The Key Trait of All Great Business Leaders | Ep 45

Speaker A

00:00:00.240 - 00:16:36.380

This is episode 45, and on it I cover the number one trait in great business leaders and how it sabotages small business owners when they start slipping with it. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. Looking forward to digging in with you today about this concept of what the best leaders have in common.

I've been working with a lot of business owners over the years, and there's a lot of ways you can go about building a business. There's a lot of different styles of business leadership. Obviously, business models differ by personality types, by who's in charge of them.

But the one thing that stands out over and over and over, when I look at all the most successful entrepreneurs that I've worked with, the best clients I've had, the people who've sold their companies for the most money, the companies that have gotten through the craziest times, the single trait that all those owners and leaders had was decisiveness. And when I'm doing assessments, one of the factors on the disc assessment is the D score, which is decisiveness.

I also call it your dominance or your directness score.

I find that people who are higher in decisiveness tend to be a little bit more outspoken, a little bit more direct, a little bit more dominant in some of their interactions with others. And when we look at navigating growth, so many companies that I work with are somewhere in the 2 to 5 million dollars range.

And there's so much change going on at that stage of business size and maturity. And the number one thing that causes business owners to stall out there is they start managing by committee.

They start looking to too many people for opinions, they start looking to too many places to try to get the perfect information, to try to get all of the details before they move forward. And I think what happens is when they get to that spot, they feel out of their depth.

And there's a number of factors coming together that causes them to get stuck.

I talk about it a lot in my consulting that the $5 million desert, seven figure desert that stuck at 5 million is the worst place any small business owner can get stuck at. And it's because the managing by whack, a mole that has been going on for so long in their career no longer works.

They can't handle the moles that are showing. And so they're stacking up one behind the other.

And the reason they're stacking up is because they don't have managers to delegate 80, 90% of the decision making to. And so everybody gets stuck waiting on the owner to make decisions on big things.

And so everybody gets stuck twiddling their thumbs and the owner feels trapped and pressured, and they have way less time, freedom, oftentimes less profitability at 5 million than they did, maybe 3 million. And they are completely stuck. And it's out of this stuckness that they get paralyzed and they stop making decisions. And I get it.

It feels overwhelming. It feels like the mistakes are greater when you make bad decisions.

But when we look at successful leaders over and over and over, they make quick, informed, detailed decisions, direct decisions, and they're willing to go back on them if they find that the path isn't right. But I've got one example. We've got a client right now that is struggling with his sales team.

He's got a lot of inside reps, and they're closing at a low rate. And so we've been trying to help him recruit a sales rep. And I've been coaching him through it.

I haven't been managing the process directly, but I've been pointing out candidates, 99% of them are not a fit. So he found one. She's a great fit. She's got potential.

But he keeps hesitating and he's worried and he's afraid that he's not going to be able to keep her. He's afraid that she's not going to hit the ground running or that she's not going to make as much money as she hopes. And we're talking with him.

I'm coaching him with another friend I brought in on it, and we're talking with him about make the decision, get her started. You're coming into busy season. You need to be decisive. And it's an interesting detail about his company.

I've assessed his entire team and they all are very low on the decisive score on the disk assessment. It bleeds into the company.

And so they're struggling with executing in a focused way because, as I say all the time, the fish stinks from the head down.

An old Chinese proverb as this owner who has been decisive enough up to this point, but is now starting to run into uncertainties, in insecurities, whatever, very normal stuff. But without having other decisive people in the organization, he's now stalling out.

I've got other clients that are in similar spots where they get to this stage and they get paralyzed and they start going to everybody and it doesn't matter if everybody's giving them the same advice. They're still stalling, they're still hesitating. And so I've been reading a book that I highly recommend called Working Backwards.

It's by two guys, Colin Breyer and Bill Carr. They're ex Amazon executives.

