Podcast Transcript

[00:00:20] Sean Steele: G’day everybody, and welcome to 10 Minute Tuesday. Well, we are at the end of the year and that means hopefully you're going to get a little bit of downtime and you don't want to spend heaps of time reflecting or reflecting all the way throughout the periods. So, what I suggest this year is perhaps have a crack at doing like a half day of solid reflection, but with structured questions to work through so you can be present with friends and family.

[00:00:41] Because the reality is, if you don't carve out the time, you kind of find yourself mentally wandering off for a week or two. Do it properly, just get it out of the way so you can be present with those that matter. What I tend to do at the end of the year and what I've done for the last 10 or 15 years driving the growth of different businesses is to review four key areas: strategy, your personal effectiveness, your leadership, and your business rhythms.

[00:01:03] So what I wanted to do today was just to give you some prompters for some questions. So, if you're going to spend any time reflecting in this holiday season, you've got a bit of structure to do that with. So, what are the questions? Let's keep them pretty simple. Number one, your strategy. Are you clear about what you want your business to look like in three years’ time?

[00:01:19] And if you are, is your strategy aligned with that? For example, do you know what initiatives you're going to double down on that are going to help you to get from A to B? And as a result of knowing what they are, it gives you the ability to say no to other things that come along. You know, thinking about key initiatives is all about getting out of the short-term urgency and into like medium-term importance thinking because business moves fast and it's hard and it's quick. And if you don't jam a wedge in for a couple of things that take focus and resources and effort that won't pay off today, but over the next three years could transform your business, then you get stuck in operations and reactions. And in three years you might end up with a bigger business, but not a better one, a more competitive one, one that's actually really building momentum towards scale. So, the question is, do you know what those big bets are? And are you confident that the ones that you've chosen are going to move you the greatest distance towards your goals? 

[00:02:37] Okay. Second area I think is worth a bit of reflection is your personal effectiveness. Are your personal habits, and by personal habits, I mean actually fun, meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep. Are they helping you to show up at your best? And if not, where can you jam a wedge in and start improving those things? You know, a very smart client of mine Ryan said to me last week, "As a founder, I know I need to have my best 2023 for the business to have its best 2023.” And I couldn't have said it better myself.

[00:02:37] You know, your brain is your greatest asset as a founder. The decisions that you make are affected materially by the state that you're in. So can you imagine what kinds of decisions that you are making if you feeling burned out and over? Probably not great. You can't just power on and hope that the quality of your thinking is going to improve just magically by itself.

[00:02:55] And let's be clear, your entire business spends their entire year working on the answers to the questions that you ask yourself and that you ask of your team. That's what work is. So, if the questions that you are asking are poor because your brain is foggy and tired and unclear, that's actually what everybody else is going to be spending their time working on the answers to, if that makes sense. So, I think it's actually time to put as much effort into your personal performance and my personal performance as into the businesses' performance. And I came up with a fun acronym that I thought makes it easy to think about this. It's called FMEDS.

[00:03:28] Have you taken your FMEDS this week? You know, F is for Fun. Where do you have joy in your week that actually fills your bucket? You know, the things that you probably used to do as a teenager that you dropped when life got busy and work and families and so on. That's the F. M is for Meditation. I know it feels a bit woo-woo for some people, but if you're concerned about that, actually try the Smiling Minds app.

[00:03:48] Lots of free meditation in there. I've done it plenty of times, but it doesn't have music. There's no woo-woo, there's no spooky voices. Just clear, authentic, simple, guided chances to stop for 2-minutes, 5-minutes, 10-minutes, whatever you can create as a habit, and it will absolutely help you start in the right state for your day.

[00:04:04] Do I do it religiously? Not all the time, and every time I do it, I go; why am I not doing that every single day? It's such a state changer. Okay, exercise. I'm not going to carry on about exercise. I'm no exercise expert, but you and I both know that 20-minutes a day or even every second day of vigorous exercise, I don't mean just exercise, but like weights or cardio or sweating, basically massively improves your mood and your resilience. There's lots of science behind it. I'm not going to go into that, but exercise is absolutely key for you to improve your mood, which is one of the things that improves your decision making. 

Okay, the D is for Diet. I find this one hard, because I do love sugar. It's my Achilles heel, but I applicate myself knowing that all the food that we cook and eat at home is excellent.

[00:04:45] So if I go off track, 10 to 15% of the time, at least 85 to 90% was great. No question. I'm sure you will agree that too much caffeine, processed food and alcohol will make you a worse CEO. Full stop. 

The final one is sleep. I also find this one hard because I don't want to miss any minutes of the day. I want to get an hour or two to myself every day to get myself in the right state. I need some time to myself. I want that first 20 or 30 minutes in the morning for my first coffee when nobody else is up. I need half an hour to activate all of my core muscles and my glutes. Because I've got all these herniated discs that I've done in my back a million times through sport. And then I like to spend an hour walking with my wife and the dog, or surfing with the boys or doing a workout.

