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In this episode of Finishing Touches, I dive deep into the topic of leadership and its impact on business success. As a business owner, understanding the importance of effective leadership is crucial for growth and sustainability. I discuss key strategies for forming a strong leadership team, and the positive outcomes it can bring.
During this episode, I emphasize the need for a solid leadership team in order to avoid high turnover rates and stagnant growth. I highlight the importance of having a clear vision and outline steps to form a successful team. I also stress the significance of open communication and setting realistic expectations to ensure effective execution.
This episode is a valuable resource for business owners of all sizes, from small startups to larger organizations. It provides practical advice and provides actionable steps to implement effective leadership strategies. Whether you’re a business owner looking to improve employee morale or preparing for a transition, this episode offers valuable insights to help you achieve your goals.
Also, I offer a comprehensive assessment for business owners to evaluate their strategic capacity. This assessment helps identify strengths and weaknesses within the company, offering insights into value range and financial planning for future transitions. Reach out for a personalized consultation and take the first step toward building a strong leadership team.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and unlock the power of leadership in your business. Subscribe to Finishing Touches and stay tuned for upcoming episodes that cover a wide range of topics designed to help business owners thrive through transition. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!
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Transcript:
00:00:00
Hello and welcome to Finishing Touches, the podcast designed by business owners for business owners. I am Vincent master vita. I’ll be your host today. Thanks for joining us. And today’s topic is about leadership.
00:00:12
Over the last, I’m going to guess at least two or three years, there’s been a significant amount of conversations on leadership. What is leadership? How do I get really good leadership? Why should I even think about having leadership? And many more questions that might be out there.
00:00:29
So let’s focus on two or three areas that I think today in our discussion that I think will help you as a business owner really kind of focus a little bit more about you yourself understanding why do I even need to be considering leadership? Right? I’ve been making the decisions all along. They’ve been kind of moving forward. I’ve got a few good employees and we just kind of move on down the road.
00:00:54
So I think when you take a look at our previous discussions about Derisking You as the business owner, I think leadership is one of the probably the first main avenues that you want to try to approach. So that you can get a foundational runway, as we always say, to having you as more of a CEO visionary, as they say in working on the business and not in the business. So a couple of things that we want to talk about first, certainly the problem is that if we don’t do leadership and we’ve got good people there, then you’re more likely to really have a little bit higher turnover potentially in your company. People don’t see any upwardly movement happening as you kind of move through the processes. So there’s a lot of things that come out of that that really are not, let’s just say, the most positive.
00:01:53
I don’t say that they’re horrible, but they’re not, let’s just say the best environment for what people are looking for today. So whether you have 510 employees, 5100, a few thousand, your range of what this leadership team is going to look like will vary. Certainly if you’re at the five or ten employee range, you’re going to probably have yourself and maybe one or two other people, right? If you get to 50, you may add a couple more people that are going to be inside of that whole process. And then above that you’re going to be even more.
00:02:26
Most of the time you wouldn’t have more than ten or eleven people on the leadership team that usually would cover every department that you would have within side of the company. And the reason why that’s important is if you got that big, first of all, congratulations. But more importantly, you need one representation for the most part from each department. I think it’s a little bit easier to kind of move through the process. So that’s some of the first pieces of it.
00:02:50
So now you say, okay, I understand that and I want to form a leadership team from whoever that is, right? So we’ll keep it small for today’s conversation and the time that we have today. Let’s say you want to add a few people to your leadership team. I think first and foremost you should just sit them down in your office or conference room or take them out to lunch and you’ve earmarked, let’s say, a couple of people. I think you talk to each one of them independently.
00:03:18
I think you let them know why you’re thinking about forming a leadership team or adding I think you need to let them know why you chose them as a conversation piece. I think you need to outline some of the expectations that you want to have. And if you’re looking to add any additional people, then I think that you also want to share with them to say, hey, look, I’m also looking to bring on this person here too. And the reason why you want to do that is I think it helps to get an understanding is that can these people work together? Right?
