In this Simply Be Found huddle, hosts Rob and Dean are joined by special guest Pete Mohr, an experienced entrepreneur who shares invaluable insights on business ownership, exit planning, and creating systems that allow your business to thrive without your constant presence.
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This Huddle’s Special Guest
We’d like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Pete Mohr, founder of Simplifying Entrepreneurship, for joining us during the huddle and sharing some powerful insights with our community of business owners.
Pete’s been in the trenches of entrepreneurship for over 30 years, and it shows—not just in his success, but in his deep understanding of what it really takes to build a business that runs without running you into the ground.
He’s walked the walk:
- Built and ran a bathroom renovation company for 15 years
- Took a cleaning franchise from 30 clients to 300 before selling it
- Earned an Executive MBA to sharpen his business toolbox
- Helped others buy and sell businesses as a business broker
- Still owns and operates two thriving shoe stores, now celebrating 15 and 10 years respectively
And today, he uses all that experience to help other business owners create exit-ready systems, so they can scale their business, enjoy their life, and eventually transition on their terms.
Pete also works closely with family-run businesses, guiding them through the emotional and financial complexities of succession planning. As the leader of the NextGen group at the National Shoe Retailers Association, he’s helping the next generation step into leadership with confidence and clarity.
At Simply Be Found, we believe in making marketing simpler and more human. Pete’s work aligns beautifully with that mission: structure, freedom, legacy, and a business that doesn’t fall apart when you step away.
Thanks again, Pete, for your time, wisdom, and commitment to helping business owners build something they can truly be proud of.
Want to connect with Pete? You can find him here:
Key Takeaways From The Huddle
Pete started his entrepreneurial journey back in 1994 with a bathroom renovation company he ran for 15 years before selling. Since then, he’s grown and sold a cleaning franchise, worked as a business broker, and today, he owns two successful shoe stores (15 and 10 years strong). His career hasn’t just been filled with wins—he’s navigated the tough moments too, and it’s those lessons that shape the way he helps other business owners today.
Why Exit Planning Starts Now
Pete made one thing crystal clear: you will exit your business one day—the only question is whether it’s on your terms or someone else’s. He shared the “Five D’s” that force many business owners into sudden exits:
- Death
- Divorce
- Disagreement
- Disability
- Disinterest
About half of all exits happen unexpectedly. That’s why it’s critical to build your business with exit planning in mind from day one. This isn’t about selling tomorrow—it’s about protecting what you’ve built and being ready for whatever comes your way.
The Frameworks That Drive Sustainable Success
Pete outlined two frameworks that can help any business owner stop being the bottleneck and start building something that runs without them.
The CSA Leadership Framework
- Communication: Build trust and transparency inside and outside the business
- Structure: Create clear decision-making processes and roles
- Accountability: Transfer real responsibility, not just job titles
The Six P’s Operational Framework
- Promise: What are you really delivering to your customer?
- Product/Service: What are you selling that fulfills the promise?
- Process: How do you consistently deliver results?
- People: Who are your ideal customers, team, and partners?
- Promotion: How are you getting the word out?
- Profit: How are you funding your freedom and future growth?
These tools aren’t just for scaling—they’re the foundation for a business that’s sellable, sustainable, and self-sufficient.
Letting Go So Your Business Can Grow
Another major takeaway from Pete’s session was around team empowerment. To prepare for a future exit, you need to build a business that doesn’t revolve around you. That means:
- Asking team members, “What would you do if I wasn’t here today?”
- Shifting from micromanaging to monitoring a dashboard
- Coaching instead of controlling
- Letting your team learn through mistakes
- Focusing your time on the areas where you add the most value
If your team can run the business without you, then you’ve built something truly valuable.
The Emotional Side of Exit Planning
Dean brought up an important topic: the identity challenge that comes with exiting a business. For many owners, their business has been part of their story for decades. Letting go can feel like losing a piece of yourself.
Pete emphasized the need to prepare emotionally as well as operationally. Exit planning isn’t just about metrics—it’s about mindset. Start detaching your identity from your business now, and give yourself permission to build a life beyond it.
A Business Should Support Your Life—Not Consume It
Pete left us with a powerful reminder:
“We get into business so we can have a better life. But if you’re always propping up your business like Atlas holding the globe, something’s backwards. Your business should be propping up your life.”
That’s the heart of exit planning—not just preparing for the end, but designing a business that gives you options, freedom, and peace of mind every step of the way.
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Transcript
- 00:00 | Welcome & Introduction
- 01:45 | Pete’s Entrepreneurial Journey
- 05:30 | From Franchise to ShoeTopia
- 08:15 | Lessons from Failure
- 10:00 | The Easy Button Framework
- 12:00 | Simplifying Entrepreneurship with CSA
- 14:30 | The 6 P’s Framework
- 18:00 | Why Every Business Must Be Exit Ready
- 21:00 | Family Business Transitions
- 25:00 | The 5 D’s That Force an Exit
- 28:00 | Solopreneurs vs True Business Owners
- 30:00 | Adapting to AI & Modern Tools
- 33:00 | Love-It Zone and Avoiding Burnout
- 36:00 | Coaching Moments & Transferring Accountability
- 40:00 | The Dashboard Approach to Metrics
- 43:00 | Melancholy of Exit Planning
- 46:00 | Personal Identity vs Business Legacy
- 49:00 | Trademarking & Preparing for the Sale
- 52:00 | Funny Exit Stories (Poker Game Deals)
- 55:00 | Pete’s Resources & Where to Find Him
- 57:00 | Final Thoughts & Wrap-up
00:00 | Welcome & Introduction
00:01 Rob: Welcome to the Simply Be Found huddle with Dean and Rob, and today we have our guest Pete. Pete, you’ve done a lot inside of the business world. I’ve did a lot of research on you before today.
Looks like you’ve done a lot inside of the getting businesses ready to be sold and how you should be operating inside of your business versus, you know, being inside of the daily operations, actually being a business owner and having a business. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about that concept?
00:25 Pete: Yeah, for sure. I mean, over the—I—time goes quick guys. We were talking about that. I mean, I can’t believe it, but started my first real business, I’ll call it—I—I—I had the young childhood of pushing lawnmowers and doing all that kind of stuff, you know, like you hear about for several business owners.
But my first real business was a bathroom renovation company in 1994, and the person that owns it now called me in September, and he said, “Pete, it’s 30 years old. You had it for 15 years. I’ve had it for 15 years, and it served us both well.”
So I mean, it’s really, you know, 30 years goes by quickly, and a lot of stuff has happened, but I’ve been a business owner pretty much my entire life. We had that business. It was a franchise, so I’ve had franchise experience, and it’s—it got sold three different times within five years.
And at the end of the fifth year, I finally said, “Hey, I’m out of this. I’m going to do this on my own.” So I bought out my franchise and went my own way.
But during that time, we also bought another franchise. It was a cleaning franchise, and it was really suffering. And it was only—it only had about 30 clients. We built it and 10x-ed it, sold it at 300 clients about 10 years later. I went back to school, got my executive MBA, something I wanted to do. I became a business broker, helping other people buy and sell businesses, and then that’s where I found what we currently own, which is a shoe store.
