15 Navigating Business Strategy, Operations, and Passion

In Episode 15 of The First Choice Podcast, join Drew Homola and special guest Keith Van Pelt as they delve deep into the intricate world of business strategy, operations, and the critical role of passion in entrepreneurial success. From the concept of a "war room" for strategic planning to fostering team development, they share invaluable insights on enhancing meeting efficiency and finding the right balance between systems and external operations. Discover the top three priorities for business success and the importance of aligning your business ventures with your true passions. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just embarking on your business journey, this episode offers essential guidance and inspiration for achieving your goals.

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Transcript

Okay. So, guys, today we have Keith Van Pelt with us. Hey.

Good morning, Drew. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you today? Yeah, I'm doing really good.

Awesome. I appreciate you coming down. So you are a consultant for First Choice Builders? Yes, sir.

And you spent your career as COO and operations of many or a few companies? Yep. I've been involved in several organ organizations growing up through my career, running operations, manufacturing, and business strategies. So been involved in Fortune 20 companies, anywhere from big companies to small startups.

So it's given me a good breadth of realization what goes on in the world, anywhere from the small guys up to the super large guys. Awesome. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from? What exactly do like, if you're okay with it, who you've worked for in the past, or if that's private, that's okay too.

Okay. And how did you get here? Why are you in Sheridan? How did we meet? Yeah, sure. Sounds good.

It was kind of a unique story. So my background, I was born and raised in Arkansas, so I'm a Southern guy, and when I got out of college, kind of started into my career, got down the path of manufacturing and operations. My wife Beth and I, and we've got a son, he lives in Texas now with his career going on.

But we kind of took a gypsy life path, and we wanted to just travel and go where opportunities took us. So we left Arkansas, went up to Montana and helped a company in the firearm business start up a new organization there, lived there for a while, and family needs took us back to the south for a little while, so I went back down and we lived just outside the Memphis area. And I worked for a large medical device company, Olympus Corporation.

So worked for them for a while running some medical device operations, and then opportunities came up to really come back out west. Our dream was to live in Wyoming. We always vacationed here, came out here on just different haunts and things.

So I knew the Sheraton area, I knew the bighorn mountains well. And just you never know when blessings come your way that you don't expect. And one day I got a call from the weatherby organization and after a few discussions, took a job with them as their vice president of manufacturing and came out here, helped them move their operations from California to here, start up the new business, et cetera, get their processes in line.

And a few years after that, just kind of decided to go my own way and start my own consulting business. So for two and a half years now, I have had VP consulting, and my sole focus is to help organizations, whether they're startups or larger companies, get their business strategies understood and figure out what their tactical actions need to be to achieve their goals. I've done a lot of project management work on the side for some of them.

I worked for a company here in town, VACuCh, worked under a contract with them for about a year and a half and just kind of had numerous roles with them as the need came up and then met with you. It was kind of an interesting time that I met you. My wife has a business where she does flower containers and pots.

It's called Flowers and Pots here in Sheridan, and I think we had some she sat out in the driveway one day and you were driving by and you stopped and you wanted to look at the pots. And I believe you bought your wife a know, and you and I just got to talking a little bit and we were considering building a new house and thinking down that path. So our conversation was kind of mutual on both sides to where it was house building.

It was business consulting, it was talking that and I think we had lunch a couple of times maybe. And things just progressed to where I think we saw value in each other, to where we could help out. And me with my consulting business, come in and help you build out your strategies and maybe you have a few initiatives going on, help get your initiatives aligned.

And that's kind of the path we went down. Well, it was kind of funny. So remember the first time I met you on site of your future build and you kind of said, oh, I'm a CEO or COO and I've done these things, my ears just perked right up because I love the whole business thing.

Business to me is just so interesting how things come together and how can you pick the most important things to focus on because you're not going to focus on everything. And how are you going to choose those things and what are they and how are you going to manage them? And then you told me you're a COO of X, Y and Z companies and I thought, oh man, I got to get to know this guy a little bit, probably has some valuable information. And I remember after going out to eat, I think it was lunch one day at a Mexican restaurant and you had mentioned something about up until this time, I didn't know how or know what to expect from our relationship.

