Episode 72 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

But let’s be honest, if you’re growing a business, becoming a great manager is essential. In the early days, it’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be uncomfortable, and it’s going to require you to change almost in every way about yourself. Something there’s going to be something somewhere which needs a little bit of a shift.

Speaker 2 (00:22):

Hi everyone. Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den, welcome back Dan. Good to have you on today.

Speaker 1 (00:31):

Thank you, Rob. Hi everyone. Good to be here. Looking forward to getting stuck into a longer episode today, and we’re talking about something every growing business runs into sooner or later. This isn’t inevitable. This is that weird uncomfortable shift where you’re not doing all the work yourself anymore and usually where things when you do that don’t go always according to plan. It’s not necessarily smooth sailing. It’s the point where you’ve got, it’s a real fork in the road actually. It’s a point where you either you step back and start doing things yourself, you almost regress a little bit or you push on and you start to treat management like it is your actual job and you need to start doing, let’s call it better in that area. This is the fork in the road where everything changes, but it’s not black and white and Rob starting today. There are stages or periods that you go through and people do this naturally. You go through these stages, but it still has to be worked on as you go. It evolves over time.

Speaker 2 (01:28):

Especially this is a really hard transition that every trades person will go through as they’re going on their journey and growing their business. And you’ve got to think of it like most traders get into business because they like doing things with their hands. They’re problem solvers. They like building stuff and they like the outdoors and they get satisfaction in working with their hands. But as you grow a business, it’s not about working with your hands anymore, it’s about building a team of people around you. And that’s the whole transition and that journey that you’ve got to go on when you build a business. You’ve got to accept that. You’ve got to go from doing it to managing someone to get it done or a ground crew to get that job done to eventually as you continue to go down your journey to managing a project manager or a maintenance supervisor to manage your ground crew. And that whole journey from doing to managing to managing a manager are three big transitions that any business owner has to go through and go through that process at some point in their journey.

Speaker 1 (02:33):

And the interesting thing with it is that confidence often goes in the opposite direction. The more you step through doing the job, that’s the zone, right? You’re a gun at it. Guys that start their own trades businesses is usually great tradesmen. So having high confidence in doing the job is there. It’s always been there. It’s something that a lot of guys feel naturally good at, it’s their home base. But as you go through those stages, you explain and maybe break ’em out for us, but as you go through those stages, things change.

Speaker 2 (03:00):

Yeah, you’re right. Anyone can do a job. Anyone can go, right? That needs to be done. Get out of my way, I’m just going to go on and get that job done. Anyone can do that. But when you take that step from doing it to managing someone or a group of people to get that job done, all of a sudden you need systems and you need to be able to develop the skillset around coordination and communication and accountability. And this is where the soft skills as managing people comes in. And this is the hard part, especially for tradies because you go from doing something physically with your hands to relying on the soft skills of dealing with people which are very unpredictable in nature.

Speaker 1 (03:47):

And you go from that place where you’re very hands-on to almost being hands-off. And as you go to that next day we’re managing a project or a service manager or managing someone who’s managing other people, you’re even further removed. So it’s not even about confidence at that stage, it’s just about the sheer terror of what the hell’s going on in my business.

Speaker 2 (04:06):

Yeah, correct. And this is where you are managing a project manager and they’re now running multiple crews. You’ve got multiple jobs going on at the same time and you are dealing with one person and they’re dealing with 6, 8, 10, 12 or more people. This is all of a sudden where you become so far removed and are very disconnected from really the nuts and bolts of what is happening on a job site. You’re relying on clarity of roles and responsibilities and expectations and standards and your ability to really lead and influence one person who can then manage a team of people. So you managing down, they manage down to your ground crew, communication goes back up to them, then they communicate back up to you. So you have these layers of lines of communication and management that needs to happen in a business. This is where good management is required to be able to manage a manager to be able to get a great outcome.