01:45 | Pete’s Entrepreneurial Journey
01:45 Pete: And I bought my first shoe store as I pitched it to somebody else, and he said, “There’s no way in heck I’m going to sell shoes.” And it’s like, “All right, no problem.” But it was a good business, a good solid business, and continues to be. I just celebrated my 15th year of owning that business on April 1st, as we’re recording this just in the early parts of April. And we have another store as well, and it celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 1st.
And we’ve had another store in there too, which was an utter failure and cost me a lot of money. So, you know, as much as—as much as there’s good things about being a business owner, sometimes it doesn’t always go as planned either.
02:28 Rob: I’ve never—I’ve never worn that t-shirt where a company fail. No, not true. Everybody has a failure of some kind, right?
02:36 Pete: I’ve done it more times than I ever want to talk about, you know? But I mean, if you’re not taking risks, you’re not doing it. And a lot of times it was me getting in my own way that ended up causing it to fail.
02:48 Rob: Yeah, and when I—when I used to be part of buying and selling businesses, we saw that a lot inside of that world. And when I was looking at some of your stuff, it looked like you saw a lot of that as well.
02:53 Pete: For sure, for sure. I mean, I mean business owners get in—get in their own way more than what they probably should. And they—they get stuck on, “This is what I need to do.” I mean, when we look at, you know, Simply Be Found as a company, we have a lot of business owners that have a hard time being able to figure out, “This is the tasks I need to do to be able to grow.” They’re looking for that magic button.
And I don’t—I don’t know, Pete, maybe you have the magic button. Does the magic button exist in your world?
03:26 Pete: [Laughter] It’s—I haven’t found it yet. I was hoping you had it over there, Robert. I always wanted the magic button. I wanted that, and it’s like Staples. You press that easy button, and boom, you know, everything just comes together.
03:44 Rob: I was literally going to bring that up because one of the things I used to do at our retail stores is I had an Easy button.
03:52 Pete: Oh, really?
03:52 Rob: Like at the cash register. And people would—would come, and you know, we’d go through our process, you know, of how to get them into the right pair of shoes, make sure they love it. You know, I have a whole sort of framework, and I help my clients develop what we call the heart of whatever your business is called—that. And this one framework we call it the heart of Shutotopia for our shoe stores.
And as we pull everybody down to the heart of the shoe store, we want them to look great and feel fantastic. And when they look great and feel fantastic, and that all happened in an easy way, they’ll often say, “Wow, that was like so easy.” And I would say, “Hit the easy button. Let everybody know.” And they would hit that easy button. It’s like, “That was easy,” you know? And it was just one of those things.
So because I wanted to—to have them slap that thing because when they slapped it, it triggers in their mind that this was a good experience. And you know, whether we’re doing it for our own businesses or helping other people build that sort of stuff for their businesses, I think having a good experience and creating those experiences in your business is an important piece of business and running a good business so that you have returning customers and all this stuff.
05:30 | From Franchise to ShoeTopia
05:03 Pete: And, you know, a lot of what I’ve had to do because, unlike you guys, you still have hair. I’ve pulled all mine out. For anybody that’s already watching or watching this show…
05:10 Rob: Working on it.
05:10 Pete: And, you know, I—I—what I do is I like to try and—my business is called Simplifying Entrepreneurship because I’m trying to help other people get the craziness out of their head and into some sort of frameworks that makes it easier for them. And so I’m always putting stuff into frameworks.
And a couple of the little frameworks that I use—my—my—my biggest one is called the Business Alignment Framework. And the Business Alignment Framework, on the top of it, I’ll give you these two very quickly because they can all go into like completely full day sessions and everything. But on the—on the top of it, I call it the CSA.
And the CSA is, as a leader, these are the things you need to always be working on: your communication skills and strategies internally and externally; your structure, which is how is everything aligned in your business—do you even have an accountability chart, like does everybody know what the structure of decision-making is in your business; and then A is for the accountability.
So many small to medium-sized business owners will give somebody a title but don’t actually transfer the accountability. It’s a real problem. They don’t, and—and that’s where they can’t—they can’t go—they can’t do a vacation. They can’t go do any of this stuff because there have to be inside of it.
Now there’s certain business models you can get away with being a part of all that as long as you have a good structure and a lot of framework and process there.
06:30 Rob: We—we kind of go against the grain for Simply Be Found. Dean and I handle 100% of the support that comes through, but we couldn’t do that if it wasn’t for the team that’s behind us. And we couldn’t do it if it wasn’t for all the AI tools that are now out there and all that side. But it allows us to work directly with those business owners, which means we can spend, for how we have the system set up, maybe an hour a day to be able to go through and make sure the support tickets are taken care of. And we know they’re taken care of right because we’re the ones doing them, which is kind of that easy piece to do it, which makes—but we have that team behind us to be able to make that happen.
And a lot of—if you’re talking about a lot of, you know, retail shops or even if you’re getting into the home services area, you can’t—you can’t do that kind of piece. So you have to have the right people in those spots. So when you were setting those frameworks up, like for, say, home services, like you’ve done in your past, what—what was your technique there?
07:34 Pete: Yeah, so this is—I told you the leadership one, so that’s really for the business owner. The next piece of the puzzle, which I wrote a little book on, and my—and my podcast has been largely sort of centered around, are called the Six Ps. This—we—when I wrote the book, it was Five Ps, but we added another one.
So I’m going to give you that layout because it is the operational structure, in my opinion. And very quickly kind of go through them because, like I said, everything can be broken down into depth and detail. But it all starts—it’s the bedrock, it’s the foundation—with your promise.
And your promise is not your guiding principles. It’s not your mission. It’s not your vision. Those are all internal, all worthy, and you still need to do your work there. But what I’m talking about is your promise, and your promise is what you shout out on top of the mountain. “This is what I do. This is what I can do for you, and this is how you’re going to have a better life.”
08:15 | Lessons from Failure
08:18 Pete: So first of all, what’s your client’s problem? Secondly, how do you uniquely solve it? And thirdly, how do they have a better life at the end of using your service? Because one thing’s for sure, people only put their money down when they see a better life.
So if you can’t clearly communicate the better life of your services and all of the things—your goods, your products—it’s not going to happen. So that’s the bedrock.
And then we need to align the next three Ps, which are: your product (or if you’re a service business, your service), your process (which I know we talk a lot about on this show), your people—and I break down people into three, which is your ideal client, your ideal teammate, and your ideal outsource suppliers that helps and is aligned to deliver your promise.
When we have that alignment of that middle pack, here’s the other P that I’ve added because it always comes in the conversation: we need to promote it properly. And when we do that, we get to the final one, which everybody wants, which is profit.
And profit is the piece that we’re going to start digging into and align it so that we’re exit ready in our business. We—we can start hiring other people once we get to that profitability. Now, as a business owner, we can actually start looking at the stuff and saying, “What am I going to do with it? Am I going to reinvest? Am I going to expand? Am I going to take money out? Am I going to buy something else? Am I going to build?”