I just knew that you had information in your head that would potentially become valuable for me. And you're easy to get along with and very personable. So we did the lunch and at that lunch I was thinking, I don't even really know what to expect here.

This is what was going on in my head. And at some point you mentioned, I don't know the exact words, but how can I help you out in your business? I'm like, okay, striking gold. Yeah.

Here we are, right. Very grateful for how that all came about. I believe everything happens for a reason and you looking for a home.

Just happened to lead into the next thing, which so far has been really good. Yeah. And that's why I wanted you to come on the podcast, because there's a lot of people who listen who've actually said, well, what about business stuff? I see you're doing all this stuff in your business, but how do you do it? Stuff like that.

And I thought, you know what? One of these days when the timing is right, we'll get Keith on and he can help share what he's doing with our business and some of his core beliefs in what makes a business good and what to focus on. Because there's important things for one business and those are not going to be the same important things for another business. Right.

We're going to be essentially talking about first choice and our few companies we have here and what we've been working on and why we decided to take what step first. Okay. Yeah, sounds great.

So on our podcast, we're basically an open book. We want to provide value for any of the listeners. We hope to keep people entertained but also hopefully informed.

Sure. Yeah. When you came on with us, what was your first thought? Okay, obviously it takes probably a little bit of time to kind of get your bearings and figure out where you're at and stuff like that.

But once you were at that point, how do you decide what step of action to take first when coming on? No, that's great. And I just want to tell you it's been great working with you guys. I've been with you for a couple of months now, I believe.

And I believe we've gone through some real progressive actions as to where we're at right now. But to answer your question, where you start out is simple. It's observations upfirt.

You don't want to come in as a know it all or anything like that. So you start out just making observations about what's going on in the business, the people, the processes, and trying to identify areas of waste because ultimately to make your business more profitable, more efficient and everything, you want to get more done in less time. So figuring seeing those kind of opportunities is where you want to go.

So joining your specific organization, I knew you're a quick start guy. You have all kinds of great ideas, and that's one of the values of your team, is you have a good, balanced team out because you're the quickstart guy. But then you have some others on your team.

They want to think through things a little bit more, so they might slow you down a little bit and let's process the information. So it makes a really good balance for your organization right now. But some of the observations I made up front was really what's the strategy, what are the visions you have? Because I know right now you've got three different organizations that you're trying to build into the first choice name brand and how is that being linked together through a vision standpoint and whatever.

So that was really one of the first things is what is the roadmap? Where are we going? And so that's really what we've been working on a little bit. We went through trying to make sure everybody on the team understood that so that everybody's focused in the right direction and they can achieve their goals and keep them in line. So after the observation period a little bit, for a week or so, I worked with you and the team, and we did some strength weakness analysis so that everybody could bring their voice to the table in terms of here's what I see with our companies, here's our strengths, here's our weaknesses, here's our opportunities and our threats and how we work on those past that we started working on the roadmap, the strategy roadmap, and really how we tie in the business organizations together and what everybody's role and responsibility is.

We've had a few challenges with that and understanding is it the right thing for the right people in the right role. And so we worked through a few of those things. But that's kind of where we're at right now.

And the focus is always keeping in mind the bottom line of the business, because that's what we want to do is, as you mentioned, we want to deliver a good service, a good product to our customers. But at the same time, are you profitable? We need to be profitable as a business. Yeah.

When we started working on our vision and mission and that's what you were talking about, referring to the roadmap stuff. And when we started working on that, in my head, I was thinking, I kind of thought that we already knew this stuff. Here's the problem though.

Maybe only I thought I knew it in my head but never actually talked about it to anybody else. Where are we going? What's our final objective? How are we going to get there and why are we even doing it? And one thing that's easy to overlook is the importance of communicating that to other people. And if they're not on the same wagon as you, then you're not going to make the progress that you should be making.

You're right. The alignment of the organization is critical. You kind of got to start with the end in mind and make sure everybody has that same North Star as to where they're looking at, what's their true north of the organization and where we're going.

So I think you kind of hit a key point there. You were pretty good. You knew where your goals were.