Speaker 1 (05:09):

And this is why it becomes uncomfortable. There’s that discomfort there. As you go through these stages, you’re getting further away from doing the thing that you’ve presumably loved, the presumably that you’re great at. And now you’re in this foreign world where like you said, soft skills and management of different people and how do you influence, what the hell is that about? I could just get in and do it. So all of that changes. You go from hands on to hands off, as we said, the idea that you can have the results at the palm of your hand to having to somehow create or generate those results through others is very different. Plenty of clients that do this, the one in my mind is Frank, the painter, he did a great job of going through those stages, I think.

Speaker 2 (05:52):

Yeah, definitely. We’ve done a previous episode of Frank, the Painter, and when he first came into coaching, he was your typical trader working 80 hours a week working off his kitchen table. There was two or three guys I think that was working for him. He was the painter, he was onsite doing the painting and he knew that quality was high, the standards were high. Communication was done right on site because he was physically there pushing the job along. The next step then was building a team around him and getting off the tools and all of a sudden he’s like, hang on a second, I’ve now got all these different jobs running concurrently at the same time. I can’t be there at the same time. I can’t split myself now. I’ve got to drive productivity without being there in person. And that was a real challenge for him wasn’t it?

Speaker 1 (06:41):

It really was. And then the next step from that was, all right, I’ll put the people in and I’ll manage them. But then it became the phone calls. Then they became almost, I don’t mean this in a nasty way, but they became just like arms and legs. He had to still do all the thinking, he had to still do all the processing. It was almost like he was doing, but through them, that’s that first stage of managing a ground crew. That’s what it is. And it sucks and it’s hard and it’s discomfort, all of that stuff involved. But then you get to that next stage and you’ve got to find a way not to work any harder. And for Frank, that became with a whole raft of different things like using a computer for instance. He had to get his almost like his first laptop, I think it was at the time, and how do you do that? And some of the funniest calls we had was watching Frank try and navigate his way through getting the computer and the calendar working and all that sort of stuff. He was fine at it, but it wasn’t straightforward for it.

Speaker 2 (07:35):

And this is where a lot of guys grapple with it going, what? You can double, triple, quadruple your business and slash 10, 20, 30, 40 hours out of your week. It’s like, yeah, because it’s your results and not directly reflected in how hard you work. It’s about how well you manage. And you can go from one crew to two crews to three crews to four crews, and you can multiply your revenue coming in and slash your hours because it’s now about how you manage your crew or crews to get the job done rather than you physically having to be there in sight. And the results be attached to how many hours you put in. And this is the point of leverage and the multiplication effect that comes in. But the only way that that can stick and that you get great results and hold a high level of standard and quality without you physically being there comes down to management. It’s the only thing that keeps it all glued together in the end of the day.

Speaker 1 (08:36):

Yeah, it really is make or break, right? We’re going to touch more on what happens when this goes wrong in a moment, but that really is the crux. It is that fork in the road. Everything we’re saying about that, we can’t emphasise enough.

Speaker 2 (08:48):

To be able to talk a bit about where Frank is today. You think about Frank Frank’s journey in the time we’re recording this. He’s just finished school holidays in New South Wales and he’s had his two weeks off. He takes every school holidays off. Now, last year he had a six week holiday hour over in overseas and took his family away into Italy and had the most amazing family holiday. He now works a 30 hour week max. He’s got more than a dozen people working for him. He’s got the project manager and the admin and the bookkeeper. He is got a whole operational structure and around him, but he had to go through that transitional journey from doing to managing to managing a manager. And it took trials and tribulations and lots of learnings and he had to embrace sucking at it to begin with and making lots of mistakes. But he knew that the rewards on the other side were going to be worth it and are worth it today. And so when you look at Frank today, gee, he’s been on one hell of a journey, but the shift in the person who he is today is light years compared to who he was when he first started coaching.

Speaker 1 (10:07):

Yeah, it really is. He’s done a great job in terms of what it takes. I think you hit the nail on the head, and let’s talk about this now. What it takes is that embracing the suck, that idea of management’s not about working harder, but getting there and about working smarter and leading better, building the systems and learning about how to influence, you’re going to suck at the start. There’s no way around it. It’s not what you’re good at and it’s exactly why you have to do it.