You know, because one thing is for sure, and you guys, I’m sure, will agree, that you can’t separate your life and your business. As much as people talk about it all the time, business owners, your life and your business—work-life balance? What is work-life balance? It’s—it’s—you have life with it, kind of thing?
10:00 | The Easy Button Framework
10:06 Rob: Our—our lives are part—like, our businesses are part of our lives as entrepreneurs.
10:12 Pete: Exactly, exactly. So well—I mean, even if you take a vacation, you’re still going to think about your business. So being hands-off on your business doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about your business.
Prime example, Robert. I mean, I took the—between middle of February to middle of March off. I didn’t like—I—I practice what I preach, and I didn’t have one call from my stores. I didn’t have one text from my stores. I didn’t have one email from my stores. Everything was done while I was gone, and when I ca—it doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it when I was gone. But the—the concept was that I need to be exit ready for this business at any given time, and this was a test.
So I was actually testing our process, testing our people, testing our product, testing all of those things that—when you put those six Ps into every lens of whenever you have a meeting and whatever your meeting structure is and whatever decisions you’re making, you’re thinking about those six Ps. Does it—does it tie back to the promise? Is the product aligned? Is the process aligned? Are the people aligned? Can I—can I promote this? Can I communicate it? Do I have the structure and accountability to make everything happen so I can have the right amount of profit?
It’s a model that you can gen—generally just plug and play into any business, whether it’s a service business, a retail business, manufacturing—it doesn’t matter. It’s a way of doing business and understanding how you can get your business to be exit ready, whether you want to exit one year, five years, 20 years. It doesn’t matter. But it’s now at the point where it can actually be self-sustaining if you want it to be, and you can work in the business where you want to and when you’re best serving it.
11:46 Rob: Well, I think that’s an important piece, and I think it’s important to do those small tests to know what—what—what can actually happen while we’re not inside of the scenes because if you are looking at going through and you’re planning and doing your exit strategy, that’s a very important piece to have in there. And I agree with it.
12:00 | Simplifying Entrepreneurship with CSA
12:04 Rob: And I think that at the very beginning of starting your business, you have to be very much in that—in that daily operation to be able to put those right processes down because you have to be able to know each of those steps that are happening so that way you know how to train somebody to be able to take over that spot.
But that’s a—you run into this huge piece, and Dean, I’m going to pick on you because you’re inside of this piece right now.
12:21 Dean: Yeah.
12:21 Rob: Is—and I—you and I talk about this all the time—is because Dean’s part of a generational business, and he’s handed the business for his other business off to his son and all that. First off, you have to make sure: do they really want to be part of the business? Don’t—don’t—don’t get them all ready to go and not ask that question because they might just be there because it’s an easy job to do, and you’ve babied them the whole entire way. Because I’ve seen that multiple times in my career.
And Dean, I’m not saying you did that, okay?
12:51 Dean: Thank you. I appreciate that.
12:51 Rob: So—so I don’t want you to think I’m going that way. So I’m not going that way for you. So you have to—you have to, for one, have that conversation. For two, you have to give—let them fail because if you don’t let them fail or whoever is going to be taking over any operation—doesn’t matter if they’re your kid, if they’re a family member, if they’re somebody you hired for that position—they have to fail and be able to learn how to fix it. Because if something goes wrong and they can’t come to you while you’re not there, they have to know what to do.
Now but that’s a very—that’s a very critical spot because you also don’t want to crash your entire business and lose all your money that you put into it because now you just created a huge mess for yourself.
So how do you—when you’re going through, and you’re coaching, how do you go through and coach for that?
13:39 Pete: Well, I—I mean, I—I coach a lot of business owners that are—I don’t do a lot of startup stuff, Robert, anymore. I kind of—it’s one—when they get to the point where they’re at the—at their sort of glass ceiling, and they don’t know what to do, and sometimes they even want out of the business because they don’t know how to take that ne—like, that’s kind of my happy zone when—when it’s like, “All right, let’s go.”
But when we’re talking about family transfer—because one of the big pieces of the puzzle for me is family transfer—I—I literally run a group with the National Shoe Retailers Association of America that’s called NextGen. And I do all sorts of work with Next Generation all the time. And it’s a big piece of family transfer for me.
On the—on the—as a certified exit planner is working with family businesses that are transferring. I’ve got several of them that I’m working with right now. It’s not easy. There’s business stuff we got to tackle, but there’s family stuff we got to tackle.
14:30 | The 6 P’s Framework
14:34 Pete: In some of the cases, some of these businesses are fifth generation. Like, I’m dealing with one right now, transferring from the fourth to the fifth generation. It’s 175 years in business. And the current generation: 71, 68, and 66, and they’re going to transfer to the next generation. But they—the way their buy-sell agreement was set up was very poor, and they can’t even really exit right now themselves, as far as allocating shares to next generation. There’s just a whole bunch of stuff there where, you know, sometimes they don’t—they’re not even talking to each other internally.
And—and that’s from a family perspective. So if we’re not talking to with each other as a family perspective, how are we actually getting done—excuse my language, but how are we actually getting done on the business side that we all are making our money from?
And all of these things are part of—of this sort of arrangement here because, ultimately, you know, there is going to be a transfer. There’s one thing for sure, and this is for every business owner listening: it’s—you know, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now in—in the world. There’s one thing for sure: you will exit your business one day. It’s either going to fail, it’s going to be sold, or you’re going to—sell the—debt in some kind of way, or you’re just going to die.
But it—you know, guys, there’s six D’s that we—or five D’s that we use a lot. One is death. Two is divorce causes a lot of exits.
16:02 Rob: Oh, it does.
16:02 Pete: Yeah. Three is disagreement. You’re divorcing your partner because if you’re in a partnership, one of those partners is leaving, or maybe both. One is disability. Disability affects a lot.
And I’m talking to you, the listener. You probably know someone who’s been stricken with cancer. You probably know someone who had a heart attack. You probably know someone who literally got hit by the bus. And whatever that bus was, had to be out of their business for three to six months. Did that cause the—the problems?
This happens, guys. This happens to one in two business owners in North America.
16:44 Rob: Wow.
16:44 Pete: Where they’re exiting their business, not because they want to and they’ve planned to, they’re exiting their business because they’ve had to.
16:55 Rob: Yeah, I—I’ve seen that a lot too. I mean, so if your business isn’t exit ready, and you’re—you’re leaving value on that table, and now they can’t—now they—they built this thing, and it ends up dying off because they didn’t have anything in place to be able to get it done. And they didn’t—they didn’t have the structures to be able to do it.
18:00 | Why Every Business Must Be Exit Ready
17:14 Pete: Yeah, Rob, you know, so—so often it’s their biggest invest—like, it’s the biggest investment that they have in their portfolio. They know what their house is worth. They know what their stocks are worth. They know what their bank account says. But they don’t even know what their business is worth and how to actually change that valuation so that it’s bringing the value of the 20 or 30 or 50 years that they’ve worked in the business.
