Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank. Talk Business. I'm Stuart Amadon. With me is Tom Chaldegat. Today we're going to talk business, but more specifically when you should let things burn to the ground. Tom, help us out. Where are we going?
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Yes.
So, Stuart, you and I have chatted about how you quite like building systems.
Now my query kind of is, what is the threshold for building systems? And when should you just let problems burn?
Obviously, we run into problems all the time and there has to be a threshold for do I let this thing sort itself out by catching fire and
[00:00:43] Speaker C: self combusting and then just disappearing in
[00:00:45] Speaker B: a pile of ash?
[00:00:46] Speaker A: And when do I actually need to foresee the fire happening again and potentially
[00:00:53] Speaker C: put a system in place where I recognize that the fire is happening? I go and get my fire extinguisher and I actually learn how to use it and I do something about it.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: I think the other dichotomy to throw in here as well, and you're gonna criticize me for this, is that I quite enjoy fires burning.
The best way to get me to
[00:01:15] Speaker C: do something is for kind of carnage
[00:01:18] Speaker A: to start happening and that becomes interesting and like, I want to kind of
[00:01:22] Speaker C: jump in and that looks like a fun thing to go and resolve rather than preempting the fire, because that's boring.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: I prefer to see the thing happen
[00:01:31] Speaker C: and then jump in after the fact,
[00:01:32] Speaker A: which is not good business advice.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: I'll put that caveat in.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: But yeah, over to you.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so I have bad news. Something's happened with your audio. And it sounds really, really poor on my end, but I really liked everything you said. You might have to say all of it.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Again, should have happen the audio.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Let me try something.
All right. So when do I let it burn? This is a fun question.
So I. There's a couple of things going on at the same time. So first, like, I. I don't necessarily agree, and I know that you don't either, but we should probably say this out loud with the secularist, socialist, Marxian view of things must fall to the ground before they can arise, rebuilt. Like I'm. I believe my theology says that generally speaking, humanity moves up into the right until the end of human history. And so that's kind of where my head operates now. It goes like this as it goes up and to the right, but it still, generally speaking, goes up and to the right. And so I think that's something that we should probably frame pretty effectively. And human history has generally speaking gone up into the right over time with the collapse of cultures. But I'm talking broadly speaking and zoomed out both humanity as a whole and time as a whole. So there's that. Now to go back to the other question. In the times when things are burning to the ground, when do I let it go all the way? Well, I would say that I'm very quick inside of my business, inside of my church to turn things on, to try new things and to turn things off, to shut them off. Okay. So if I'm looking around and I'm seeing that there might be some issues with something, I don't have an issue with just letting it go away and then moving on to the next thing. So practical example, I have never actually had a you're fired conversation with an employee ever.
And we've had a lot of employees come and go through page 50, but I've never sat down and said, hey, you can't work anymore, I'm sorry, we're going to, we're taking a third option. You know, we're, whatever.
Because what I notice starts to happen, typically with my employees, especially employees that are struggling, is they just can't keep up with what's going on inside of the culture. They can't keep up with the workload, they can't keep up with the vision. And eventually they self excommunicate. They kind of move themselves out of the business.
And there have been a few people that I've tried to look at and say, I don't think it's going to work out with them.
Let's see what happens. I'm not necessarily going to reduce their workload, but I am going to insert more opportunity for them to grow and thrive in different ways. And most of the time that actually does kind of finish the job. That kind of pushes them out when really I am trying to just say, maybe there's something else that they could do, you know, maybe there's something else that they could work on.
But if I see something start to fail, I don't necessarily wait for it to burn, to burn to the ground. But there are instances in which I'll put a more, put more gas on it to kill it all the way.
So like, yeah, that's. But it's an interesting classic example with our business is that we used to have a lot of part, a lot more part time employees than we have right now.
And I could just see into the future that we wouldn't have nearly as many anymore and we'd be moving to more full Time employees. So what I started, I just started saying that, I just started saying that to people inside the business like, hey guys, the trajectory of the future is that we're going to have more full time employees and less part time employees.
And everybody just kind of understood and took the hint. And we had less part timers coming in and the people, eventually as the shift happened, more folks who were interested in full time work started being more serious about pursuing a conversation with us. And it's gone well in that sense.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: So have you got kind of a rule of thumb where you would go, this is the point.