Speaker 2 (10:36):

Yeah, you’re absolutely going to feel out of your depth. There’s going to be situations that you don’t know how to handle. You’re going to have to deal with multiple people with all different personalities and you’re unsure about how to handle those situations. You’re going to be dealing with people in your team who have got personal challenges outside of the work environment and you’ve got to navigate those situations. You all of a sudden lose control of being able to create an outcome because now you’ve got to influence a team to get the outcome rather than you being in control of it. And so this is what we mean by embracing the suck, that all this is going to feel so foreign to you and you’re going to have the risk of filling that much out of your comfort zone that you’re going to want to potentially go back to what? And I think that’s the danger, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 (11:37):

It is that flight to what’s safe, what feels secure, where you’re good at stuff. The other thing that comes, it’s the emotional pull of not just feeling out of your depth or discomfort. I don’t want to get too bogged down in it, but there’s also all these other emotions that come up with it. The united adequacy, the guilt. For instance, if you are not working hard and you’re working smart and everything you’ve ever done has been rewarded on the basis of how hard you work, how much you can get done in an hour, for instance, all of this is going to rub up, but that’s where the growth has to come because unless you outgrow that, unless you can move beyond that, you will revert back. You will just go into that thing of I’ll just do it myself. Let me just show you. I’ll give you the answer.

(12:19):

Rather than trying to build a team or manage your way through it, you start to do it. And that’s the trap that most people find themselves in. And it’s a grind that most business owners skip. I mean I can think of for instance, interviewing people and having no idea what you’re doing. That’s a classic one, right? The first time you do an interview, you remember that forever. It’s like I remember interviewing someone, I had no idea the role. Was it even something I’d ever done before? How can I tell if they’re going to be good at it or not? But you have to learn that skill.

Speaker 2 (12:50):

Yeah, it reminds me of the time and the poor guy on the podcast, we like to tell great stories of clients who have absolutely killed it and we like to tell the good, the bad and the ugly, but let’s tell a couple of stories of clients who have sucked during their journey and have had to go through the hardship to get where they are. And going back to what you’re saying there about the recruitment, like poor old Caleb, he runs a fit out business in southeast Queensland and he went through three admin people within a 12 month period and that’s because he’d never interviewed before and he just didn’t get it right. He hired someone, they didn’t work out, he hired another person, they didn’t work out, he hired another person, they didn’t work out and he did it again. And it’s sure some things were out of his control, but looking back, I’m sure he would admit that he didn’t follow the process and he sucked at the interviewing and probably hired the wrong person. And so it’s one of those things that when you’re getting into this journey for the first time, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to suck, you’re going to make and get things wrong, but that’s just part and parcel of running a business and learning how to manage, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 (13:58):

Yeah, it is. And for every 1k that goes through multiple admins, there’s probably two, three or four guys that will do nothing instead because they won’t embrace that suck of the process. They won’t do anything. They’d rather just plough through, plough on, I can’t possibly do it. And you get no action at all. You get no growth. Their management skill doesn’t improve. The business stalls, it correlates that way. Another one, what about, I like this game and we love our clients. Let me restate that, but let’s play the one on in terms of running a team meeting, right? That’s the next thing in management, the communication skills, the side of that, running a meeting beyond, let’s call it beyond the toolbox talk for instance, and not having a clue what to say.

Speaker 2 (14:43):

Yeah. A great example of this is Alan who runs a sparky business over in wa. He is pretty much scripted his whole meeting out and he had pretty much written out word for word, and he was so nervous in terms of getting up in front of his team and running a proper meeting with his team. But you look at him now, he runs management meetings, he’s got a couple of ops managers, he’s got his operational crew and around him, he runs a cracking business over there in Perth. But for the first time, him running a decent team meeting, he was so nervous and he did not enjoy it, but look at him now, he loves it and he thrives on it doesn’t he?