[00:05:22] But that means I actually need to be up at 4:00 AM every day, which makes it actually quite challenging to get the sort of recommended eight hours of sleep every night. When I'm getting up at, you know, 4:00 AM, it's not always easy to do, but I'm always grateful that I've done it and I work pretty well on, you know, six and a half to seven hours of sleep, but I prefer seven and a half to eight hours of sleep.

[00:05:40] Point being, it's not about me, but everybody knows how much sleep they need. I think you can feel it, and you either feel rested or you don't. So, if you don't, something's going awry and you probably need to check on the amount of sleep you're getting for you. So do a bit of an FMEDS check. What could you do this year?

[00:05:53] Don't take on too much. Build in one habit every maybe six to eight weeks. Let it settle in, then stack on the next one. Slow changes. Not all the changes at once. I know we know this stuff, but this is the opportunity to step back and go. How can I make some small changes this year? That'll start to help the way that I show up for other people. Because if you have your best year, as Ryan said, everybody else has the opportunity to have their best year. 

[00:06:13] Okay. Third area of reflection is leadership. How effectively are you setting your leaders up to succeed? You know, fundamentally how you approach your leadership with your key people will dictate how they model leading their people, which will impact how much load you carry, how much load they carry, and how much load everybody else carries to free you up to work on the business more. Which I know we all want to do. Right? So, some questions for you to consider are you challenging them to build operational plans that will see your business become best practice in the area that they're responsible for.

[00:06:43] What I mean by that, so let's say you've got a sales manager. Ask them to come up with a plan on how you become a world-class sales organisation. Don't do the thinking yourself. Get them to build a one-page plan with initiatives like Gantt Chart or something so you can see what they think that you should be focused on, and challenge them to initiate the thinking so that they own the plan, and then you can just challenge and refine it and endorse it, and then support them.

[00:07:05] The second question there is, are you applying the right leadership style for their stage of competence in the projects that they're leading? You know, quite often we'll have someone who's very experienced in say like six out of eight competency areas that they need to do their job well. And so, you then assume that they're competent in everything, so you can just delegate to them anything. But then you give them a project for which they're actually incompetent. You know, they may not know what they don't know. They might be unconsciously incompetent. They don't know what they don't know or consciously incompetent. They know that they don't know stuff, but they still don’t know how to do it. And therefore, you are still assuming that you can just delegate to them. But actually, you might need to direct or coach or support them more, depending on what they need. If you assume that you can delegate them to them on everything, you may not actually be setting them up for success. You have to adapt your leadership style, not just for the person, but for the task or the projects that they're undertaking to help them succeed.

[00:07:56] Third is, are the meeting agendas of your meetings with your leaders inspiring thinking and brainstorming as opposed to just reporting and kind of approval or disapproval? You know, we've all been in meetings where the boss wants one-on-one-on-one, and it's; what did you do last week? What are you doing this week?

[00:08:13] Okay, thanks very much. Next person in the door. You know, it's not great. What questions could you use in your agenda to stimulate better thinking by your leaders? Like, you know, which customers have you spoken to this week and what are they saying about what's changing in the market or their perspective of us, or in how they're making decisions or, and what are the implications of that? Which team members have you done a start, stop, continue with this week. You know, like getting them to reflect on maybe your leadership. What would they like to see you stop doing, start doing, or continue doing that's really working? Or maybe not you as a leader, but the whole business.

[00:08:42] What do we as a business need to start doing or stop doing or continue doing? That sort of mini feedback loop can be really impactful in terms of helping you figure out where you might need to prioritise next or how we can constantly improve. What about, what's your biggest roadblock to success and what options do you have to navigate through that and how are you thinking about tackling it? Don't do the work for them. Don't say, what's your problem? Let's work on solving it together. Say, what's the problem? What do you think is the strategies? What do you think are your options? How are you thinking about tackling that so that you can coach them rather than do the work for them and jump in and save them?

[00:09:13] Challenge them to do the thinking for themselves so that they grow. Your job isn't to tell them what to do all the time. It's to help them learn to think like you, so they can actually make, they can think, I guess at a higher quality level, make better decisions. 

[00:09:24] Okay. The fourth and final area is business rhythms. How effective are the planning, meeting, and reporting rhythms in your business. And as you stew on that, the second question as a result of that is, how is that effectiveness or ineffectiveness impacting on your diary to enable you to focus on the things that you should be focused on?

[00:09:44] Like enough time for medium-term strategy and planning, culture, cultural design, customers, engaging with customers, cash optimisation, and enabling the success of your key leaders. Those things all rely on you having an effective diary structure to give you time to focus on those things. So, here's a few things to consider.

[00:10:02] Are the right people meeting with the right people, talking about the right things and at the right frequency? And second, how clear are the inputs that people are expected to bring to those meetings to make them effective?

[00:10:14] What's the agenda, what's being discussed and what are the outputs that are expected from the meeting? And then who do those outputs flow to? Like to stop more senior people asking questions to people who've been in the meeting about stuff that's already been discussed. I actually like to think about this like a meeting matrix.