So you've just identified kind of sometimes we'll let things, I'm going to call them, let them burn. You've got kind of let them burn. You've got a, oh well, I'll just kind of try and plant this seed in people's heads a little bit, which is kind of, I think further away from the burn end than the full system end. But it's kind of here somewhere. At what point, what kind of do you have a rule of thumb for like, okay, we need to actually put a system in now because X has happened or it's happened this number of times or whatever the thing is, have you got anything for that?
[00:06:04] Speaker B: So typically speaking, so let's put it in the context that I was talking about earlier. If I'm starting something new, I generally like to timestamp it and say I'm going to try this for three months and we're going to see what happens. And if we, you know, get, if some type of fruit manifests itself from our three months attempt at this new thing, then I'm going to say, okay, well then this looks like it might be something we should invest more. We should, we should put more money in. Now that doesn't mean that in three months this is now profitable necessarily, depending on the gauges and the metrics. But I'm looking for fruitfulness. So some trees take years to bear fruit, some plants bear fruit that season. It just kind of depends on what it is that you're doing. So to give you an example, so like new top of funnel inbound marketing strategies. Okay, so. Or outbound marketing strategies. Let's use that one. So new top of funnel outbound marketing strategies. Typically I'll deploy a strategy, I'll give it three months and I'll make sure that I can pay for it for three months before I deploy it. Right. Like I'll say I've got the revenue, I've got the time, we're Going to interest in this for 90 days and see what happens. And then we do.
And I did that with two different mechanisms over the past year. One of them worked, one didn't. So one of them got cut off and the other one is still running. And we're letting it run because there was fruitfulness there. And so we're going to keep going, keep letting it yield fruit over time. And then typically, also one of my habits is that if something does make a return, I want to put more into it. So I want to.
So one of these options was like an ad buy strategy that I was using. It was generating more revenue, generating more return. And I said, okay, let's turn the, turn the volume up. Like, let's, let's put the gas all the way up. Let's see what we can do to really make this thing cook really, really well.
I do the same thing with Media Buy strategy for our clients.
Generally speaking, if you do Media Buy, it's going to take three to six months before you get a return out of it. I know that because I work in the industry. But then as soon as you start getting good ROI out of your Media Buy programs, you need to start upping the spend. And I'm very aggressive in the way that I advocate for spend raises. I increase budget by 50% month over month until we hit what I would call market saturation plateau, which is where eventually you get to a spot where spending more money just doesn't generate any more return. So you just, boop. You just turn it off right there and you stop spending more money. You keep your spend consistent after that point.
And I find that to be a very effective strategy to deploy too. Like also, for example, with our so I'm wearing my parish circuit shirt today. This is a local media institution that we stood up and we said, let's try this and see what happens. We put somebody in the seat full time to help us manage it. So we're spending money, right? That's happening. Not a ton of money, but we're spending money.
And after a month we start to see fruit. And after two months, we continue to see fruit. And I'm like, okay, well, not making any money off of this yet, but there's something happening.
There's good things happening. And so we're going to continue to move forward from there. So that would be my advice to anybody who's looking at considering turning something off or turning it on, letting something burn or not ask the question, is there fruit there?
[00:09:27] Speaker C: So the examples that you've set There are kind of, what are the potential returns I have on this activity or this thing that's being done? Let's say you've got a member of the team and something goes wrong within a project, files get deleted, or like there's audio that's terrible or has been missed off a video shoot, something like that.
At what point do you, and this is slightly ridiculous, I'm assuming you won't do this, but say that happens. Do you suddenly write an SOP that's really thorough, get everybody in the team to sign it, and develop some sort of AI tracking bot that provokes people to make sure that they've checked that the audio is done and take seven hard drives with you? Probably not. But, like, what. What do you do there? Like, how many times does that event need to happen before you do some of that?
[00:10:24] Speaker B: So the people who are fruitful,
[00:10:30] Speaker A: where
[00:10:30] Speaker B: fruit is, money goes okay. So the people who are fruitful get rewarded. The people who aren't fruitful get managed.
Okay. And so there have been instances inside of our business where mistakes like that have happened. I mean, you know that.
And those have always made us better, provided that we know that there was something that happened and we needed to build a. Maybe it's a redundancy in.
Maybe it's a new system. Maybe it's efficiency movements inside of existing systems that we already have. Like, that's true in the instance that it's strictly a personnel issue.