Speaker 1 (15:26):

He does, but embrace the suck again. He actually took footage of that, the very first thing that he ran and he was pain. Look how I did. And it’s like looking at your baby photos sometimes when you go back and watch early footage of yourself doing something for the first time or the first couple of times. But he embraced the suck in that he would watch that he would self-reflect, he wanted to get better at it. He knew he wasn’t going to be great. All that was part of that attitude again. So yeah, hats on to Alan. It’s becoming our hall of fame for embracing the suck. So really good job. What about, oh, this is a good one. Feedback. Feedback and having that thing where you’re talking one-on-one, you’re doing your first one-on-one with someone. It’s either you’re giving ’em a clip. If you haven’t heard that episode, go back and listen to it, but you’re working through this stuff and you get the blank stare back or the crickets when you ask that question and nothing comes back to you.

Speaker 2 (16:21):

Yeah, this is episode 66 and 67 that we had the conversation around difficult conversations. So if you haven’t listened to them, make sure you do go back and do that because we gave you some really great frameworks around how to have that. And I remember one of our clients that, I won’t say any names because he gave one of his operational admin team members some affirm feedback. It was definitely warranted around performance tears and it was the right message, just wasn’t delivered the right way and it wasn’t received really well. And the poor guy, he came to coaching, he’s like, this is what happens. It wasn’t the best outcome. I delivered the right message the wrong way and shit, what do I do about it? And you look at this guy now, he’s great at having good hard conversations. He’s not afraid to hold his team accountable.

(17:15):

And this was a guy who had poor culture, poor accountability within his team because he avoided these conversations. Then he started having them and people got their nose out of joint business like, hang on a second, now I’m being held to account. And now it’s just high standards, high expectations. If you step out of line, you’re going to have a conversation. So that client has gone from not having them to having them the wrong way now to having them consistently and he runs a cracking business. And so there’s an example of the journey that you’ve got to go on in management to get better at this stuff, but you’ve got to embrace it.

Speaker 1 (17:51):

You do. And that client you’re talking about, I know exactly who you mean. The beautiful thing that they did in terms of embracing the suck there was they adjusted their approach to it. A lot of guys fall into this trap when they start doing management. Well, that’s just the way I am. That’s who I am. If you don’t like it, you don’t fit on the bus, get off all that sort of stuff, great. If you want to do it that way, you’ll end up hiring a whole lot of people that just fit in with exactly how you do it. You lose the opportunity of hiring great people in that have slightly different points of view that can help expand the business. So you really run a risk if you go down that path. But what this guy did was he learned to adjust his approach. He learned to manage different people differently, and that’s a huge evolution in terms of doing this. But again, you’re going to suck at it because now not only are you in managing people, which you might not, you might not be good at yet, but now you’re going to try and manage them a different way to the way that you’d normally manage people. So it’s another step removed and another level of discomfort that you have to embrace. But this guy did a great job of that.

Speaker 2 (18:50):

And that’s when you hear tradies talk with him like, oh, it just feels like all I’m doing is running a bloody daycare centre. Well, it’s not that you’re running a daycare centre, it’s just that you suck at management and you haven’t developed your skills, and that’s just part of management. There’s going to be different people, different personalities, and they all need to be managed differently. So instead of making it their fault, maybe you need to look in the mirror yourself and learn to manage better rather than just make off the cuff comment saying, well, all I do is run a daycare centre all day. That’s just a signal of poor management, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 (19:22):

Yeah, absolutely. Nothing worse. It’s that old thing about don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. That’s what you’ve got to get to. And there’s always that sort of stuff. So that’s another one, which is great. He’s in our hall of fame for embracing the suck. We can’t name him for obvious reasons, but let’s talk about the last one we want to talk about, which is setting a deadline and anything to do with holding people to account. You can set a deadline, you can set expectations. Anytime you set something up, I guarantee when you suck at it in the early days, you’re going to just let that thing will sail by, right? It’ll be, you will not follow up, you won’t hold people to account the right way. It’s just natural.