You have a visionary mind. I would say you're a very strong visionary person. I think it might have been that communication piece across the team from the alignment piece.

Communication is so hard, even people who think they're good at it are still, like, at 50%. Yeah, you're right. Communicate.

I'm not that good at it. I would say I'm mediocre, but I would say I thought I was better than I truly was. And some of that comes out with seeing other people who are better at communicating.

I'm all of a sudden, like, I guess I didn't even think about telling somebody that or there are certain people who just love to talk and love to interact with people, and in fact, there's so much different levels. There's times that you might know somebody who that's all they want to do. Right.

And then there's the other person who's more reclusive, and they go back in their office, and you don't hear from them all day, and you're like, I hope they're okay back there. I'm more in the middle. Yeah, you're kind of that middle road guy.

Yeah. Every member on your team is different in terms of their needs. Some people need more communication, and some people, they're good with very little communication.

So sometimes you have to tailor it to the individual. You got to understand what their needs are and how that works with what your capabilities are and what your natural abilities are. So it's part of that people management that you just got to learn the personalities, what their needs are, and how that balances out across the organization.

You know what one of my problems is? I get blinders on. I'll start working, and I need to get something done, and I feel like that's really important. And somebody will walk in the office so confession time here.

Somebody will walk in the office while I'm focused on something, and I know what they have that they're bringing to me needs to be addressed. And in my head, I'm thinking, look, don't distract me right now. I'm doing something.

I try not to show that outwardly, and I hope that it doesn't come across that way, but that's just the way I am. I'll be focused on something. What's this person need? Or how can I essentially fulfill their needs and get them back to work? Not because I'm worried about them not working.

It's because I'm worried about me not focusing on what I was doing right. And I think that's that quick start thing just, I got my head down, I'm ready to do it, and I'm doing the thing right. Yeah.

And I'll say that's part of the culture development that you have to build in the organization, and you've got a very good culture in the first choice group. You mentioned earlier that it's open communication. We're open book.

And that's felt across the team. There's no secrets. We talk openly, and sometimes that can be a detriment because it does interrupt your workflow a little bit.

Sometimes if people bring to you things that maybe they should handle theirselves or not bring the problem and dump the problem on your desk. And those are things that we'll work on and continue to grow. But it's just that cultural development piece that you have.

But I understand. Yeah. You're a quick starter, so your mind's running 90 miles an hour.

If somebody comes in and distracts you, it'll take you a few minutes to get back on track with that. Right. But that's one of the evils of business sometimes, right.

You have to accept those things at times. Well, and I've always a little bit envied the people who can just take everything that comes at them and someone takes a distraction and deals with it and graciously moves on. And basically their day is not interrupted by that or that moment.

There are certain people who are really good at that, and I would say I'm not so good at that. But nonetheless, that's part of being the business owner. Right.

You have to learn how to deal with stuff spontaneously and move on and get refocused again. Right. You have to be flexible.

But one of the good things about you is you kind of recognize those things. And I see you using tools that help you maybe improve your personal efficiencies at work. So you're always looking for opportunities to be more efficient, be more productive, not only for yourself, but your team as well.

And that's obvious, just watching you through the day and some of the new things that you're trying in terms of time management and things. So it's good. I would like to hear your opinion on KPIs, how they benefit people and what's the overall goal for a KPI sheet.

Sure. So KPIs key performance indicators. A lot of times you want to look at your indicators in terms of how the business is performing versus your forecast, what you plan it to do, and against historical information.

So sometimes your KPIs can be leading indicators or they can be lagging indicators. You want to have a balance of both, really, I think to have a feel for the business. But the first part to the KPIs is, first of all, what's important to the business.

Right. As you mentioned earlier, if everything's important and everything's a priority, then nothing's going to be a priority because you just can't focus on everything. So you have to identify those top things that you want to say.

These are the drivers of the business, whether it's through the marketing organization, the sales organization, the project coordinators, the project managers. It could be over into the other segments of the first choice business as well. So it's part of that strategy development that we have to do is identify what are the true important things for us, what's going to drive us forward in the business, and then break it down in terms of, okay, what is that and what do we want to focus on through that let's take sales.