They don’t get that until it’s too late. It’s like, you should have started this journey at the beginning, not at the end. And that’s one of my big messages. It’s like, I do work with people at the end, of course, but at the same time, for the person that’s saying, “Well, I don’t want to exit my business for another 10 years,” it doesn’t matter. Your business always has to be exit ready, always, because if you were one of those two people, then you’re going to maximize that value. And that value is going to go to the people that you love or go to you when you’re feeling better, or when all these other things—like, that’s what we need to do.
It’s—it’s—we buy insurance for these days. Why aren’t we insuring our own companies with setting up these systems that allow it to run without you?
18:10 Rob: Exactly. Well, if you don’t have those systems in place, you’ll be in trouble, right?
18:15 Dean: So, you know, when you’re talking about people that have staff and other things, what do you do? How do you recommend that to the solarpreneur or the—the single business owner? How—what kind of strategies do you offer to them? Or do you get into that realm much?
18:28 Pete: I do. I consider solopreneurs more of a practice than—than a business. So I do work more with business owners that, you know, in that state. And practices are a little bit different.
You know, if you’re selling a book of insurance, or you’re selling a book—your law book or whatever the case is, there’s definitely ways to transfer that. But those people are generally selling their time, and you know, if they aren’t working, there is no income coming in.
So what we’re talking about here is really more in lines with, you know, what businesses that are operating—there’s other people involved, there’s, you know, there’s—there’s things around there. What can you do to build your practice? There’s a ton of stuff you can do to build your practice, and if—if that’s what you want. But then it usually ends up becoming, “I got to hire some more people here so that I can get out of that daily hour,” you know, 200 bucks an hour or 500 bucks an hour, whatever you charge, and—and have somebody else do that.
And—and I mean, there’s virtual VAs, there’s all sorts of automations, there’s all sorts of things that you can do to clean up. And I love AI and all that stuff. That’s another whole conversation, another podcast on its own. But it’s changed the whole landscape.
19:36 Rob: It has, and—and it’s going to continue.
19:36 Pete: And the idea here, it’s like, hey, listen, if—if you still have a fax machine sitting on your table and you’re, you know, this kind of stuff, it’s like, you have to be moving ahead with this kind of thing. And if you don’t love technology—and I’m talking to you, the listener—if you don’t love technology, and if you don’t love what’s happening with AI, and you don’t love what’s going on in the back end of things, that’s okay. But you need to surround yourself with somebody that does know, and you need to surround yourself with someone who can help you through this, help your business through this, help your clients through this, so that they can poise you in a position that’s effective, efficient, and ready to roll.
And you don’t necessarily, you know—Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan wrote a book several years ago called “Who Not How.” You don’t necessarily have to know how to do all this stuff. You just need to know who can do it for you because one thing’s for sure: it’s not going away. So if you don’t jump on that, you’re still working on a fax machine from 1994, you’re going to be bypassed. That’s a problem.
20:46 Rob: You’re losing all the value in your business then.
21:00 | Family Business Transitions
20:46 Pete: Yeah. It’s—it’s funny, Pete. We were joking right before I went on vacation a week ago. We were just having this conversation. I was like, “Maybe we need to do a marketing campaign that’s to fax machines.” Remember old fax machine marketing? There’s a lot—I think there’s still a lot of people who have a fax machine sitting there. No one’s hitting that market, and I was like, “I haven’t thought about this in years.”
21:10 Pete: Robert, it was leading edge when I bought my franchise, you know, back way back then. I had a Brother fax machine. This thing was like leading edge because what it would do is when you phoned into that thing, it would actually phone out and leave the message directly to my pager. And it’s like, my—my pager, right? And I’m thinking like, this is leading edge, baby, you know? I’m getting it. I’m—I’m—I’m riding my truck, going out to look at my next bathroom, and I got—I got paged. So then I call my fax machine back, and it would—I’d get my message, right?
You know, that—that was the new technology. But before that, you called into your answer machine, and you had that little device that you played the—the recording that told it was you, and then it would let you listen to your messages.
21:50 Rob: I know.
21:57 Pete: And then I went, you know, a year or two later, I—I—I got a message company that was actually answering live my—you know, they were—it would go directly to an operator. They the operator would say, you know, “Good morning, Surface Medic. How can I help you?” And then I got it—then I got, you know, my essentially what we call a text now, but it was onto your pager at that time. You could read the message, right?
So I mean, but these things—I mean, we look at—we look back at that now and say like, that is just so ridiculous. And some of our listeners here may not have even seen a curled up fax paper ever before, right? They’re probably thinking to themselves right now, “Why didn’t they just send a text?” And text did not exist at that—that was the very beginning of text message market or text messaging.
So the point of the thing here is that, you know, what we don’t use that technology anymore, and we—that was bypassed. And if you don’t jump on with AI, and if you don’t jump on to all of this other stuff—and there are people out there that don’t use cell phones, and there are, you know, there are people that do this sort of thing.
But ultimately, you don’t have to be the person to lead the charge in your organization to do this. You just need to have somebody who’s smart, understands it, and can help you through these things so that everything is being done for you.
And—and, you know, that’s what I call living in your love it zone in your business.
And I try and help my clients always be working in their love it zone because working as business owners—you said it, Robert when we’re starting those startup days, it’s like, get in there, you’re going to work your 70, 80 hours a week, you’re going to do it every day for three years.
And you’re going to be like making every decision and doing all this stuff. And that’s part of startup. That’s normal.
23:36 Rob: It is. It’s no different than if you pivot your business and go a different direction. You have to be ground on the feet because you have to understand all of that because, really, you are the heart of the business at that point. But then you need to be able to start stepping back.
23:53 Pete: Yeah, and I think—I think the thing where I—I come in in a lot of cases, it’s like, “Okay, I can’t—I don’t have an—another hour in the day. I can’t—I haven’t seen my family. I haven’t taken a vacation. I haven’t done a—maybe I have more money now, but, you know, the life isn’t turning out the way I wanted it to necessarily when I look back at the last few years.
And—and I got to do something about it.” And so from that side point, it’s like, “All right, let’s get in here and start working through this and start aligning and assigning your communication structure and accountability so that we have other people in the—let’s set up these six Ps. Let’s set up the meeting structure.
Let’s set up everything so that we actually have an operating system here that’s going to take you out of that.”
25:00 | The 5 D’s That Force an Exit
24:42 Pete: Because my goal is I want to get business owners—typically are smart people, you know? They get it. They—yeah. And—and they do have that sort of full vision of the business and all this kind of stuff.
But ultimately, you just can’t do it all. And we end up tending to do the stuff that we’re best at, but that doesn’t mean we actually like it.
I’ll use a prime example. I have two business degrees. I’m pretty good at accounting. I hate accounting. Hate it. I’m really good at reading a report. Send me the report. I can analyze it, all of that kind of stuff. Do I want to balance the Visa? Do I want to balance the bank account? Absolutely not. And I haven’t in 28 years, probably.
But—but when my accountant has a problem, she’ll come to me, my bookkeeper at the stores. She’ll come to me, and she’ll say, “What do you think about this, this, and this?” And I’ll roll through it, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, okay, that’s great.” You know? So I mean, I get it. I just don’t want to do it. It’s not in my love it zone.