[00:10:29] In fact, I've always had a Meeting Matrix as a CEO for the whole organisation, and that might sound like it's way too detailed to you, but let me ask you, have you considered the cost of a meeting for an hour with six people in your organisation that people come unprepared to, has no quality in the agenda, and no outputs that flow out to or up to the right stakeholders.

[00:10:47] So then multiple stakeholders, waste time and money going back to those people who were in the meeting to talk about what did or didn't get decided. You know, let's just say you had an average salary in your business of a hundred grand, including on costs. Okay? So that's like 50 bucks an hour per head, right?

[00:11:02] Six people, 50 bucks an hour. That's a $300 meeting, there's another $300 wasted in the follow up by other stakeholders because the information flow wasn't well constructed. So, now it's a $600 meeting, that quickly becomes a thousand dollars meeting when you add in a couple of extra people. Or it goes from 60-minutes to 90-minutes. And now imagine an offsite with eight people. Don't get me started on offsites. You know, one of the biggest costs in your organisation that is hidden is meetings, and if you are not paying attention to that, you have got rocks in your head. If you do not spend time designing that and trying to put it on autopilot and trying to make it efficient.

[00:11:32] So you know, every week and every month, the rhythmic readings, I don't mean every meeting, but the 80 to 90% that are actually rhythmic and predictable. That's around planning and reporting and discussing anything that you can expect to discuss, there's obviously going to be some ad hoc stuff. But if you're not thinking about, you're actually wasting lots of money week in, week out.

[00:11:49] And what's worse is it means that your diary is probably cluttered and ineffective as much as everybody else's is. So, I strongly encourage you to think about things like designing rhythmic meetings in a matrix for the whole business. Who should be there? What inputs are required? What's the core agenda? What are the outputs? And who do those outputs flow to? Because that's what happens in a meeting. And how does that move through the organisation? And when you then consider what's happening in your diary, what percentage of your month are you spending on things that CEOs should also do, in addition to just general execution and reacting. The proactive stuff, looking upwards and outwards to the next one to three years.

[00:12:24] Thinking about the market, thinking about strategy, engaging with customers, understanding their pain points, their perspectives on your business, the problems in the industry, thinking about cash, and how to bring it forward so you can enable your growth. How to help people understand what success looks like for them and for the organisation and what needs to be put in place to enable that success.

[00:12:42] Now that all sounds like a lot, but let me summarise to keep that really simple. It's really simple. When you think about four things, if you're going to do some reflection time this year as a CEO, as a leader, I would like you to reflect on your strategy. Is your strategy aligned to your three-year goals? Number one.

[00:12:59] Number two, your personal effectiveness. What do you need to change so you can have your best 2023 to make it possible for other people to have their best 2023. Third, your leadership. How can you ensure that you're enabling your key people to succeed? And finally, your business rhythms. How are they affecting the diaries of your team and your diary, and therefore, how much time you are getting to spend on the stuff that really matters.

[00:13:23] If you value getting to step back and reflect, which I absolutely do, and I really enjoy this process every year, and you like working on your business to make it better, you might like to consider joining me in the next ScaleUps Roadmap Program in the first half of next year. Scaleups Roadmap is an exclusive cohort-based course that's going to help first-time founders develop a growth strategy and execution plan to enhance their growth rates, valuation and exit options.

[00:13:44] That is the goal. And what are we doing in the program? Yeah. How do we get there? Well, we are actually stepping back and forcing ourselves to do the hard thinking to work on the business because it's so difficult to make space to do this ourselves and without a framework. So, we are making sure that your growth strategy and therefore what you prioritise in terms of your effort and investment and the team's effort and investment results in you taking the maximum steps forward towards fulfilling the potential of your business over the next three years.

[00:14:09] No more wasted time. Wondering whether you're prioritising the right things, no constant feeling of guilt knowing that you're stuck in implementation mode and you're just reacting, and you are therefore not making good decisions based on good strategic anchors. No more feeling unable to get your people on board with where you are on head because it's difficult to communicate what's going on in your head as to where the business is heading, and no more feeling alone on the journey where you don't have anybody around you as a cheer squad to help you get there.

[00:14:32] Well, how is that possible? Well, by the end of the course, which by the way, is mostly online, you do most of the learning and activities and thinking in your own time. But then you get brought together with other founders to workshop ideas four times over four months, and they help you keep accountable to progressing. You walk away with a clear growth strategy for the next three years, a 12-month simple execution plan, both of which your team will be able to understand and embrace and own, a renovated and improved business model, because we pick up all the elements of your business model and we optimise them for scale and valuation as we go.

[00:15:02] And you end up with some amazing new business peers to cheer you on and support you. So, if you want to know more about the ScaleUps Roadmap Program, head over to scaleupsroadmap.com.au. Join the wait list, and all the details become available about everything in the program. You'll be the first to know. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and New Year's period, and enjoy reflecting on your year past and the year ahead. Hope these questions have helped.