We'll break it down a little bit. So from a sales standpoint yes, we want to talk about how many new contacts we got each week, right? And then how many of those new contacts turned into a contract. What is the revenue value of the contract? Where are we at from a customer satisfaction standpoint? Because we always want to drive with that customer in mind.

That's the lifeblood of our business. So we just got to identify what are those important things. And then the main thing is measuring it, managing it, and improving it.

Those are the three words that I follow a lot and I try to incorporate into the businesses. Because if you're not measuring something, you can't manage it because you don't know where it's at, if it's on target, off target, or what. And then once you manage it, then you can start seeing opportunities of improvement.

And that's what it's about, driving improvement in the business. So that's kind of it. And you talked about a KPI sheet.

You want to have what I call a dashboard. I like a one sheet dashboard. That's kind of the executive summary for you.

As the owner of the company, you don't need to get into the minutiae of the details. You look at your team leads, your area managers, whatever, to manage their business. And you're really good at that.

You give them that leeway to take care of their business. So the dashboard is really an executive spreadsheet for you to say, okay, I got my hands on the pulse, I know where we're at. And you see those things happening.

And then at each level of the business, they'll have their own set of metrics that they're watching. So it's kind of a cascade effect. Cross.

It's kind of interesting to think about taking a sheet because if you want, you can dive into so many nitty gritty details in a business when you're looking at not so much a KPI sheet, but specifically all the numbers you got balance sheet, profit and loss and all these reportings for each segment of your business. What's your break even? And all these things. And there's only a certain number of KPIs that say someone like myself, who's a business owner, but a real high quick start.

I need to rely on other people to handle the details of things. I can take action, I can start things quickly and I can get things done. But then I need to rely on somebody else to handle the details.

Like, for example, I'll have somebody else actually work up my KPI sheet. I'm not going to go through and build it because I'm not the one to go into QuickBooks and withdraw all these numbers and go through our sales port platform and withdraw all this information to compile it into our KPI sheet. Right? But for me to be able to take this sheet that's handed to me once a week, and say, hey, look, this is where sales are at, this is where our leading four weeks is.

This is where our following four weeks is at, this is where our estimated profit is and blah, blah, blah, blah. You can see if things are skewed, then it throws up a red flag, right? And that's more my style, right. Like I want to be able to take a look at this thing and in five or ten minutes read through it and know how life is.

Exactly. And that's our goal, creating this executive dashboard for you and the leaders of the organizations. And we're jumping off into that right now.

You guys have been doing a weekly meeting, talking about what's going on in sales, what's going on in the project management, where customer jobs are, et cetera, et cetera. And we're currently in the midst of putting together a new scorecard and rolling that out. And it's going to be exciting to see that come about because it's going to take us a little bit deeper into some of those number things and start seeing some of the variances that we need to address.

Right now, we're looking at that once a week factor. But here soon we'll drop that thing down to where it's a five minute meeting every morning real quick, so that it's kind of like a debrief from a strategic fight or a plane war, whatever you want to call it. When they go out and they do a mission, they come back and they immediately do a debrief.

Well, that's kind of what this is. It's a quick debrief of the previous day, what went good, what went bad, what we learned from it and move forward. So here soon we'll jump off and start narrowing this thing down into those quick daily factors.

So one thing that you had a really good idea. So for those who don't know, we're currently building our own office and hopefully done here in the next couple of months, but you gave us the idea of having a war room. And I'll be honest, I'm actually shocked with myself that I didn't think of that.

And I'm like, well, at least somebody thought of it even if I didn't, right. It was a good idea. And we're excited to have this war room and explain to people what a war room is and why this idea is important.

Sure. So the war room concept for us is going to be it's our strategy room, right? It's going to be a room where we're going to have a series of it's going to be whiteboards, it's going to be monitors so that we can project information, we can talk about information. And it's where we'll do our debriefs, and we'll talk about where our wins are, what our losses are, what we got to do going forward.

So it's really that room where all the strategy is going to happen. It's going to call out the things where yeah, we got opportunities for improvement. We always will have.