Speaker 2 (20:00):

Yeah. Great example of this is Jake. We use a lot of Sparky examples. That’s because we coach a lot of Sparkies, but this guy’s based out of southeast Queensland ripping guy. And when you think of what we do in launch, we help guys develop two levels, two foundational levels of leverage, which is off the tools and build their ground crew and out of admin because they build their office crew, which is admin and bookkeeping. So launch is really about building out those functions so you can step out of it and more into estimation and project management. Jake did a cracking job in terms of getting off the tools, building his crew and putting admin in, but that was the first part was getting out of the doing of those roles, but he noticed that he was setting deadlines, things were getting missed, he was setting more deadlines, things were slipping through the cracks, and it wasn’t then until he stepped into leverage where we really taught delegation accountability, closing the feedback loop, having one-on-one team meetings and really driving accountability where the penny drop moment for Jake where all of a sudden he was setting up his task manager, setting deadlines, holding to account, and really driving performance through his team.

(21:18):

That’s when the culture and the performance changed in his business because step one was getting the people in the position. Step two was him learning how to manage those people correctly in those positions. And ever since that, it’s been an absolute game changer for him. His team know that when things need to get done, they get done in a timely manner to a certain standard. And Jake hats off to you. You’ve done a cracking job in being able to hold your team accountable to a certain standard. It’s been awesome.

Speaker 1 (21:47):

He really has. And I think that’s that idea of it’s not needing to be liked. A lot of people think management, if people like me, I’ll be able to get through this management nightmare when they first start, but it’s not about that. It’s about being respected and heard when you talk and being clear and understood. If you can do that, you’re doing a good job as a manager. The liking, you don’t have to be an asshole, but you don’t have to be everyone’s mate at the same time. And Jake sort of really found a nice groove when he learned those skills that you talked about. It wasn’t about being liked, it was about being fair, reasonable, but firm. And I think that’s what he did really, really well as I remember it.

Speaker 2 (22:25):

And this is the thing around management is developing these skills, it is awkward, it’s hard, it’s confronting takes time. It takes time to develop these soft skills and the soft skills actually take longer than physically learning a skill around pick up them hammer know where to nail that in there. The soft skills need to be grooved and practised and developed and because you’re dealing with people, the unpredictable nature of people, and I think that’s why embracing the suck is a really important mantra when it comes to your management. It’s just accepting that it’s going to take time and it’s a never ending journey, if I’m honest.

Speaker 1 (23:11):

Yeah, it really is. And I think management reveals a lot about yourself as well. Just looking back on my own journey and if you’re not willing to explore what it reveals about yourself and where your shortcomings are and address those, you’re going to peter out. You’re going to stall out. You’ll either run away from it or you’ll just stagnate where you are. So it’s really important that you embrace the suck as we call it, which is all about being able to reflect and grow and push yourself into those uncomfortable places.

Speaker 2 (23:41):

Yeah, I think about my own journey. I can be in business 15 years this year and probably the first five years I was a one man band coach and I really wanted to learn and groove my craft as a coach. We just celebrated Steve Green’s 10 year anniversary in January and that was been 10 years since the first employee of this business, and I think I would’ve spent the next five, probably the next five to eight years really winding myself out of the coaching seat and learning to manage coaches. And that was a hard time for me if I’m honest. It was difficult. I had to transition from being a great coach and being able to know that I could get great outcomes from my coaching to now managing coaches to get the outcome that was really hard. And now obviously you stepping into the head of operations position, that’s been the big change over the last couple of years of me taking an even bigger step back. And so I reflect on my own journey. I’ve been through that journey of doing to managing the doers, to leading a manager to manage the doers. It’s been quite a journey, but it’s been a long road and even still today, 15 years in business, I’m still making mistakes and learning new things and trying to be better. And that’s why what I said before, it doesn’t stop. It’s just one of those things you can always get better at. I think that’s the punchline of that story.

Speaker 1 (25:18):

And if you do embrace that suck, like you said, it is those steps you’ve had to take them, right? The equivalent of the benefits, the reward, it’s rewarding when you do that and you get to have a business that grows. Now, this is our last point that I want to get on today, which is why most fast growing businesses crash. You would’ve had all the success in the world. You could have just brought a team on, you would’ve been able to get more clients and done all that sort of stuff, but if you didn’t allow your management to grow, if you didn’t grow as a manager, then it would’ve been chaos. The negatives would’ve far outweighed. You had to grow, you had to go through this, call it baptism of fire if you like, these journeys and points that we’ve talked about so far.