And there are so many business owners out there that are doing these things, whether it’s—whatever. So for some people, it’s sales. “I don’t want to do the sales anymore.” For some people, it’s operations. For some people, it’s the payroll. It doesn’t really matter what it is in your business because it’s uniquely your business.
I want you working in the area where you’re giving the most value to your business, the most value to those three people, right? Your ideal client, your—your team, and all of your suppliers so that you can help deliver the promise because that’s when more money comes in.
And the—the real powerful thing about this exercise—and I’m a Colby coach, so I use Colby in this—in this part—is really understanding your team, really understanding how decisions are made.
Really understanding how we can overlay this onto the accountability chart so that not only you’re living in your love it zone, but everybody working with you is too. That’s when it gets powerful.
26:36 Rob: Well, and one thing I’m going to add to that that I—I’ve seen in businesses, I—I’ve been—I’ve been guilty of it is when you’re working on your business, you do make yourself super busy.
And probably the biggest story I ever put in place for this piece where you feel really busy, but you’re not getting any value out of it, I’m going go to the home service world.
Yeah, I worked with a roofer for a while. I still do. He’s still one of my big clients on my agency side. But he was buying leads from Home Advisors, which is now Angie’s List.
But he was buying leads over there, and he was chasing his tail on those leads. But he got to go through—he got to feel busy about every move he was making because it kept him busy. So therefore, he felt he was good.
Doesn’t mean he was making more business. When I had him look at it, I was like, “Here’s our leads. We’re closing, you know, this percentage.
We’re a lot better closing percentage. You’re not driving all over Hell’s Creation, chasing this business and having to now discount your business because you’re competing against all these people who they sold a lead to as well.”
But he felt b—business owners get into that mindset to where, “I’m doing this, and I’m on—working in my business, not on my business. And I’m just going through, and I’m doing all these tactics over and over again.
But I feel busy, so I’m getting things done.” And I think that’s a mis—I think that’s a miscue a lot of business owners have.
27:50 Pete: I’m with you, Robert. Have you seen this too, dean?
27:50 Dean: What’s that?
28:00 | Solopreneurs vs True Business Owners
28:07 Pete: Have you seen that?
28:07 Dean: You caught me off guard.
28:07 Rob: Yeah, quit laughing at me. I said—
28:14 Dean: You’re okay! Are you getting too old? You’re falling asleep over there?
28:14 Rob: I’m trying to figure out what to say.
28:21 Dean: I thought—I thought I was in church, guys, so I was like, “I listen to sermon, but I’m not listen—”
28:21 Rob: No, but come on. I’m already—you can’t be off. You can’t be off your game too, Dean, because I’m—I’ve already repositioned my camera. I’m pr—I’m trying to figure out my position for this. I feel really awkward right now.
28:34 Dean: So you got to be at least in your zone. But—but no, but I agree with you though. I mean, business owners like to see things. I call it the task list or the to-do list for the day. They like to check things off and say, “I did this, this, and this, this.”
And sometimes it benefits them to do that. Sometimes it’s just busy work, and they’re not doing the things to make their business grow. And it’s really—it really—it goes down to the person.
I—I use the acronym at the end of my—on my other business: head janitor. And Rob start does it too because we have to clean up all the crap all the time.
So—but—but the thing is was, you have to do some of the problem-solving, but the—you got to grow the business. You just can’t just do the—the, you know, here’s today’s checklist and—and go through it, you know? So is that—
29:23 Pete: You know, I certainly can associate with the head janitor. I mean, guys, I had a—a cleaning business for 10 years. I have cleaned more urinals, sinks, and toilets than you could ever imagine. And that’s what I did in my youth, though. I did—I was a janitor in my youth, so I—I know all about that fun job.
29:42 Rob: Here’s an interesting—here’s an interesting parallel. Go ahead, Robert.
29:48 Pete: Problem for that business, for the whole janitorial thing, is you’re constantly having to go into the business and work on it because people don’t show up, and now you have to clean up all the—literally—
29:59 Pete: Y—and—you know, just as a little sidebar here, and I won’t keep it long because it’s off—off topic, but it is interesting.
30:00 | Adapting to AI & Modern Tools
30:05 Pete: One of my—because we can put it back—we’re all business coaches here, and so, you know, and we have to see this stuff in order to help our clients through, right?
So what we did—one of our—one of my very favorite selling tools was a little compact mirror about the size of half of a—a—a phone. For those of you who are listening instead of watching, I’ve got my phone up.
I would literally take this compact mirror into the bathroom with me and take it underneath the lips of the toilet, flip up the toilet seat and underneath the lips of the toilet.
And I had a light on it too, just like your—just like your flashlight on your phone. And so it would like shine up. And if I ever got—especially the ladies that I was presenting to, and they…
30:46 Dean: Ah, I don’t even want to see it. I don’t even want to see it. Like, how much does this cost? Because they knew we were going to take care of it, right?
30:51 Pete: And so how are we phrasing, how are we digging into these issues within our own businesses? What’s the scope we’re using? What’s the lens we’re using so that we can see the crud that needs to be cleaned up? Because it needs to be cleaned up.
It needs to be sanitized. It needs to be sparkly clean. That’s part of being exit ready. That’s part of having everything presented properly for all of your three people. You know, that’s part of having the process ready.
So this is how we clean the toilet. This is what we do every week in our own businesses. It’s all part and parcel, and we can flavor that in any way we want to. But there is a process in order to do this.
There is a way in order to have a business that’s running on the rails, and I think that’s the—when you get that—and, by the way, it’s never perfect. We’re always trying to work on it, but we need to get it as far as we can at any given time so that we’re building this value, not only for our own lives.
So that we’re—here’s another line I use a lot: we—we get into business so that we have a better life.
And if you’re always propping up your business like Atlas holding the—the big globe—you know, if you’re that one who’s doing that for your business all the time, that’s a problem because your business is supposed to prop up your life—the life that you want to live as a business owner.
32:08 Rob: Well said. Well said.
32:08 Dean: Yep, I—I agree 100%.
33:00 | Love-It Zone and Avoiding Burnout
32:14 Dean: And I think it’s one of those big pieces inside of every business. Having those processes are going to make and break your business at the end of the day.
32:26 Rob: Yeah. I mean, I’ve thought about that for our business and how much we do for, you know, Dean and myself, being the face of the company, doing the podcast, doing all that. How are we going to go through and do that sale at the very end?
And I was talking to my mentors about that over—well, I talked to one of them on my vacation because we met up for lunch. But we were talking about that piece, and he goes, “Well, simple. You stay on for a little bit, and then somebody else takes over your role.”
And it’s no different—and I’ll use my mother-in-law’s example for that. She was an oncology nurse for a really long time and retired from it. She thought she did all the paperwork, all the processes. She thought the whole unit was going to fall apart when she retired.
And it was heartbreaking breaking it to her when it continued. They almost deleted all of her for a lot of it. And was like—and she’s like, “Oh my god.” I’m like, “You’re not that important.”