They were early on at Amazon and they talk about the culture at Amazon and the leadership rigor that they had to go through that Jeff Bezos took them through. And I think I've referenced Bezos interview with Lex Friedman in a recent episode. But if you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend it.

And I highly recommend their book Working Backwards. They have made management really, really clear in a way that I probably haven't read anything close to them other than Drucker.

That makes the process of management really clear. And their process at the backbone of all of it is decisiveness. And you can't fault their outcomes and their results.

And not everything at Amazon has been a success. Not everything is a home run.

They talk about some mistakes in their social media posts on LinkedIn that they made trying to launch various initiatives and what they learned in the journey. In the book they talk more about the successes and what those looked like.

But throughout all of it, they demand that leaders have strong opinions and make quick decisions and lead clearly. And I think that's where so many business owners really just start running into their limits.

So if you're a business owner and you're struggling with how to be decisive in your business, in the size and the scope, and you feel like you're getting out of your depth, a couple things that I tell all of my clients to start with are1, you have to cut back the amount of time that you're distracted if you're in your day to day, if you're doing tedious stuff, because that's just how it's been.

And you don't make space to think and you don't make space to process, and you don't make space to have deep discussions, then your decision making is going to suffer significantly. We cannot make critical decisions when our mental ram is at capacity. There's no way. It's impossible.

I love Naval Ravikant's quote that says a busy calendar and a busy mind will prevent you from doing great things. And this is the number one saboteur of your ability to be decisive is being busy. And so you may say, well, yeah, it's easy for you to say.

You're just a consultant, you live in an ivory tower. You don't have the million things I have to do every day to get done, to keep the wheels on this engine and keep things going forward. I get it.

I know you're busy. But that's why my bottleneck breakthrough process focuses. The very first thing is on freeing up your time.

If the owner does not have time, nothing will grow the company. I don't care what whiz bang idea, new shiny object, breakthrough hack from some guru that you try to implement.

If you do not have time to think, to react, to be proactive, to be a fixer, to roll up your sleeves, to get into the weeds, to do things that are uncomfortable, you're never going to grow. And so you have to free up your time. So I told a client the other day, do a time study.

He's been in a very stable business, he's third generation running his family's business and he comes to the office every day, he's there all day. And I told him, I said, do a time study.

Figure out where you're wasting time just because it's the way it's always been, just because people come at you and want a God admitted meaning. And it was a revelation to him. He realized, oh my gosh, there's so many little things that I'm just the backstop for everybody else.

And so he started implementing systems. He came up with a system solution for things that he's stepping in to fill in. And he's like, you know what?

Somebody else could fill that in, somebody else could do these things. I don't have to remind this so and so to do XYZ every time they come through and do this activity.

So he set up some reminders for that person and by getting him out of the tedium of the day to day, he's able to have more time to think. And so his next question to me was, okay, what should I focus on? And I said, look at your financials. His profitability is right around 20%.

They're in a retail business, multiple million dollar company, but they're facing a downturn, they're related to real estate and it's starting to turn hard in his market. So I said, what's your profitability? And he says, ah, we're about 20%. I said, great work on getting it to 25%.

Now you may say, oh, that's easy for you to say, just chopping expenses and cutting people off or whatever, but it's like if you don't focus on strengthening your profitability, then when the market turns, you're just going to be bleeding that much more. And he already survived the big recession in 08 and they fell by over 50% then and survived. So he already has the muscle memory to get through it.

But by making time to think, by not being caught up in the got a minute? Meetings, he's able to now go look at those financials and we'll dig into them.

He'll send me financials in a couple weeks, I'll look at them, I'll challenge him, I'll press him on questions around, well, why are you spending here? What is this returning? Why is this necessary? How's this person performing? Have you a performance improvement plan with them?

What do they need to get to to justify their existence? All those hard things.

The sooner he can start working on that and have a plan for, hey, if the market turns harder, if we have softer summer, if things don't turn around or keep growing or whatever, he's got an execution plan and he can make those decisions quicker, faster, easier and with less stress because he has more time. So that's the number one thing. If you're too busy to think, then your decision making is going to suffer.