And we're going to tie in our it with automation into reports. That's the goal of it. Right.

Pull as much information as we can from autonomous factors so that we're not having to spend manual somebody pulling numbers, things like that. So our It team's heavily involved with us there. Getting that.

Thank you, Mason. Yeah. Good job, Mason.

So that's going to be really cool for us. Not sure if we're going to put a sit down table in there or it might be a stand up table, only we got to talk about that in terms of how we want to be strategic there. So.

Hey, are we going to have sound dampening in there? We're probably going to need it. Yeah. I think.

Yeah. When it comes to looking at some of the numbers, we'll probably need sound dampening. But, yeah, that's the goal of it, is really give us that focused area where we have all our information in front of us, and we come in there as a team, and we beat it up and we debate it and we make strategic actions.

It's just basically looking at kind of like planning out a battle, right? Yeah, I think it's an awesome idea. You know what I like about it is that it's a dedicated room and you can leave it. You can come in there and you do your thing and say you write a bunch of information on the whiteboard and it's not information that you want everybody to know.

It's meant for inner business workings. Right, right. But because you have this dedicated room, you can actually leave it and come back later and review.

Okay, well, I've had a day to think about this. I'm going to sit down and just kind of ponder what we've talked about. And it's still all there.

And it's handwritten. You can see by the way the stuff is laid out how people were feeling at that time, because it might be really chaotic and disorganized. Then you'll be able to tell that okay, we were brainstorming through this section because you can't even hardly follow it.

Sure. But maybe it's real organized and thought out and well, you're like, okay, someone's probably presenting an idea that they had already thought about and planned. And if they thought about it and planned, maybe I need to focus on this and take into these brainstorming ideas as consideration.

That's one thing I'm really excited about is just to go in there and reflect on what has happened the day before. Exactly. And another great benefit of the war room structure.

Like that. Is it's team development? So each area of the teams, whether it's sales, marketing, operations, whomever will have a section in the room where that's where their information is at. So as the meeting starts, you just kind of go around the room, and it could be the leader of that team.

It could be somebody that just started with us yesterday that might get asked to present the information and talk through things. So it's a great opportunity to give your team members developmental things, to learn the numbers, to learn that, to get up in front of a group and talk and build theirselves. There's so many multiple facets of opportunity and improvement in that war room setting.

That's awesome. So one day you helped me set up a meeting for people who've listened to the podcast in the past. They know that I have started a real estate investment fund.

And one thing, that one of the things that you've done, you're kind of an all around type of guy. Like, you've told me you need help with anything, let me know and I can help you with that. And so one day I was like, you know, I really need help with this meeting.

I'm bringing some partners together for the first time. Most of them don't know each other and they're going to introduce themselves to each other. So basically I had you build this meeting, right? I mean, built it and found us a place to put it and set it all up.

And I showed up and you helped with the presentation and it was awesome. So just out of curiosity, is that something that you have commonly done in the past? Tell me how to when you do meetings, do you normally prepare everything or are you like, me, I just kind of wing it and be like, well, hopefully it all comes together? It depends, really. It depends on the meeting.

Like this particular meeting we were having was it was a little bit more strategic focused because we wanted to make sure the message was very clear. It was concise the roadmap was laid out for the investors or the partners. So there was some strategy behind how it would go and work.

Again, I worked with it to make sure the setting that we found was going to have the appropriate communications abilities for us. Again, thank you, Mason, for your help. But other meetings, it's on the fly.

You just take it, you go with it. You just got to be natural about the communication. Again, it comes back to communications, right? And a lot of this just came to me just through growing up in the operations world.

I cut my teeth in manufacturing just out of college, and I built grand pianos for 14 years. I ran a grand piano manufacturing company. Incredible.

And then I moved over into firearms and ammunition, ran operations for Remington Arms for about ten years. So through those early areas of my life, I had so many opportunities just to personal development, develop my teams. And a lot of that came through, being able to run on the fly, have those conversations, put together a meeting.

A meeting can be two people in a hallway. A meeting can be sitting down. In front of the board and giving a presentation on the business strategies and things.