And business owners aren’t that important either. People are buying a product from you. They’re buying a service. And chant—and depends on the type of business; you might only see that person once in a lifetime, and they don’t even know who you are and don’t really care. You just happen to sell them inside of that piece.
So when you’re doing that piece, even if you have that video piece or have that, it’s no different than having a salesperson inside of the piece because they’re the—they’re the face of the company. They’re the person that’s putting out all the outreach.
But it could be replaced. It’d be like flow from what—what is it? Progressive—leaving. Well, it’s just a new face. It might seem awkward and go—where it should come for a couple weeks, but then it goes away because people aren’t paying that close of attention as much as we think, as business owners, they are. Do you agree?
33:57 Pete: I do.
34:06 Rob: I was hoping you disagree with me.
34:13 Pete: I just—I’m just going to disagree because I want to disagree and play the—but no, but—but the self-reflection of for business owners is so important to understand where they’re at and where they’re going to go with things.
I mean, I—I—I think that my place will fall apart, and so everybody’s trying to get me to retire from my other business. And my joke is: “Are you retired yet?” I said, “No, I’m just tired, but haven’t got re yet.” Just tired.
I’m just tired. But no, but—but the thing is, is I try to step away and more and more and more, just to make sure that the systems are in place like you said. You—if you don’t—if you don’t know it’s—can operate without you, you’re never going to know.
But it gets really hard, though, when you—you see something going on you’re going, “That’s not how I would handle it.”
And you got to learn that things change too because I’m not allowed to quote anymore because they go, “Your brain’s still the 1990s, Dad.” You know what I think?
36:00 | Coaching Moments & Transferring Accountability
35:08 Pete: One of the other things there is that when we do see things like after we start aligning what I call aligning and assigning authority—on—on that accountability chart and that—in that whole CSA structure, the—the thing that I like to do is I—I call those coaching moments, Dean.
And so we have a process set up in place, and it covers 90% of—of everything. It’s that other 10%, which is sort of managerial discretion. And from your perspective, in your business, it’s like there’s that 10% that isn’t really covered in the process that doesn’t actually have a detailed checklist on.
And—but now, if—if, instead of you injecting 100% of the time, you’re only injecting that 10% of the time with the coaching moments.
So it clarifies, and you’re communicating the clarity around the process and the promise. And you’re saying, “How does this tie back to our promise? And how does this tie ahead to our future profit? And this is why I think at this stage, if we were going to do something, here’s—here’s how I’d coach you through that.”
And I think that kind of stuff is really interesting when we’re—when we’re—when we’ve moved from detail to dashboard in our operations and in our business, and we are looking at things on the dashboard board now. As the leader, we do need to come back in and be their coach, right?
36:31 Rob: Yeah, I think that’s—I think that’s a huge, huge part. That was not working for my chair was—sorry, guys. I’m totally all over the place. It was starting to fall back, and I was going to go backwards. I’d be make a great clip inside of a short.
But, you know, I don’t know. The older I get, the more I fall. I don’t recover as well.
36:53 Pete: I quit playing squash.
36:53 Dean: There’s a—there’s a talk show on in—in Great Britain, the—the Graham Norton show or whatever, if you’ve ever seen that, Pete, where they do the big red chair. People tells the story, and if it’s done any good, they flip them off this chair backwards. We—we can match Rob’s feet back up the air.
37:12 Pete: I’ll catch it on YouTube. I’m sure it’s there.
37:12 Rob: But I think you have to let your business—I think it goes into the whole piece of you have to let your business fail a little bit. And it’s an awkward feeling when you have so much passion, when your heart’s been in there, and you’re the one that built that. It’s like a plant that you just grew, and it starts to die off.
I—if it—it—it hits your soul in a different type of way. But you have to be hands off and go into a coaching thing to where, “Unless you absolutely need me, don’t call me.” And you have to almost step away for anywhere from three to six weeks from what I’ve seen in mine. Pete, what do you think on that?
37:57 Pete: One of the things—and, like, I—I mentioned earlier in the show, I took a month off, so I’m right on board with you.
The other thing, just on the day-to-day stuff, I think—one—a line that I’ll often use that really helps business owners and leaders is, you know, when was the last time somebody came to you and you thought,
“Come on, John, you’ve been with me”—you’re thinking this, right—”Come on, John, you’ve been with me for five years. You should know the answer, right?”
You’re thinking—I’m guilty of that, right?
38:27 Rob: Yeah.
38:27 Pete: And it doesn’t matter what—what their chop position is, but they’re coming to you, and they’re asking you something that you think they should know.
And like 90%, 95% of the time, they do know it. Well, what—what’s the problem there with the accountability? The problem is, is you haven’t actually aligned and assigned them the accountability.
They don’t—you haven’t given them the authority yet to make that decision without you. That’s why they’re coming to you. This is your issue, not theirs.
38:49 Rob: Would that fit into the P’s and be a permission piece you have to—
38:54 Pete: Yeah, you could absolutely—I—I—to me, for you, because you have to give them permission to be able to fail. And you have to give them permission to be able to make those mistakes.
And here—here’s the line that—you—as soon as you think—I have seven Ps now. It’s going to be a seven! As soon as you think, Rob, that, you know, you’re thinking to yourself, “God, this person should know what to do here. Like, what—what is this person coming to me for this—for here?”
Here’s what you say. Simp—this is so simple, and it transfers accountability right away. You say, “What would you do if I wasn’t here today?”
39:28 Pete: That’s a good question.
39:28 Rob: And you wait. You wait an uncomfortable silence until they answer. Like, you don’t give them the answer. Don’t give it to them because they want you to give it to them because they’re used to—you’ve habitualized them to ask that question.
39:47 Rob: You’ve created that habit, for sure.
40:00 | The Dashboard Approach to Metrics
39:47 Pete: For sure. And so now what you’re going to do is you’re going to say, “You know, John, what would you do if I wasn’t here today?”
And you just sit there and shut your mouth. 95% of the time, they’re going to say—because as it goes on, because they’re still waiting for you to answer because you always do, and now—now they’re quiet. It’s like weird at the beginning.
And—and so you’re just waiting there, and they finally say, “Well, I—I would actually fill out the form and then go over here and drop it here, and—um, everything would be done.” And you’re like, “Exactly.”
40:24 Pete: And that’s where you go: “Exactly. Why don’t we go ahead and do it that way? I like your idea.” And—and now you’ve transferred the authority. So next time they have to do that requisition, they’re not going to come to you again.
And it gets so addictive when you start doing this, and everybody else is starting to feel good and—because they’re thinking like, “I’ve been here a long time. I should be able to make this decision, but he always wants me to go and asks for authority.”
But now I’ve transferred the authority because I’m like, “If I’m not here, then what would you do if I wasn’t here?” And they say, “Oh, this.” And—and here’s the other thing, getting back to Dean.
95% of the time, they’re going to have it right. But that 5 or 10% of the time, what is it? It’s a coaching moment. So you have a conversation, and you say, “Hey, listen, that was almost right, but on step 10, what I would do in that situation, I probably do this way.
Why? Because I’m going back to my promise. How does it align to my promise? And because we want to make profit here, right?”