Speaker 2 (26:04):

Correct. And I went through that where our business was growing, growing pretty quick, and I was developing my management skills, but my management skills were not growing faster than the business and the team were growing at the time, and there was about six years ago now that we had some pretty challenging times within our team. It was really tested, my skills, my management skills, and my resolve to want to make this work. It was the courage to..

Speaker 1 (26:37):

The suck to embrace it was large.

Speaker 2 (26:40):

And that’s because the team and the business outgrew my skills at the time and we had movement in our team. We had two coaches leave in a matter of a week each. And then not long after Steve went off to take three months off to be able to have his operation, and that’s when you came in and gee, it was a hard time, but that was the reminder for me that the business had outgrown my capability to lead a team of people and manage a team of people. And I had to really dig deep there where we almost had to pause growth for me to be able to get better and get ahead of the growth curve in my management and my leadership at the time.

Speaker 1 (27:24):

Yeah, it’s growth. And then there’s that crisis moment that happens and I think some of those crisis moments are unavoidable. You will get shit that goes sideways and it’s like, holy crap, this is the learning experience I, I’m going to have to just learn more way through this and figure it out as we go. That happens, and I think for our clients, the same thing applies. The fast growing business in our client’s world is that the chaos that we see in our clients is often a result, not so much of the business or where it’s at. Sometimes it’s because the business is going too great and it’s outpaced the management skills or the management of the owner.

Speaker 2 (27:59):

Yeah, correct. Because you’ve got to think that a business that does a million dollars a year has a different requirement of management for someone who does 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, 8 million, 10 million. So all those different rungs in the way you grow a business all require a different style of management and leadership to run that level of business and that management style needs time to develop and groove and become a way of your day-to-day operation. But when a business goes from one to three to five like that in 12 months or not long after, the growth of the business outstrips that speed in terms of the time required for you to develop. And that’s what we’re talking about here where fast growth is not only dangerous because it’s hard to fund it and resource it and manage that growth, it’s also dangerous. It grows faster than your ability to manage it, and that’s when a lot of businesses find themselves in problems.

Speaker 1 (29:01):

Yeah. Let’s look at when the warning signs of this. I think there are some clear ones. The first one for me is that you’ll know that if you are management’s being outpaced by the growth of your business because people will become unclear on their roles. It just becomes a thing where no one really knows what’s going on. We’re just showing up doing our best.

Speaker 2 (29:23):

I would say it’s you lose a level of standards and quality within the business because things become sloppy. It’s almost like it’s a bit of, and this is where a lot of businesses think, well, when I was smaller it was better. Not necessarily, it’s just that you just haven’t got better as a manager to draw the bright line in terms of upholding the standards and expectations around how we do things around here.

Speaker 1 (29:49):

And that’ll show up as clients not being happy with the work, regardless of how well you’ve sold them, regardless of how well you get along in the sales process with a client, there’s going to come that pushback of, shit, this wasn’t what I signed up for. It sort of all starts to fall flat, right?

Speaker 2 (30:04):

Yeah. Where else does it show up, do you think?

Speaker 1 (30:07):

I think the other one I was going to say is that owners get stuck back in the weeds. You just keep finding I can’t break clear, I just have to, every time I turn my, we hear this all the time, right? Every time I turn my back something else goes wrong and I have to jump back in and fix it. There’s this permanent sense of I’ve got to fix things rather than we evolve and manage through it. We’ve got to fix everything and everything still needs to be fixed. And guys go on fixing things for sometimes it’s like a year of fixing the same problem over and over. It’s not a fix at that point. It’s literally you not growing in your management skills to be able to overcome and render that thing that’s going on irrelevant.

Speaker 2 (30:46):

Yeah. It’s almost like you’ve got team but no time because every time you try and take a step forward to get ahead of, to keep growing the business, it’s almost like you keep getting dragged back, don’t you?