So the meeting depends on the situation and what the communication need is. Really? Yeah. That's awesome.

And like our weekly meetings, for example, they do have a structure, but we don't set up presentations. Generally our structure is more like a written agenda and review the KPIs review where we're going, where we just came from, who's accountable for what, what the key actions are that need to be done this week and then we follow up next week, make sure they got done and stuff. So they are structured.

They're just not as structured as say, a formal meeting of outside people. Exactly. And as we've talked and as we're working on now, I think with our current structure we got opportunities to probably be two words, more efficient and more effective in that communication.

So those are some of the things we're working on with this new scorecard aspect. And then here in well, we'll be in the new office in six weeks or so maybe is what we're shooting for. So at that time we'll roll it over and start into that war room concept.

So it's really going to be pretty cool. Yeah. One thing that I would say with our meetings is it's scheduled for an hour and I think we always go into an hour and a half, at least.

An hour and a half? Yeah. That's that efficient part. Right.

It seems like there's always someone who has a pretty good story to tell and sometimes those stories are needed. Right. It kind of brings a little glue to the team, I guess.

Yeah. For me personally, I'm always probably helping the meeting stretch out for longer than it needs to be. I think it would probably be more important to stick to a very strict schedule if you had more than we have.

Like our business is so small. Right. And I'm in the meeting, so I know that I'm wasting everybody's time.

Let's say if we were even a few more people and we're spending time on visiting for the morning and let's say you spent a half hour times ten people, that's 5 hours of well paid time doing actually nothing productive. Right. Non value add.

Exactly. Yeah. So I can totally see that a strict agenda or a time period would be super important.

I'm a little bit lax on that just because, well, I'm also interacting in the meeting and there's not very many people. Right. And that's just part of the aspects that we'll continue to grow on and improve on as we go.

You don't want to shut everything down and not have any kind of a friendly conversation and you always want to show value in the people. Right. You want to hear about what was your weekend, how was things go, how was the kids game, whatever.

But I think we got to limit it to a minute or two rather than the 15 or 20 minutes conversations that lag on sometimes, but always want to have value in the people of the organization because they're what makes it happen. So in your opinion, if you were to say the top three things in level of importance in a company, what would you say they are? And just briefly, why? Number one, I would say the vision and strategy of how to achieve that vision you have to know where you want to go and then you have to build your roadmap to get there second to that is I would say people, right? You want to make sure you got the right people on your team and that those people are doing the right job. Sometimes you have people on your team, but they may hate what they're doing.

They may rather be doing another role in the organization where the value they bring could be multiplied by x. So you always have to make sure you got the right people on the team and they're doing the right function to take the organization where it needs to go. And then thirdly, I would say, is the three words I mentioned earlier measure, manage, and improve.

If you don't have the right measurement systems, you can't manage them and you can't drive improvement. So strategy, vision, people and the measurement systems, that's awesome. If all those things are right, then that brings profitability, right? And in my opinion, the lifeblood even though you don't want to make profitability the single most important thing because I agree with you, I think I've always focused in fact, I would say my lack of focus on profitability has been like to a fault I've always focused on oh, how can I do these things easier? How can I make it more enjoyable? And how can that help me get to the next big adventure? Because I like adventures.

I like doing things, whether it's buying a piece of real estate or building a house or maybe investing in something or building an apartment or something like that. I just like starting the next new thing. And that's what really drives me.

But because that's how I am, I've always made profitability a lower priority. But now, if you say these top things that you've talked about, if those are focused on, then those things will bring profitability and customer satisfaction just by association, right? You talk about the profitability word and you don't want it to make it your sole focus or anything, because that's not what it is all the time. A lot of it's the customer satisfaction piece, but the product, the pride and all that.

But at the same time, a business is in business to make money. There's no point in being here if you're not going to be making money. So there's a balance in there.

But you definitely always have to keep at least one eye on the profitability side of the business. Make sure the financial health is there. Yeah.