41:20 Rob: Right, exactly. And I—I would—I would say, Dean, that fits into the same piece of the article you wrote. And I’m not sure if that ever got published to the—
41:26 Dean: I never published it because I—
41:32 Rob: But—received—Dean wrote a whole entire blog, and I—I wish it would have gotten published if it didn’t—about how most business owners have narcissistic behavior. And I think a lot of that comes into our psych piece.
So inside of the world of business, a lot of us have ADHD. A lot of us—we’re all over the damn place. So I mean, I’m—I’m right there. So it’s one of those things to where you do that just because it makes you feel good. It gives off the—like, I—I don’t—I’m going to say this wrong—off endorphins that—that make you feel good.
And they almost—I’ve seen businesses get ruined by that because now they’re micro—they’re not really micromanaging, but to the staff, it’s going to feel like they’re micromanaging every single moment.
42:22 Pete: You are micromanaging if you’re involved in every decision. Yeah, you are.
42:22 Rob: And—and you’re—you’re feeling good because now you feel important.
And I—I—I see that a lot. I’ve seen that in businesses, especially businesses that are about right that are sitting inside of the divorce table. And they’re going through the divorce, and they say, “We have to sell the business to be able to make ends meet.”
43:00 | Melancholy of Exit Planning
42:41 Rob: So I’ve been at that table more times not for my businesses, but for people selling their businesses. And a lot of that comes down into that whole entire—it’s a big part of them, and it fits into that same category.
I don’t know where I was going to go with that, but I was going to go somewhere really important. I lost track of what—
42:59 Pete: Well, we we were kind of talking about flipping the switch of accountability to have other people making decisions for you. And then—and then kind of tying it back into this idea that you can’t leave everything—everything to everybody all the time, like there are times where you need to inject your coaching moments.
And that’s why I like to use that analogy because, you know, if you’re having a coaching conversation, then, you know, think of—and it doesn’t matter what sport you love. I’m—I’m a hockey fan myself.
But, you know, from that perspect—perspective, you see the guys go down, and they cross the blue line, and they’re going towards the net, and something happens, and it doesn’t go in the net.
Well, what happens is they go back to the bench, and they’re sit there. And the coach pulls out the—the board and starts drawing stuff and says, “You know what, guys? I—I’m looking at this from an outside perspective, and I would try and do it this way next time.” That’s why—why do teams go through and review tape, right?
43:49 Rob: Right, exactly.
43:49 Pete: Exactly. So our job as the leaders here is really to communicate, add that structure, add that accountability, and coach within that so that our team can deliver the six Ps to our customer.
When they deliver the six Ps, and we can get the amount of profit, we can do what we want. And it’s our choice as the business owner to start doing what we want to do with that money.
Until you get to that money, which is that startup phase we talked about, you just got to go down—you just got to do it. You just got to do it. And there’s—we all know it who have been through it.
I’ve—I’ve founded businesses. It’s like, you just got to get your head down and get it to that level. But after that, it’s like, “Now what, right?”
44:32 Rob: Well, I mean, it’s—it’s one of those things to where you have to be able to go through and review that tape.
You have to look at yourself. It’s no different than when I go through and I—I coach, you know, our team and go through and review it like it’s a fresh set of eyes and go through and go, “Okay, this is where it is, and this is where it’s going to be.”
Now, if it’s important pieces and it’s during a pivot, you’re going to be more involved. There’s going to be sections.
Now, if you’re a multi-generational business, and you’re going through, and you’re getting ready to do the sale, you have to make sure that oldest generation isn’t coming in and everybody going, “Well, you know, we’re going to have to listen to him because he’s the oldest person in the room.”
And this is, you know, the process there. Your staff has to understand where that role is and who they’re reporting to because that older person’s going to go, “Well, you know, god damn it, I’ve been doing this for 50 years. This is how we’ve always done it.” Well, I mean, things have changed. You can’t do it that way anymore.
I mean, you have that whole entire mind piece there. And I think businesses—I—I think it’s a normal struggle across all businesses.
45:22 Pete: It is. You know, 50 years ago was even before facts, Robert.
45:36 Rob: That was before facts. I know.
45:36 Pete: Analog phones. You might have had to talk to an operator to get over to them.
46:00 | Personal Identity vs Business Legacy
45:42 Rob: Exactly.
45:42 Dean: Younger generation: “What the hell’s an operator?”
45:49 Rob: So you remember the days when you could be on the internet, but nobody else could use the phone—net—while you were on the internet?
45:56 Pete: Yeah, for sure. And—and I also remember the days where I used to go to the bank when I was doing my deposits and—and get 10 bucks worth of quarters all the time and keep them in my—in my cup holder of my van so that I could stop at the pay phone and make phone calls along my way.
46:08 Rob: Yeah, exactly. So I was—I—when I was growing up, my parents owned furniture stores, and my grandparents owned furniture stores. We used to know exactly where you could pull up, and we love the—the pay-oneses you could actually drive up to them.
You even have to get out of the truck, and you could get on there. And then the pager came out, and then you had micromanaging to a whole new level because they page you go, “Where you at?”
46:33 Pete: Exactly.
46:33 Rob: Point at what room of the house you’re in. Your guys are in—are they actually there, or are they off to McDonald’s to buy their lunch, right?
And then I mean, then cell phones came into the picture. And when cell phones came into that picture and micromanaging inside of that world even got worse because of that because now they can make a phone call.
And the cheaper that the cell phones got, the more that increased. And I mean, I think that technology is really good for businesses, but it’s made it to where it’s hard to disconnect from your business as well. You’re seeing the emails.
You can see the reports. You can see everything from your mobile phone for a lot of business owners. And it’s—I think it’s not healthy in a lot of ways.
47:13 Pete: I—I’m guilty of that. I—I agree. And s—sort of another whole podcast maybe we’ll jump back on sometime. But it’s—it’s this idea of moving from detail to dashboard.
And you know, do you really need the detail that you’re getting with all of these different things? Do you really need to know your open rate of every single email? Or would it be okay to know that once a week I’m going to review the open rates of the three or four emails we’ve sent out? Like, these kind of things.
Like, pe—because the data is available, people drill down so much and so often as opposed to really understanding how to use a dashboard. A dashboard is there to help you make decisions. And you don’t need to have the minutia. Other people can look after that level of detail for you.
And then you—yellow—are you green, yellow, and red light these dashboards so that you’re really don’t even—even look at the green. Don’t even look at the yellow. You can start to look at the yellow.
We’re going to deal with the red, the two or three things that are red right now with. And if we have time, we’re going to get into the yellow. And then we’re going to assume that all of the greens are running to the dashboard that we want them to run at.
When you start looking at your dashboard, and if you’re seeing more reds and yellows, you got to dig deeper. But if you’re seeing more greens, things are going well. And now I’m starting to look at, “Okay, well, out of all of these things, what do I need to add to the dashboard?
And where am I going to focus on from my leadership perspective down the road so that I can add value to the overall side of the business?”
And this is moving from detail to dashboard because you can’t possibly manage all of the little details of all of the data points in your business today as a solo business owner. You can’t.
