Ask it again….

What is most important now?

Getting new leads (Marketing)?

Selling?

Production capacity/quality/consistency?

Measuring results (Accounting)?

People – training, recruiting, teamwork, engagement…

Identify what the MOST important thing to do is – then get the RIGHT PEOPLE (“WHO not how”) all over it until it’s not the most important thing (obstacle, missed opportunity) anymore.

Then ask the question again.

SO – what is your answer?  What is MOST important now?

It takes as long as you make it take!

On one hand things take time.

On another hand, they take as long as you make them take.  

I think that having a sense of urgency about taking the steps that will move you forward is necessary to do really well.

Just eliminate the time and steps in between making important decisions and taking key actions.  

Figure out what the most important steps are and knock them out.  When one is done, get right on the next.

The business moves no faster than the leader is making key decisions and implementing.

How long do you want it to take?

It's been a great year here at Contractor Nation!

For those of you who don’t know, my business is called Contractor Nation, and it is composed of 2300 employees and many business entities in 35 states.

We have had a great year here.  It was a year of growth and stability.  We built another building on our campus and acquired another one. 

We started a new business – M. C. Fence Company, as a franchisor.

All our businesses grew – all 36 of them.  

But what I am most proud of is the rock-solid foundation we are on.  We have employees who are experienced, engaged, and happy.  A high percentage of them stay year after year.  We have a great culture and there are a lot of smiling faces around here.  People comment on it when they come into our buildings.

I recently took the Ferry boat across Long Island Sound on a Friday night to our company there – Healthy Basement Systems, for their Christmas Party.  It is led by Marc Tannenbaum, who worked in our office, heading up our Dr. Energy Saver division for years.

I saw the same thing there – great culture and happy turned-on people.

Marc was calling people up and giving awards.  The last one was for the woman who had been there the longest – Denise, who is the office manager.  Denise came up and told a little story.  She said one day long ago, she was in Connecticut and was talking to my right-hand man here – Mark Daconto.  They were heading out to lunch, and I jumped in and joined them.  During lunch, in the conversation, I apparently said that I was all in and here for the long run.  She said, “That was over twenty years ago, and he’s still here.”

I hoped nobody could see it, but I welled up a little.  That’s right.  I’m still here.  I’m the no-quit guy.  I am honored to not only be the leader of my team, but the steward of it.  I will see that nothing bad happens to our team.  I will see to it that all parties win.

Thank you for the story Denise!  And YOU are still here too!  Love ya!

The best is yet to come! 

The leader sets the culture

“The level of morale is a good barometer of how each of your people is experiencing your leadership.” – Danny Cox

They say culture is what happens when the leader leaves the building.

If you have a culture problem, it’s the leader’s fault.  Who got hired.  Who you put up with.  The expectations you set.  How YOU behave.  What you tolerate.  How you talk and what you talk about.  Walking the talk.  Communication and the character of it.  Your caring.  What you celebrate.  Your attention or your neglect.

It all flows from there.  

A great culture will unlock performance, productivity and happiness and lead to employees who stay and get more experienced.  

A thousand problems go away if you can create a good culture.

How is the culture at your business?

Musings of a high school graduate.

 I didn’t go to college.  At one time I thought the word college had a “d” in it – “colledge”. (Sound it out!) Isn’t that funny!  Today, after 42 years in business, I have 2,300 employees in 35 states. I teach leadership to thousands of leaders across the world, and have a blog (short daily message) called Think Daily and one called Think Daily for Businesspeople that I’ve been writing faithfully every weekday for 16 years that is read by over 20,000 people.

 

How did this happen?  Answer – lifelong learning and lifelong practice.

 

When I was a young self-employed carpenter, framing houses with my three employees, I discovered audio learning with the six cassette programs from Nightengale Conant company.  When I started listening to Earl Nightengale, Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn and Denis Waitley, I was hooked.  My friends would see the cassette programs in my 1967 Chevy pickup and say “Aww you listening to that motivational crap again?”  I knew what was good for me so I wasn’t deterred. I’d hide them under the seat when I had to give one of them a ride home.

 

At the time they were expensive. $59 (in 1983 dollars) for a six-cassette program which was really one audiobook.  It didn’t matter to me.  I made the investments in myself.

 

Since then I have listened to perhaps 1,000 books – maybe more.  Not a minute of drive time was wasted.  I learned about marketing, psychology, leadership, management, personality styles, how to think well, money management, great service, and so many other things that I needed to know to become a leader who could accomplish what I wanted to .

 

I couldn’t see all that has actually happened in my business and my life back then.  But each learned capability solved another problem and opened up new doors.  It’s like driving at night.  You can’t see your destination 100 miles away, but if you drive as far as your headlights can see, you can see farther.

 

Today, we have all the world’s information available for free and a supercomputer in our pockets.  It has leveled the playing field.  Anyone can learn anything – if they want to.

Someone said it’s not the “have’s and the have not’s” anymore, it’s the “will’s and the will not’s”.  Nothing is being withheld from anyone.

 

It’s a great time to be a learner.

Your life will never outperform the leader

Who is the leader of your life?  Fortunately, you are a free person.  (Over the course of human history, it wasn’t always that way.) 

Obviously, you are the leader of your own life.

The quality of your life is the quality of you.

Your character, interests, delay of gratification or not, ambition, vision, self-discipline, courage, relationships you choose and choose to stay in – all of it.

Your life will be as good as you are.

How cool is that?

The loftier the goal, the deeper the foundation

Leadership excellence. The quality of your people.  The level of commitment and engagement.

Training.  Standards and values.  Communication channels.  Skills and abilities.

Great success takes time.

The loftier the building, the deeper the foundation must be laid.

Greatness = Consistency on the Fundamentals

Answer the phone.  Follow up.  Be polite.  Ask questions.  Listen.  Care.  Do it right each time.  Be clean.

All the fancy innovation or technology won’t help your organization if you don’t get the basics right.

Talk about it.  Talk about listening and follow-up and caring and cleanliness.

It doesn’t happen all by itself.

Master the fundamentals and be consistent.

Sometimes, that’s all that is needed for competitive advantage.

Ego is the enemy

I borrowed the title for today’s post from a book by the same name that I listened to.

I know a businessperson who just didn’t want to take advice.  My feeling is that he wanted to “be his own man”, and that taking advice would be a sign of weakness.

Well, years passed, and after being unable to build a great team, years of poor execution, and many bad decisions, he finally threw in the towel.  I know that his people felt that he was mostly interested in his success and less interested in theirs.

To be a great leader, you have to care about the success of your team and they have to know it by their observations.

When you lead others you need to work very hard on yourself, learning all the skills necessary and becoming the kind of person others will follow because of your credibility and caring. 

From there, it’s about other people.

Get the right people quickly

If you have been a subscriber for some time, you see me give advice regarding keeping your people, and that turnover kills you.  Each time a person leaves and you have to hire a new one, that piece of your business is brand new.

You also hear me say that if you have the wrong person you need to recognize it and let them go elsewhere so you can find the right person for that seat.

The idea between them is that you need to get the right people and keep them as quickly as possible.  If you made a hiring mistake, fix it and get the right person there.  Don’t string out this process for any more months or years as it needs to take.

It takes plenty of time even if you do it right.  Don’t make it take any longer than it has to.

Once you get the right people in the right seats, then they can build their knowledge and experience and teamwork – and that’s when things get fun.

A leader is team-builder-in-chief.  The better and faster you can do that job, the faster your business will pop.