00:03:52
I mean, leadership is only as effective as they can execute and it’s designed to help you as the business owner move this company forward to be easier to run, to grow it to a new level, or to prepare yourself for an exit. Really, that’s the three areas that you’re going to be focusing on, one or the other. Ultimately, everybody does exit their business, but you may be a number of years before you get there. So I think you have these conversations with them first individually, kind of walk through that, give them an opportunity to certainly ask the questions that they want to ask and go through some dialogue that I think that both of you can feel like you’ve made some significant progress, right? And they may tell you right there say, yeah, I think I’d really be interested in it.
00:04:38
And they may say, hey, may I have some time to think about it? And you say, sure. Go. Ready? Head.
00:04:41
Let’s get back together in a week and let’s meet again and go from there. And then you would have the conversation with the other person. It’s really going to mimic what you just did with the first one. Once they both agree to that or whomever agrees to that, then I think you can have a meeting with them collectively. And then I think it’s important to get down into a little bit more granular conversation about what do we think we’re really trying to accomplish with the company?
00:05:07
What is your vision as the business owner? And I think it’s time for you to share again, get more granular with that. What do you see in that? If you’ve completed a SWAT or swit analysis, strengths, weaknesses and trends, whichever you do, I think you should share this information with them and say, look at here’s the work I’ve done so far. I think it’s important if we’re going to be a team that everybody here understand what we’ve gone through.
00:05:32
I’m open to some pushback on this because if they’re on the leadership team you have to give them some autonomy to push back on you and just say I don’t think that’s a good idea and here’s why. Right? What you don’t want to do is say, hey I don’t think that’s a good idea and then they don’t have why it’s not a good idea or what is one of the solutions that we could do. Right? So as you kind of walk through that process with them what you end up having is a little bit more alignment for what you’re trying to accomplish for the company.
00:06:05
And now everybody knows that you’ve talked about expectations. I understand you’re not going to cover every little thing when you get these meetings but you want the basis of what you have and then you can work through the stuff as you meet on a weekly and monthly basis and move on from there. So then I think once you have that completed then I think it’s time to roll it out to the company right? Make an announcement to the rest of the employees. We’re talking about a 1015 20 minutes conversation.
00:06:38
We wanted to bring everybody together. Over the last few months I’ve been reevaluating the goals for the company. I thought it was important for us to have some leadership team that could help us to direct and execute the strategy and we are going to start today with and then you just kind of name the people that you have. And here was the reason why I kind of went through and chose these folks initially. Certainly if we start to hit our objectives as a company and kind of move through the process there will be a need for additional leadership on the team.
00:07:09
We would like all of you to consider that at some point and some other opportunities within the company. Certainly you can give them a couple of minutes to ask a few questions. You won’t get inundated with a ton but you’ll get a few questions. And then once you have that we have to then set the expectations. And so we start with setting expectations as what are the deliverables?
00:07:32
Right? So what are the deliverables for you the owner, what are you going to do? What data are you going to bring back to the team every week and then what data are they going to bring back every week to the team? Why is this important to the company and then how are we going to manage and move it forward? Right?
00:07:50
So if you have that done then you have a start, right? And I always say start smaller and then expand it from there. Don’t try to get this Monstrosity list. They’re not used to being in a leadership role. You’re not used to having people in a leadership role.
00:08:06
So start small and then just it’s easier to expand than to retract, right? It’s always the simple analogy is, hey, this is working pretty good. I think we should cover this other data. Hey, I think that’s a great idea. They’ll all kind of chime in.
00:08:20
I think we should track this data. Here’s what I can do. And maybe each start with one piece of data, maybe two. Then you go to three or four. Certainly I wouldn’t think you’d need more than five pieces of data each.
00:08:31
That’s 15 pieces of data that you’re looking at every single week. That’s a lot of data. And you should be able to cover a lot with the company and move it forward. Certainly if the company gets bigger depending on the runway and what you’re looking at, then you can always go back and add another person to help get some of that data and kind of move through the process. So that will help you to make better decisions as a company.
00:08:53
One, because your leadership team knows that you’re consistent with what you’re saying. You’re allowing them to execute. You’re talking through challenges and successes so that you know how to work through each one of those as a team. And it’s okay to do that, right? It’s okay that, hey, if I don’t deliver what I’m supposed to deliver, you can say, hey, Vincent, you said you were going to deliver these results.