48:50 Rob: One of the biggest things that happen out there, Pete, is I think people get information overload. They’re trying to get so much. I mean, and then that information becomes too much to process the things that are—that are really necessary.
49:00 | Trademarking & Preparing for the Sale
49:01 Rob: You know, you might go, “Okay, I’m going to look at the P&L. Oh, our sales are up this last month by 3%.” Well, “Why aren’t they up 10%?” Well, you don’t get hung up on that.
So you talk about what could we have done for opportunities that we missed or what to—how to grow the business. And that’s those red zones that you’re talking about. Am I—am I kind of in the—where you’re going?
49:23 Pete: Yeah, I mean, I’m always looking at leading indicators, you know? The—the back stuff, it’s kind of like, are—are you—are you—for those of you who have taken accounting in business, do you love financial accounting, or do you love managerial accounting?
Managerial accounting is taking numbers and looking and forecasting. Financial accounting is taking numbers and saying, “Oh, we did pretty good last year.” I don’t care what—personally, I’m—I—I don’t like tax. I don’t like that whole preparation side of things. I mentioned that already.
But I do like to look at numbers to say, “Okay, if we’re going to make decisions, these are the areas we need to make them in.” And that’s that managerial forecasting that I’m talking about. So when I’m looking at the details, I—I mean, we spend very little time on looking back.
We’re always using the information that we have in order to look ahead and seeing what decisions we need to make in our business and for our customers and for, you know, our families and all that other stuff—whatever those things are for you. They’re uniquely yours.
They’re the reason you got into business. But we need to use the information that we have to look ahead, not to turn back and say, “Oh, well, we sucked at that, or we didn’t do so well at that.”
That’s like the smallest part of the decision. That’s like a 10%. Now—now that I know that, I’m going to take the next 90% for planning purposes in order to make this thing what we want it to be.
50:33 Rob: So when you look—when you’re looking at reporting, reporting is not always 100% accurate. It doesn’t always show the whole picture, especially when you’re looking at marketing reporting. So if you’re looking at those numbers, there—there’s only so many numbers that could be pulled in there.
So like, if you’re looking at voice search or any of that, there’s no data points on that as of this point in time. But for example, I have my EAs. They go through, and they come up with a report every single day. I get a screenshot.
That report is more for them than it is me. And they probably don’t even really realize it’s for them, so that way they’re keeping track of, “This is where everything is. This is where we’re going.” It puts that—it’s that—it’s that nonverbal, non-piece inside of the back of the mind.
But if I want to look at it, I’ll take a look at—I’ll look at it for about five seconds. I know exactly which numbers I want to look at: Is our website traffic good? We convert? Are we not converting? And that’s it. I mean, it—it’s not hard. And I—I take it, I process it, and I keep it in the back of my brain.
And do I need—do I overanalyze it? No, because you don’t need to overanalyze it. It’s the general numbers because the numbers that most business owners give two shits about is going to be, “Did I make more money?”
I used to say, “Do you have more money in your bank account?” And then a guy called me out on that and said, “Well, I—I was getting more money in my bank account, but my wife is spending it faster.
So—yeah, you’re not right there.” I’m like, “All right, I’m going to change that because I can’t keep—I—I can’t help you keep it inside of your account. But you should be getting more sales. Are you getting more leads? Are you seeing—are you seeing indicators and knowing where things are going to shift?”
52:00 | Funny Exit Stories (Poker Game Deals)
51:52 Pete: Because in the new digital world, things go a lot faster than what they ever have. And that’s why having someone that’s paying attention to those numbers is going to be super important.
Love it—for—for that side because I mean, and it’s—it’s going through. It’s part of that whole training process. But you have to know what that is.
Now, I might go through, and I might look at those daily reports, and I might go, “Okay, well, what were we yesterday?” Or did they remember to change that date and that time? And did the numbers actually move?
And are they paying attention to what it is there, or do we have a coaching opportunity that we need to go through, and we need to talk about? And I—I think those are the things that people need to know about a dashboard and not overanalyze it.
Because I think—get people get in there. People get into—say their Google Search Console, and they’re looking for perfect search consoles. And that doesn’t exist.
And if it does, then you’re not taking chances, and you’re not taking risks, which—which is I think is a huge piece. You know, we kind of started off by talking about business owners and stuff like that, business owners.
You know, like we said, we—there’s wins, and there’s fails. In my 30-year career, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I mean, I love it. It’s just been my life, and it’s provided me with the life that we’ve wanted as a family and all that kind of stuff. But at—at the same time, it’s not for everyone.
It’s not—not everybody can deal with the stress and anxiety of the next paycheck. “Can I pay my—can I pay my team? Can we get that next order in? What happens if I lose a customer that’s worth more than 20% of my overall business? What happens if—tariffs come into play? What happens if COVID hap—”
Like, all of these different things happenings happen. And you know, for those of you who aren’t business owners that are thinking about being business owners, it’s not for everybody. And it’s okay if it’s not for you. But if it is for you, there are things that you can do to make it even better.
And I think that’s why we’re having this conversation, right? It’s like, let’s, you know—one thing I’ve noticed about business owners, you guys probably see this too: most business owners, and I love talking to business owners, but most business owners don’t want you to go through what they’ve had to do to get to where they are.
54:43 Dean: But don’t they want you to have the quick—they want you to have the easy button?
54:48 Pete: Well, it goes to that—it goes to that same piece of, “Are you in business to have a business, or did you start a business to have a job?” Because that’s—that’s a huge concept inside of there as well because I think—
55:00 | Pete’s Resources & Where to Find Him
55:00 Pete: You have two different types of business owners. Recently, I was on a podcast. I had a guy at a gas station that goes, “I started my own business.” And I did it because I don’t want to have to work hard anymore. Well, being in startup mode, you’re not—you’re going to have to work your ass off.
I—I’ve never met—I’ve met very few—I’ve met a few that had startups that absolutely rocked it because they had bank accounts and processes already in place. And I—and most of the time, they don’t even go to a franchise. I’ve seen that because franchises—you still have to work your ass off.
55:36 Pete: Sure, you do. Owned a few of them.
55:36 Dean: Yeah. So one of the things that happens, Pete, is you were talking about the exiting and being a small business owner. I—I remember the—going home and working till midnight every night, doing books.
We didn’t have the computers that we have now. But you—you did invoice it or whatever. You—you’d get at home. I’m just—I’m at the end of 35 years of this one business now. It’s what’s defined me.
57:00 | Final Thoughts & Wrap-up
55:58 Dean: And I think a lot of business owners, they get melancholy a little bit because that’s what’s defined—people know you by that as well, you know, as people that are getting like where I’m at in my career. I’m ready to start to exit, but now I start to get a little melancholy about it.
How do you have—help business owners overcome that process because you’ve seen—so I mean, talk about a loaded question, de—but—but I’ve seen people that in their 40s that made these fantastic businesses.
They killed themselves for tw—you know, they started when they were 20. They got out when they were 40. And they sold a business, made all this money, and then they’re going, “Now what?”