Is there a point when a company has two? Is there a point when a company is so focused on their systems and what would you say building the inner business? Is there a point when they're so focused on that that it actually lets the outside the sales and the production and stuff start to fall? I mean it seems like there's got to be but there is there's a line there that you don't really want to cross. You've got to have a good foundation of the systems and the process stabilization factors. But if you just focus only on that you get into what I would call analysis paralysis to where that's all you want to focus on is how the system is working or what is this number, what is that number? And you're not taking care of that peripheral stuff of the business.

It's really kind of out there driving things. So yeah, there's a balance that you have to have. You can't be all systems kind of an organization.

I've been in organizations where that's all it was is this metric system, that metric system and you got five, six, seven different systems that are trying to balance each other and manage against each other. And you spend all your time just trying to manipulate data and track stuff through this one and that one and this one. And you can't keep the finger of the pulse what's going on in the business.

So you can very easily get overloaded into too many systems and too much of that. So one of our core beliefs in our company is constant never ending improvement. And I would say that could be a place for us that when you're always trying to figure out what you did wrong and how to improve it, you've got to be able to draw the line.

Okay, look, this was a one off thing. We're not going to focus on that mistake because it was a one off situation. Or look, we've actually seen this two or three times now and we really need to figure this out because we can't just keep doing whatever this mistake is.

Exactly. I think you mentioned there's companies who have been stuck in this area where they have systems to manage systems to manage systems and I'm pretty soon all they're doing is just managing their systems. Exactly.

And I wonder if that if those companies also had the same mentality of always constant, never improvement. Constant and never ending improvement. Let me get that out.

But they weren't able to really execute. All they did maybe is just built another system instead of saying, okay, look, we're making the distinguish, being able to distinguish whether it's a problem that you need to focus on or not. Yeah, and you're right.

Some of the companies I've been associated with in the past that build systems to manage systems to manage systems. They have an overarching mentality of wanting to drive improvement. But what the miss is, is the difference between a value add and a non value add activity.

Right. You always want to focus on the value added activities. So some of the systems on tops of systems, on tops of systems, maybe they're not value add, even though the mentality of the organization is constant and never ending improvement.

So that's the piece you have to sit down with the leadership team on and really diagnose in terms of the value add versus non value add piece of that. Another piece is you mentioned about what do we want to focus on, do we want to focus on this was a miss we had, was it a one time off or something like that? Whatever the other piece of that is, when we do have a miss, it's always important to say, okay, we had this miss. Where else could this miss happen in the organization? Right.

And then share that learning across the whole team so that everybody learns from it. So that's one of the big things I try to drive is when we recognize something that's an opportunity of improvement, not only for this one specific thing, where else in the organization can we implement that improvement? So it keeps us from going down that same path again somewhere. Yeah.

Okay, so we're coming up on our time, but I got another question for you. All right. Some of our people listening have said, hey, how come you don't talk about business? And there's I think, three people who've asked, and currently none of them own their own business.

So from an operations standpoint, a single person starting their own business, they're not going to be able to go hire a consultant to help them, to help them get their systems up and running. What would you tell those people how to start their business and what's going to be their most important thing to focus on right out of the gate as a single person startup? Sure. First of all, I would say you got to have the passion.

You've got to have a passion for the business you're wanting to start up because your passion is going to carry you through some rough times because when you start a business up, it's not always smooth. The revenue flow can be good, it can be up, it can be down. So you've got ebb and flow you have to work through.

So your passion is going to carry you through a lot of that. So number one, have your passion. Number two is, again, I'm going to go back to that strategy.

What is your vision and what is your strategy for your business? Because if you really don't know where you want to take it, it's kind of hard to get there. Right. So do you recommend a certain amount of time down the road to have that? I'll always try to get my clients to have at least, what's, a one year goal and what's a three to five year goal.

That kind of gives you a short term, what I call tactical initiatives and what the longer term aspects of the business are the best thing to do. If you're trying to start up your business and you're having challenges and you can't get a consultant for financial needs, whatever it is, talk to people that have done it. It might be somewhere else in the United States or whatever, that they have started a similar business.

A lot of times they'll talk to you know, they've done it. They've already felt the pains. They've gone down the same roads that you're getting ready to go down.

