What’s Your Mindset Time Horizon?, The Top 5 reasons People Regret Selling Their Business & Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People
11 June 2023 Newsletter
Don’t aspire to build a $10m company. Aspire to create the systems that will build a $10m company.
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a really good week. It started with a father & son long weekend, spending time with my 12-year-old – an occasion I would encourage everyone to try.
Also, our team held a fantastic private event learning about cash for all our clients.
Then finally, I had a great quarterly workshop with a team in Sydney.
Don’t Worry About Wins or Losses
You know when something just sticks with you?
In the world of information overload, sometimes something just hits the right note at the right time for you.
Well, last week I watched the TV show Ted Lasso, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, and if you haven’t, I’d recommend it. Anyway, Ted Lasso is the coach of AFC Richmond, a fictional London soccer team taking on the reigning Premier League champion Manchester City.
After the match, Lasso is seen shaking hands with Pep Guardiola, the real-life manager of Manchester City, and saying, “Good game, congratulations”.
Guardiola replied, “Don’t worry about wins or losses. Just help these guys be the best version of themselves on and off the pitch. This, at the end, is the most important thing.”
Now that statement may seem strange if you don’t have a coach. “Surely it’s about the wins”, you might ask. Well, it reminded me of another saying that Ronnie Lott said about Bill Campbell, the coach to Apple and Google leadership teams.
Ronnie said:
“Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better. They relish creating an environment where you get more out of yourself. Coaches are like great artists getting the stroke exactly right on a painting. They are painting relationships. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better. But that’s what coaches do.”
And that’s why it’s haunted me. It felt weird in the context of sports that a great coach wouldn’t worry about the wins or losses, but then I realised it’s exactly what we do.
What’s Your Mindset Time Horizon?
Too often, leaders find themselves stuck in the day-to-day or doing other people’s jobs. Several times in the past few months, I’ve worked with leaders who are tied up with day-to-day issues and who are struggling to execute their big goals.
Some leaders think they should be across every detail of the business, watching the daily numbers or getting involved at the front line. But that’s OPJ – Other Peoples Jobs.
As shown in the image below, the mindset of a leader should be three years out, ensuring the company is capable of executing the strategy and the big milestones the company must achieve.
Then leadership team members time horizon should be from a quarter to a year in order to execute the company plan. Of course, this prescriptive advice depends on the organisation’s size – everyone is different. But frontline workers should be focussed on a daily metric or KPI aimed at productivity and efficiency.
Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People
This week I came across an article I thought you would enjoy about productivity, posing the question, is productivity about people or systems?
From the article:
“Leaders are always seeking to improve employee productivity (including their own). All too often, that quest goes no further than time management training provided by the HR department. Those classes cover the pros and cons of Inbox Zero, the Pomodoro technique, the Eisenhower matrix, Getting Things Done, and countless other approaches that tantalize us with promises of peak productivity. Given that people are still overwhelmed by work, buried in email, and unable to focus on critical priorities, it’s safe to say that these productivity hacks just don’t hack it.
The problem isn’t with the intrinsic logic of any of these approaches. It’s that they fail to account for the simple fact that most people don’t work in isolation. They work in complex organizations defined by interdependencies among people — and it’s often these interdependencies that have the greatest effect on personal productivity. You can be an email ninja, but with the explosion of email (not to mention instant messages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and countless other communication tools), you’ll never be fast enough to deal with all the incoming communication. Similarly, your personal urgent/important Eisenhower categories fall apart when the CEO asks you to do stop what you’re doing and handle something right away.
As legendary statistician and management consultant W. Edwards Deming argued in his book Out of the Crisis, 94% of most problems and possibilities for improvement belong to the system, not the individual. I would argue that most productivity improvements belong there as well. Personal solutions can be useful, but the most effective antidote to low productivity and inefficiency must be implemented at the system level, not the individual level.”
Read the article here:
When Your Accountant Takes You Through The Numbers
This Week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
165 The top 5 Reasons People Regret Selling Their Business
There is an entire industry and philosophy surrounding why you should sell your business, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
There are many reasons why people choose to sell their businesses and really the reasons can be broken down into two different things.
1. Long Term Goal To Exit: A strategic decision because their plan all along was to sell their business and they have something else more desirable to do with their time (besides golf).
2. Looking for an Exit strategy after losing faith. They hit a point of frustration or desperation and are no longer either enjoying the business or don’t believe they can get it to the next level.
The first point is a goal to exit, the second allows you to think it isn’t going to get any easier, it might be better to sell. And there are a lot of people who will want you to sell. This means you can feel forced to exit.
In this episode, we discuss the top 5 reasons people regret selling, and how you can consider different perspectives and opportunities.
Episode 165 of The Growth Whisperers
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