And if you're not decisive by nature, if you go to a restaurant and you're the last one to pick the meal or you're trying to figure out what to do with friends and you're always the one like, oh, I'm fine with whatever and you're not deciding and making a recommendation, that's clear.

If that's you by nature, then the more busy you are and the more ram your brain is consumed by, the less decisive you'll be in your business when it comes to critical decisions. So that's the number one way to improve your decision making is make more space.

The next is to start doing internal work and figure out why am I not decisive. Now this is a lot of navel gazing.

This may be sitting on a counselor's sofa and talking about your dad putting pressure on you when you were a kid to hurry up and pick what ice cream you wanted and you just wanted to test a couple more and try it out, but you always got the crappy ice cream because your dad put pressure on you, just got whatever he got or whatever. Now I'm not. That is a completely fictitious situation.

That's not something I ever experienced, but I could see that that could come to affect somebody's ability to make a decision.

Or maybe you're a millennial and you've got helicopter parents that never let you make a decision and so you never developed your decision making muscle. Until you became an adult.

And because it wasn't formed at a youth and you didn't get to make mistakes on little things, now you can't make mistakes on big things because everything paralyzes you and you're afraid of messing up. I don't know. But that's the next level of working on your decisiveness.

If you find that you've got a lot of projects, a lot of decisions that are stacking up and you just don't have time to think about them, you don't have time to look at. I will say that I had a family member, that he was a perfectionist and he had to make the most perfect choice.

And so oftentimes on the biggest things he would delay and delay and delay. And I realized my hypothesis was that if he didn't make a final decision, if he never finished that final project, it could never be judged.

And so if it couldn't be judged, then it couldn't be judged as a mistake yet. And so things were left undone forever for decades.

And it was a really interesting thing to watch because the things that he did finish were fantastic, but so many things he didn't because he was paralyzed from the fear of having regret, of making a mistake. So think through your decision making stalls like what's causing you to freeze and not move forward.

What's causing you to second guess every major move that you're trying to make.

What's causing you to get another quote or another estimate or check out another piece of software or talk to another advisor or go work with another coach.

What causes you to keep deferring to others, trying to, as Dan Kennedy said, take your umbilical cord and try to plug it into some stern, loving parent that's going to make the hard decisions for you. Those are real things that I talk about with my clients because these patterns repeat everywhere if they're in your life.

So I hope this is encouraging to you to assess where you're at in your journey of leadership, figure out where your decision making is starting to wane, where it's starting to falter and how to beef it up. Because this is the difference in small business ownership from crossing that 2 to $3 million chasm and getting past 10 million.

And I'll say I had another client we had a follow up call with the other day. They're in the tens of millions and they still struggle with decisiveness at the executive level.

And it was really fascinating to watch their inability to decide to cause them to just stagnate and they've got a fantastic company and they should be doing 100 million plus but they've just gotten past their depth and they are not decisive.

And it's been two years since I worked with them and I just wanted to have a catch up call and they're just exactly in the same spot, only with less profitability because they're not making hard decisions. So decisiveness is the differentiator in leadership. Over and over and over. Go get Working Backwards by Bill and Colin. It's a great book.

They're great guys. I really enjoy working with them. Hope this is challenging enough for you. I hope you don't feel like I picked on you too hard.

I don't have anybody in mind when I talk about these. I'm not passive aggressively coming at anybody with these posts or with these audios.

This pattern is repeating itself too much and the market is uncertain. D.C. is in chaos. The world is in chaos. So it's easy to feel like you can just spin around and want more certainty. But we all have to make decisions.

We all have to execute. We all have to move and get things done so that the outcomes we want can be achieved.

And without that decisiveness, your organization's just going to flounder and nobody else is going to make those decisions for you. Take care. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from triptych of snippets by Septah Helix. It's used under Creative Commons.