Pretty much everybody I've ever hired at page 50 comes in as an entry level employee. And so there's a few exceptions to that, but not many.
And those people who don't produce more, they don't grow in their production, they just don't move up. And eventually, as I talked about before, they kind of look around and say, oh, wait, maybe this isn't for me, because this guy who got here after me is now making twice the money that I'm making right now.
I think I need to get my priorities put in straight and maybe they go work somewhere else. I also just have very direct and blunt conversations with people.
Hey, you totally duffed this.
You can't do that again.
And I tell them things that are just true about business in general. Your mistake costs every family that's connected to this company opportunity. It's not isolated to you.
You making a mistake or you being lazy affects that guy's paycheck.
And I try to draw those distinction really, really clearly for people, because we do live in this weird, radical, individualist society, and it's not helpful it's just not helpful.
And it is a good reminder to them that they don't exist, isolated, that what they do affects other people.
And it is also my job as the owner of the company, as the one with whom the buck stops to say eventually, hey, you are causing a problem here.
And it's my job now to get you either out of this lane that you're in right now and into something else, get you on track, or get you out of here. Now. Like I said before, I've never had to do the last thing, but there have been a couple of times where I have come close and I sit down, I'll write what's called an employee improvement plan. I don't know if you guys. An eip, maybe you all have heard of this, but you basically make it real clear, hey, this is where you are right now.
Here's the expectation for you going forward. And we're going to check on you every however many days, how many weeks, whatever it is, to make sure that this is happening. And if it's not happening, we're going to have to have a more serious conversation. So that's happened before, but that's ended very well for us. It hasn't ended in me having to sit down and say, okay, you're done here. It's ended in people improving. It's ended in people fixing their problems and working harder. And it's good.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: I suppose, the. The other danger, just thinking through as you're talking, jumping to implementing systems too quickly, you know, that that is. That's what HR Karen does.
You know, instead of having the blunt conversation, it is a passive aggressive, oh, no. We built this entire SOP and it's. And it's because of you. But we're not gonna tell you. And we're gonna kind of inflict this kind of dictatory procedure on absolutely everyone just because someone over there cocked up one time.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not helpful. You know that. Cause no one's gonna read it. And now you're just creating law whenever you're not willing to actually deal with the discipling the person that. This goes back to what we've talked about in past episodes, the idea of, like, ruthless discipleship, of being able to sit down and really have very hard conversations with people because they need it. Because you need to love them enough to say it to them. You know what I mean? If you don't, then you don't love them. Not only them, you don't love the rest of the employees inside of your company. And you're operating in this weird passive aggressive avoidance of responsibility.
Doug Wilson talks about masculinity, properly defined as the glad acceptance of responsibility.
So I guess what we're really saying here is just be a man, be a man.
[00:15:19] Speaker C: Kind of capture that as this idea of freedom as well. Like freedom is you're free to take on responsibility and responsibility compounds depending on how free you are.
I suppose another question then, but I'm, I suppose one, well, a question before. My question is how much time have you got?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: But I've got time. Go, let's go.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: You've kind of considered systems previously and you know, we've had conversations where you've gone, okay, we need a system in place because of this, or this is going to help us and it's going to give us a return. But we don't want to create too much of a system because in six months time, either someone's going to forget how to use it or it just won't be fit for purpose. So there's, there's a degree of flexibility that you've implemented within said system.
What, what does that look like? How do you decide upon that?
What kind of thresholds are in there?
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah, so the way that we operate is like, okay, there's a problem. So I go talk to my ops director and I sit down and I say, hey, this just happened. So, for example, this just happened with something inside of our business the other day. So I have just a habit and a routine of following up with clients after they've signed just to see how things are going. So they come into the company. Sometimes they continue to interact with me long term, like you and I do, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes they just plug into whatever department it is that they're supposed to be operating inside of, and I never hear from them again until the project is completed. I don't necessarily like that.
So I try to follow up with them a couple of weeks in or a month in or so. And so I was doing that with one of our current contracts, one of our current clients, and I was just checking in, being like, hey, how are things going?
And they're like, things are going great. I love everybody. What do I do now?
She was asking me this question that immediately sent a flagpole up in my mind of, oh, there's a hole somewhere.
Okay, let's find out where the hole is.