And you're not going to be a marketing you're not competing in the same market they are. So a lot of times those people will talk to you and they'll help you. So I always recommend talking and trying to learn from others that have already done it.

So that's one of the best ways of doing that. Okay. I have one other thing that ties on to that, and I've been asked this, and I don't know how to answer it.

So good luck to you. My whole life, I've never had a problem making a decision. And I'm not saying that to Brag.

It's just the way my brain is okay. And I can't help it. So I'm not saying that as in like, OOH, I'm cool because I don't have to think about decisions for very long.

But I've been asked a dozen times throughout my life, how come you can approach a situation and you just know what direction to go? Well, first of all, it's not that I know what direction to go. It's just that I feel like I have maybe more of a natural instinct on what I think is the right way or whatever. But what I've been asked is how do you know what you want to do? And for me, it's super hard to say because I've never had to think about it.

It's just like I've just always known. I just know what I want to do. And somebody who's starting their own business.

They're like, I don't really even know what I want to do. Currently, I'm doing whatever. Let's just pretend a guy's a framer or something.

Or a mason or a welder or something. Well, I want to start my own business because I like the idea of starting a business, but I don't really know if I want to do this thing. Do you have any sort of method of finding what you want to do? It goes back to that passion thing.

Really? And I put myself in there. When I decided to start my own consulting business, I looked at it and I said, what is it that drives me every day? What is it that I love to do from a business world? And honestly, it's driving improvement through operations. I got into Lean years ago.

So I'm certified as a lean six Sigma Black belt. I'm certified six Sigma black belt. So at one point in my life, I got super interested in driving improvement and driving efficiencies and setting up processes and systems.

So that was kind of where I wanted to take my business from a start, and I wanted to help other organizations be able to do the same thing. I love strategy. I like creating strategic initiatives.

So to me, it's find your passion. And if your passion is real estate, buying real estate, building real estate, whatever it may be that's going to drive you, that's going to create your strategy for you. If you go off into, hey, I want to start this business, but at the end of the day, you don't care about that, and you just like, something I'm going to do, I would try to stay away from that because you're just forcing yourself into something that's not going to be a natural driver for you.

Okay, I want to make sure I understood you correctly. So what you believe or what you think, correct me if I'm wrong, is in order to know what you want to do, you actually have to experience those things and try them for a while to know if you want to do it. And once you find that thing and you're like, you know what? I love this thing, my experience I was thinking about this is my experience was I was a plumber for my dad.

When I out of high school, I had quit because he had asked if I wanted to come on full time. And I was like, well, I don't know. And he says, well, it's a yes or no thing.

And I said, okay, then it's a no. And pushed into a corner, I had to make a decision. So then I became a framer, and I'm like, wow, I actually love framing.

And I did it for four years after plumbing, and I realized at that point that I hated plumbing. But when I realized that I loved framing, I thought, I want to get into house building. This is what I want to do.

But without that experience, and if I wouldn't have been pushed into a corner to say, hey, do this or do that, and you need to make up your mind, I wouldn't have probably quit. I probably would have just kept plumbing, not even realizing I didn't like it. What I gathered from what you told me is and I might be wrong, so correct me is, when you're doing stuff, I took your example of Lean Six Sigma, and you started learning these things, and then you realize, I love doing these things, and this is what I want to do.

But you really don't know until you try it. Exactly. I would say that that rule of thumb would be good.

I'm going to call it the 80 20 rule. Right. 80% of the time, I would put that down as saying, yes, that's probably true.

You don't know until you try it. But the other 20% of that time is kind of that risk factor you throw into life sometimes, right. You just want to say, I'm going all in, and you take that risk.

So I'm not going to say it's. 100% of the time that you want to go down that mentality path of making sure it's something you want to do. Life is going to throw opportunities at you that maybe you take that risk.

So that's that 20% piece of it. That's awesome. Yeah.

Okay. Well, with that, we're going to wrap, and I appreciate you coming down, and I appreciate all you do for our business. You're welcome.

Well, thanks for having me on the podcast and really enjoyed it. And it's always great to work with you and your team. You guys are fantastic.

You got a great thing going, and I'm just happy to be working with you on it. Awesome. Okay.