What if you can’t see the future?
Well, every entrepreneur can. Every entrepreneur has an image in their mind. What they need to do is get out of their office a little bit, kind of get into nature and just start jotting down the images that pop into their head.
What happens is most entrepreneurs can’t figure out how to do it. And that’s OK; this is more about just getting the picture. Almost like a homeowner, if they were going to build a new home or design a new kitchen. They don’t know how to build the house but they know how to dream of what the house might look like three years out.
Then what’s the next step?
The next step is attracting a great team. And this is where Jim Collins in the book “Good to Great” talked about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in their right seats. It’s really, really critical to go out and get the right employees into your company and one-by-one start weeding out the wrong people.
Start weeding out the people that don’t fit with that future vision, don’t have the skill set to build it, don’t have the values that are important to your organisation, and obsessing about getting the right people into your company. Because once you have all the right people in and they’re aligned with the vision of where you are going, they’ll figure out how. It’s almost like contractors.
What if they are 80%? What if they’re, you know, they’re alright but what if you’re not sure?
If you’ve got an 80 percenter or a person who might be a B player, you’re going to give them a 30 or 90 day performance plan. You’re going to coach, you’re going to train them along that plan and hopefully they get there. And if after 30 to 90 days they just aren’t moving along that plan, you have to move them out. They can go and work for a competitor, but they can’t stay with you.
Did you do that ruthlessly when you were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK??
We did. We actually ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for. Watson Wyatt, a global HR firm, ranked us number two in Canada and they ranked Google number one in the US. Even though we were ruthless about getting rid of the wrong people, we had a fantastic corporate culture and the employees loved working with us.
Why did they love you?
They all knew where we were going. They all knew what their role was in getting there. And we didn’t tell them how to do it. We just showed them where we were going and we gave them the training and the support and strong meeting rhythms to help them in their roles in getting the right stuff done. And we allowed them to figure out how.
How did you build up the confidence and the strength to be able to make that kind of constant decision to move those people on?
How did we make the strength internally to do that? We learned that from Jack Welch, from a local entrepreneur here in Vancouver, the Jim Patterson Group, and we also did it with a tonne of respect. I mean I have former employees who I have fired six, seven years ago who I get emails and Twitter messages and Facebook notes from them every other week saying I love you, I hope you are well. You know, giving me updates on their life.
Getting fired with love.
Totally, like you’re moving them or otherwise you are stealing from them. If you keep an employee working with you for more than a few days after you know they should be gone, you steal everyday of their life going forward.
What’s that next step?
After you’ve got the vision and the team, then it comes down to reverse engineering the future. Essentially it’s like getting the blueprints in place to build the dream home. So you start putting the strategic plan in place of all of the critical projects that you need to do over the next three years to make every sentence of the painted picture come true.
Most of the world is in recession. How hard is it to be working on critical projects when you haven’t got that cash coming in the door?
It’s probably the absolute best time to be doing it. Because you’re going to get rid of all the extraneous, silly, maybe hair-brained ideas. All of those get flushed out of the way.
You get rid of all of the deadweight employees right now as well. I’m talking to entrepreneurs all over the planet. I coach entrepreneurs in five countries currently and all of the ones I’m talking to are so hyper-focused and excited about the current times.
It’s the entrepreneurs that don’t have a tight plan and aren’t hyper-focused and spending most of the time checking emails and reading the newspaper, those are the ones that are in trouble.
But spending time on a really tight plan, working closely with your employees and helping them grow, and then spending all of the rest of your time with customers and employees, that’s how you’re going to grow your business in a recession.
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