Speaker 1 (30:57):

Yeah. You can’t grow beyond that. You can’t manage it. And I think that’s the kicker of this whole thing when businesses, it’s like a law of business. You will not be able to outgrow your own management level. It will always fall over at that point. So that’s that choice point again, and I think that’s where management’s that hidden multiplier. It’s that leverage point. We talk a lot about people being the way to get leverage. I think it’s got to go hand in hand and maybe we need to adjust it, Robert. That idea of people is the key to leveraging your business, but management has to go along with that, right?

Speaker 2 (31:31):

Yeah. But you can’t can have a team of individuals. But the thing that glues that together is the management that holds it together in the end of the day. And that’s why leverage is dangerous. Where if you get leverage and step away and don’t manage your team well then there’s just going to be a group of individuals who just run their own race in the end of the day. And so it’s your ability to step out of the day to day but step into that management position to manage people, get clarity around roles, responsibilities, set the standards, hold people accountable, and that becomes your job in the end of the day and growing this business and running it to ensure that as you grow it, you maintain that levels of standards and expectations from when you were small. So you get the benefits of high qualities and high standards and you get a bigger business, better structure, and more profit in the end of the day, and that’s the benefit of having a well structured business.

Speaker 1 (32:27):

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds easy, but God, it’s not.

Speaker 2 (32:31):

It’s hard. It’s actually really hard, but it’s worth it when you get it right.

Speaker 1 (32:35):

Yeah, 100%. Alright, let’s bring this home. I think it’s been a great conversation so far and hopefully it’s unlocked a few things within yourself about your attitude towards management and how it correlates to the growth of your business. But let’s be honest, if you’re growing a business, becoming a great manager is essential. We’ve said that all the way through this episode. In the early days, it’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be uncomfortable, and it’s going to require you to change almost in every way about yourself something. There’s going to be something somewhere which needs a little bit of a shift. You won’t want to go through it, but you’re not going to be able to grow without it, and you can’t skip it. You can’t outsource it. You can’t just do more and hope that one day it all clicks into place or goes away.

(33:20):

The bottleneck’s never going to be your time. It’s not going to be the tools that you’re running with. It’s going to be your ability to get the result without having to be the one doing everything. That’s going to be the turning point. That’s the moment when you stop being a hero of the business and you start building a team of heroes that work alongside you for you, with you as a team to do it together. And yes, that’s going to suck at first and that’s completely normal. That’s the biggest thing to take out of this. This is a normal part of doing business. It’s the cost of project, it’s the cost of the progress that you’re looking for. But if you can embrace the suck and lean into the discomfort and build the habits of a real manager, then what you’re going to get on the other side is something worth building a business that works for you, a team that consistently makes better decisions, and a week that doesn’t consist solely of putting out spot fires. You can’t avoid this hard bit. In fact, that is, as you said, Rob and I loved it, and this is where we can probably end it. That is going to be your job. This is the work.

Speaker 2 (34:23):

What a great ending to a great episode. We’ve encapsulated a lot there and there’s not really anything, any actions out of today’s episodes. It’s the reality of what it takes to manage a great business and just understand that running a great business and growing a great business as much as a journey for you as a person, as it is a journey that the business has to go on as well. Hopefully you’ve taken a lot of golden nuggets out of today, and if you’re in that position where things are, you are feeling uncomfortable and you’re not necessarily enjoying the process, just lean into it and lean into what you’re going through at the moment. And the best way that you can actually craft these skills is not feeling that you’ve got to go alone. It’s by getting support to get someone and a community around you to help you become the manager that runs a great business.

(35:27):

And that’s the kicker. So if you’re in that position where you are really ready to shift from being a great doer to becoming a great manager, then jump in book in your discovery call @strategysession.com.au. Let’s have a bit of a chat around where you’re at and where you’re trying to go, and let’s get you into some coaching to be able to help you hone your management skills to be able to take your business and life to the next level. Hopefully you enjoyed today’s episode and looking forward to coming back to you with another cracker next week. Take care. See you soon.