. And so identifying what are we talking about? Who are the players that will show up to that meeting? And then what that ultimately allows me to do is say no to distractions and conversations and save them for that space. Let's go into a little more detail on that though, with your GM role, because here's what I remember. Of course I had my own role that I was kind of occupied with, but that production meeting, or what later became our leadership meeting at a higher level every Wednesday morning, you as the general manager behind the scenes in the lead up.

53:06 So outside of that meeting, you were having specific meetings each day that allowed you to show up to that leadership meeting fully informed and engaged. So if I recall, you had an AR day every week where you would check with originally our accounting manager. Mm-hmm. Later, we eventually hired a controller, a higher level financial oversight. But you had a scheduled standing meeting with that person where you're reviewing AR. So you come into the leadership meeting already exploring the numbers. And then you were looking for the color. Give me the definition. You already know what you're seeing in the books. And then you can look to the team members to give you the color, help you project out.

53:46 What does this mean? Why are these numbers happening? But you had scheduled a day where you knew, I'm doing AR today. Right. Can you give some other examples? Yeah, I think it all depends on the size of the operation, but there's key operational initiatives that you have to focus on. Like, for instance, we can't all get together and strategize about next quarter's goals. For instance, there's these moments that you break those things down and that you meet with certain people to get the kind of the lay of the land before you introduce the entire leadership to the concept or to the goal. Basically, what I would do is I just established battle rhythms for the week of which key leaders I needed to meet with based on what the strategy or that particular area of the business was. So we always looked at our business and really broke it into three primary legs.

54:30 And that was general operations, finance... and sales marketing. And so essentially, when I looked at my week, those three things were happening every week. I was having a sit-down face time with the leader of that particular area of responsibility in the business. And then when I would meet as a leadership meeting, which is very different from a production meeting, we should note that... When I would then go to a weekly leadership meeting, you're right. I had the foundational aspects together. And now it was time to unify the team on the broader perspective of these areas of expertise that each one of you had to focus on. What we felt was important to our initiatives and us continuing to move the ship forward was making sure that once a week, all leaders in general were brought up to speed on what their peers and counterparts were doing.

55:19 But I didn't waste their time diving into the details that only that particular leader was responsible for. I think we can dial that back a little bit and say, okay, what does something similarly look like for a production meeting? And it's just a matter of, can we get the right personalities into the same room to get everyone onto the same page to review critical KPIs, to do a review of how we're conducting ourselves in one to two hour block of time to prevent all the one-off conversations being done over and over and over throughout the week. And as your team gets larger, like at one point, we were in an organization with seven independent key leaders, depending on sales marketing, a operational location, whatever.

56:06 We'll imagine that seven different leaders are having some form of this haphazard conversation day in and day out. For us, it meant the equivalent of 10 to 12, 15 hours in a week. that were being reduced and boiled down to a two-hour leadership meeting. So that in and of itself is a tactic or strategy that I think supports what we're talking about, which is creating a container for those conversations. Container is a great word. Yeah. Create a container for those conversations. It should be if you don't have a production meeting, that absolutely should be a container you're using every single week. Almost regardless of size, right? So period. Somebody's got two mitigation technicians and an owner.

56:47 They still need to be having a production meeting. So creating those containers. And for us, we got to a certain size and we had a weekly leadership meeting that we put in place where it was forward thinking. It was rear-facing. We'd take a look at performance, but it was largely focused on where are we going this next week? That was an important container for us at some point. And then of course you have a container as a mitigation department manager, right? That one of those critical containers is the morning process, including the stand to and the vehicle checks and all that kind of stuff. Can I just hit on something with this? Here's the theme. You mentioned themes earlier. Here's the theme with us, you guys. Busyness becomes an excuse to not use these timeframes consistently.

57:30 And then what we're trying to tell everyone that we become susceptible to this too. This takes a constant reminder from you and your team is that that busyness that becomes the excuse to stop doing these consistent behaviors for time blocking, for putting people and meeting spaces into the right time and space during the week, because you allow that to stop, you then inevitably perpetuate the fact you will never get back to it if the excuse for not doing it is that you're busy. Because again, it's our business. And half the reason you're that busy is because you're not using the right time and space for the appropriate topic, the appropriate time, the appropriate task, whatever the case may be.

58:15 And yet it's very normal for us to have a hard time seeing that in the moment. Absolutely huge. Busy, busy, busy. That energy can take over. And we've all done it. We all do it. But I think it's just the practice of becoming more aware and choosing differently. Yeah. Okay. So, dude, we need your magical wrap. Okay. The wrap. Give us the bullets. I honestly feel like we probably could have broke all these down into individual blocks and spent a bunch of time on it. So here's the concept. Here's my perspective on the concept. There is a bravado, a false sense of security, if you will, a false badge of honor that we wear based on how many hours we're grinding every week. And I think that the real intelligent winning teams are the ones that assess production based on efficiency versus hours logged.

59:00 That's a really utilitarian thing. Basically, guys, we're all grinding our faces off and we're spending a bunch of energy doing things that often when we look backwards do not affirm in us a sense of productivity wins or gains. But we're really good at telling people how busy we are. What the challenge is then is that as leaders, as individuals, can we stop for a moment and do a real honest assessment of two things? One is, what can I really do well? How many hours in the day can I actually look at my efforts spent and know that I'm going to do a great job during that time frame? Next piece is do an actual audit of your day-to-day time spent.

59:45 Deal with some facts. Let's remove assumptions. Let's remove stories. Let's remove what we're telling our neighbors so they think we're awesome. But let's actually audit what our day-to-day activities look like so that we can find areas where we are being redundant with our time spent. where we're not being effective in who and when we're communicating to key personnel. And then the opportunity then is to take that information, those two very important things, your personal assessment of your personal productivity and efficiency level. The second thing is where you're spending your time. And then create very consistent battle rhythms throughout the week and the month And try to push as many of your tasks and responsibilities into an appropriate block of time, day in and day out.

1:00:35 Not forgetting to make sure that we're identifying the right participants and the right kinds of actions or strategies that we want to, I guess, cover and go over during those time blocks. And then the last piece of this, what I picked up was by doing this and making this consistent regardless of what's happening around us, what we're going to identify is that we stop this self-perpetuating cycle of our busyness makes us more busy. Yeah. Yeah. I got the last bullet. Okay. Let's all endeavor to be more like Steve. Let's set up our days in such a way that as leaders, when we're talking to one of our new mitigation technicians, or when we're talking to our office manager, or when we're talking to our business partner, or when we're talking to our estimator, or our project manager, or our restoration manager, whoever we're talking to, that we're able to offer them our full presence and attention.

1:01:35 Okay. Let's be more like Steve. Be more like Steve. Freedom and discipline, man. Freedom and discipline. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of the MRM Podcast. And if you got something out of it, share it with a friend. Hit subscribe. Hit follow. Leave us a five-star review. Thanks a lot.