And it turns out that everybody was doing what they were supposed to do. The thing that we realized whenever I sat down with my ops director and kind of talked through It a little bit was we could probably do a little bit more. Just basically somebody sent her an email that she missed and I think maybe we bumped her once or twice and she still missed that because she's a busy person. And then she had no idea what to do next. And we said, oh look, okay, so we need to be a little bit more aggressive in our follow up. I think it was a copy approval for a web build that we were creating for them or something like that.
We needed her to come back and say thumbs up, thumbs down or whatever based on the content that we were making. And that could have potentially held up the whole project.
So it depends on is it something that is actually warranting a complete system revise?
Like what is the lever that constitutes that?
Well, you kind of have to be connected with your customer. If we're talking business and we're talking church, you have to be connected with your people to be able to know enough of where the potential hole is. And is there, is this a systems wide issue? Right. Or is this something isolated to just this one person?
And in order to do that, I think your lever is relationship like you, you as a business owner should have some degree of interaction with all the clients that you have working through your business at a given time. You, if you're a pastor or just a leader in general, you need to have some type of relationship with if not all, a lot of the people within your purview. So that would give you an idea of where the holes are. Does that make sense?
Yeah, if you do, then you'll start to notice trends.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Okay, I suppose that leads on to. Well, my next question, I suppose how.
Because what you've got there, here's a problem and then what is the system that then gets implemented? Is it a. Okay, Well I as say the business owner need to be more in contact with kind of every customer to some degree. Therefore I just create a prompt for myself in Outlook calendar say and it just has people's names in it and it's that simple and it's just a trigger for me or it is there a. At what point does it need to be a system that's like, I don't know, more self automating and just more complex. Like where, where do you pick on that?
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Yeah, so it depends on how you're, how big your business is first. Right. So like if, if you're the kind of consultancy that runs with two to three to four clients total, then you know everything all the time and you're probably listening to this episode of this podcast and saying, I don't need to be reminded. I work with four people, I know everything about them all day. To which I'd say, great, then you've already solved this problem.
But whenever you get past 10, 20, 30 active clients, you lose that.
You lose the ability to be aware of what's happening around you all the time. You can have all the meetings you want to with your team, with your support staff.
You're still going to miss things. And so what I like to do is I just like to build this into my CRM. So we use HubSpot. People can use whatever kind of CRM they want, but CRM's, it's called Customer Relationship Management CRM. Your CRM tool.
[00:20:55] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: What you're trying to do is manage that relationship and you can build automations to where when a deal closes, you get pinged in two weeks, four weeks, whatever you want your time to be to just send a little email, have a phone call, check in on them. It's an easy automation to build. And then you just do the task, check the task off. I prefer email because it's fast and it gives me an opportunity to have a touch without necessarily tying me up for a whole meeting like a phone call would. Right.
And I think that's beneficial for people. It lets them know that you care.
And it also is just a really easy.
I'm going to take 30 seconds and type this email, push send and then move on to the next thing.
[00:21:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think CRM is an interesting one. I know it's a, it's a helpful tool for the individual who's actually, you know, needs to be prompted to do the action, to go and talk with someone. And I think that's the way that that can be kind of viewed. I think you might get some people kind of criticizing the idea of CRM in that, like, oh, I'm an individual who is captured within a CRM and I'm just a number within a contact list. Well, no, it's a tool for the sales guy who wants to build a relationship with you to help remember all these things that is in his head and not drop the ball somewhere.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. Well, if you have a problem with the CRM, then you should also stop using a calendar, you know.
[00:22:27] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's a good point.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: It's just a tool.
It's a reminder tool to help people be served better. And that's good.
The other alternative is what to have, I don't know, AI robots talk to you about everything that you're supposed to do all day. That just sounds like some form of purgatory.
Yes.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: Yeah. So it feels like just to kind of recap then or conclude if it's a one off event and it's with an individual, it's the case of potentially let the fire burn and take that as an opportunity for the individual to improve or not.
Either way, if it's something that is more potentially across multiple individuals, well then it might be a problem within the business and it needs some sort of system implementing.
So do you build in redundancy somewhere?
And then on a personal level, if there are tools that are in place that help you, help prompt you to do a thing, then they're helpful tools for an individual.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great.
Well guys, we thank you for listening to another episode of A Brit and the Yank Talk Business.
Hopefully this has been helpful to you. If it has, then do all the things that you do with podcasts which like share, subscribe and let us know if you have any questions that you would like us to address later on. Thank you guys for joining us and we will see you next time.