00:09:14
By this point, we’ve gone through two or three meetings that are not being delivered. And this is bottlenecking, right? It’s going to bottleneck you to be able to get to that next level of profit. Certainly a free cash flow or gross revenues, depending on what your overall objective is. So don’t be afraid to make yourselves kind of vulnerable to go through this.
00:09:35
And it’s hard to do. Sometimes you got to work at it because remember, it’s like any other team, right? If you get a professional sports team or anything of that nature, sometimes there’s a little bit of clunkiness to it as you go through it. But once you start going through it, you can kind of find your path, creating some agendas, keeping them simple, expanding them from there. Don’t let them go for more than an hour.
00:10:00
They really don’t need to go for an hour. Weekly meetings should be an hour, tops. Monthly meetings certainly can be a little bit longer, but I don’t think they need to be that much longer. Quarterly meetings could probably be a half a day off site, and then your semiannual meetings could probably still be a half a day, maybe a full day off of site. And then one annual meeting off site for maybe a day and a half, two days, depending how big your organization is and how many people are going to be pulling it together with the data.
00:10:24
Because a lot of companies will take these annual retreats, so to speak, and they’re going to use it like a team building effort. They’ve got other things that are going on. They may go to a place, let’s just call it more of like a resort environment. They may ask the spouses to come just because it allows them to meet the rest of the team and understand what’s going on with the company and how are they moving it forward and what’s happening. So the spouses or significant others wouldn’t be at the physical meetings.
00:10:53
They may be able to come in for lunch. They may be able to just meet, hey, we’re going to get together for dinner. Or there could just be like a team event where we’ve got spouses, significant others, and everybody involved. And this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go sightseeing, we’re going to go see this spot or whatever.
00:11:09
So these are all, I think, critical things to look at when you’re trying to drive growth value, prepare for a transition, make the business easier for you to run. Anytime you take a look at any of those, all of these things will really be another piece that you just keep adding to your business of things that you do well to kind of help and move the company forward. I think what you find as a business owner once you get to this level, our experience has been that the owners tend to have a lot more energy and now they’re kind of like their free flowing ideas that they used to have when they were fresh in the business start to come back out. And then certainly because most of your leadership team should be younger than you or at least a few years younger, their energy is going to come in because they see your energy and it’s going to really kind of help them kind of move forward. And certainly any education, your job as an owner is like you mentor the leadership.
00:12:10
The leadership mentors your employees for execution and to move things forward. When you’re doing that on a regular basis, it really does help. They come in starting on Monday morning, they hit the ground running. They are ready. They’re ready to meet, they’re ready to execute.
00:12:27
And when they have a challenge, when they’re off their game, let’s just say, right, it’s not about jamming them up. It’s really about, hey, what’s going on and what can we do to help you?
00:12:39
You don’t need them to spill their beans unless they really want to. But sometimes maybe you pull somebody aside. A lot of times it’s good to talk about know, hey, Vincent, we’ve seen that maybe some things know things aren’t going well over in that area. Some things that we can help with or some things you want to talk about offline or some things you want to talk about with the team to kind of help things move along and keep us counting and moving towards our overall objective. Sometimes it takes a little bit.
00:13:08
Some people have to be vulnerable when they do that, but as you continue to leave that door open, they may not take advantage of it the first time, but over time, sooner or later, they will certainly take advantage of it. So hopefully you got a lot out of today’s session that we talked about with leadership. If you have any more questions, certainly visit our website@prometheuspartners.com. Feel free to reach out and ask me a question if you like. I would like to offer an assessment for the business owners if they would like to get an idea of what their strategic capacity is.
00:13:41
It’s a 25 question short assessment and gives you an idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are in your different departments and different levels to help you get to where you want to go. Certainly show you a bit of a value range. If you were to go to market today or try to transition, what is your capacity and where is your value now? And if you made some changes, where would it be at? It also helps to give you a little bit of an idea of how much of the value of the company you’re going to need from a financial perspective when eventually you do trans mission out of the business.
00:14:10
So, takes about 17 minutes to do this assessment and if you’re interested, certainly reach out and email me. I’d be happy to schedule a brief time with you to go through that. Anyway, again, thanks again for watching the show, really do appreciate it. And when you get a chance, reach over and subscribe to us and look at our next podcast and hopefully all of you. Have a great day.
00:14:31
Thank you.