Subscribe: RSS
In today’s episode, Allan speaks with Wayne Washington aka “The Doctor of Operations.” Wayne helps CEO’s sustain growth by eliminating hidden costs, disengaged employees, and unnecessary complexity. Allan and Wayne discuss ways leaders can incorporate positive changes in an organization using both collaboration and inclusion with their employees. It starts with creating a plan for long-term success. This plan gives entrepreneurs and leaders a starting point, which puts them in a position to make adjustments within their organization. The link to access the free online interactive tool is www.alignmentanalyzer.com
Contact email address for Wayne is wayne@growcompanyprofits.com and the website is www.growcompanyprofits.com
Allan has started and grown several multimillion-dollar businesses, his mission is to help you do the same. Welcome to the Business Growth Pod, building the future one entrepreneur at a time.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Allan. I’m a family man and attorney and an entrepreneur. Each week, we provide resources and advice to help build your business. Are you ready? Then let’s go. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. Today we have a great guest. We’re going to talk about business, we’re going to talk about operations, we’re going to talk about increasing your bottom line. Okay, before we get to that, make sure to leave me a review on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on. That just helps get more eyes on it, more ears on it. And make sure to subscribe. Also, you guys don’t want to miss any episodes. We have some great ones coming up. Also, today, my guest is Wayne Washington. They call him the doctor of operations. How about that? He helps CEOs sustain growth by eliminating hidden costs, disengaged employees and unnecessary complexity man, that’s music to my ears. Welcome to the show. Wayne, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate you being here. So why don’t give us a little background, tell us about who you are and how you got to become the doctor of operations.
I say it’s a long journey. I’m not a spring chicken, I guess you can say I graduated from college back in 1973. So I can give you an idea of my age. But I had got an electrical engineering degree of a small a small school called Ohio northern University. So I have a analytical background, I’ve been taught to think logically, I’ve been taught to analyze things. So that has helped me throughout my career. Over the years, I think where the best place to probably start is when I moved here to Evansville, Indiana, as I work for a company called meat Johnson, the people who make the infant baby formula. And I was I started out in a project engineering role. But eventually I moved into the major department in a major department is where I was given a task to transform the department from a paper and pencil system into a computerized maintenance management system. We basically had a team of about 12 people and we put up we put them in a reef about a year. And they did it for all the divisions and we basically came back with a maintenance management system. Think about that it helps you think through your processes and help you think through your systems. Because you have to systematize things before you start to computerize and to garbage in garbage out was a thing I learned. Well, that process resulted in us having over a three year period, actually have had things implemented for budget where I had a budget of about $18 million. About 118 employees had a capital budget about $5 million. We reduced our operating costs an average of 7% a year for three consecutive years. And for that kind of operations, it was pretty significant. It had a major impact. Well, the other thing that came about that we had a reorganization about that time, and I was moving to what they call the spike, we would have responsibility for all the buildings, the infrastructure, the cleaning, the maintenance and those types of things. And I was assigned a group of people who are roughly between 45 and 60 years old. And I don’t know if we do those kinds of people getting them to change, there’s not the most easiest thing to do. And that was an error when outsourcing was less raging back in 1994. And how do we get those people to get on board to outsource? Now, that was where I felt I learned the most about working people and getting people to get on board with a common purpose is we made the outsourcer the enemy and these all guys came together and they started giving me ideas as to how we reduce our cost. How do we do things better? How do we do things faster payments and slogan? Let’s do things better, faster and cheaper than the outsources and we even had t shirts and stuff like that. But you know that that was something was done back in 1994 and 9990 4097. And what that is when inside of me Every since then is how do you take people who have a lot of different avenues, different agendas, Bring them together for a common cause and work for a common goal. The same thing happened I learned that when we look for the complete with the preterite, make it process and bring in people together from problem departments and kind of get down to organize that that computerized system. It got to get on focus, you got to you got to minimize distraction. So there’s something I feel I learned early in my career to move forward. Let me let you take your a little bit forward from there. And 1997 I started my own company here called facility management engineering here in Evansville, Indiana. I lost my job at that meet Johnson. And within two weeks of losing that job, I started this company and within two weeks of starting a company, we had our first contract, and we’ve been gone one solidly every since at the time we had a partner, I have sent what that partner out. But what we did for me was that nickname was there for me rather than shortening what we do if I mean, we did the same thing I did Henry Johnson, we basically ran a company for Sony for them. We took her there maintenance, we took her cleaning, we took their their purchasing professional supplies, anything that had to do with the infrastructure, we would do that for a client, we basically had a model, how do you take your facilities and run your facilities like a business, you know, motion, when they have a facilities or something like a necessary evil, they just throw money, only throw money at it one day need to throw money out. And so we had to change that mindset, we had to have clients, change that mindset to make sure you run your business as a business. Taking that the next step forward. We’ve done that for the last four every since we started business. But back in 2002, roughly, I decided to go ahead and build my own software program, facility manager software program I had developed ahead, even then was a cloud based program back in 2002. We had it developed and we started using that commercially, take the whole concept forward to let’s say level four or five years ago, you know, I started realizing facility management is not the way to grow because people do not want to spend money on facilities, you could talk about saving money, but you don’t want to spend money to save money and facilities it as I say it’s like a necessary evil. At that time, I finally changed my philosophy and develop a business called grow coffee profits, where we expanded our concept to look at not just facilities, but look at the overall concept of a business. How do you help a CEO make decisions? How do you help a CEO make progress? Bottom line, it comes down to how do you make cup of CEO become more profitable system to sustain profitability. I’m a believer, if you can sustain profitability, you could fund your own growth, and therefore you don’t need venture capitals. You don’t need loans and stuff like that. So how do you take the money that’s inside of your business now, and put that back into your business? When you read the introduction? You’re talking about three things, and I call my pet peeves. Hidden, hidden, hidden costs, unnecessary complexity, and disengaged employees. Most companies have those soft skills things, they learn to live up to those things. I call them value drains, because what they’re doing is training value from your business. That’s money that’s coming from your bottom line. That’s money that once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. So what we try to do is how do we look at how do we look at getting rid of those value drains? So we look at go back to the other end. And the concept I’ve learned to use over the last three or four years? Is the three pillars of any business is your strategy, your culture and your operations? And how do you have your strategy culture and operations in alignment, you eliminate those value drains you will not have disengaged employees, you will not have hidden costs, you will not have unnecessary complexity. So to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, visualize a Venn diagram, the three circles, one circles, culture, one circles, operations and one circle strategy. that sweet spot right in the middle is where you’re trying to operate to be in alignment. And when you’re not in alignment in that sweet spot. You have different ways of operating let’s say you focus a lot on strategy resulted translates to your employees, we tell you what to do you do it because strategy is so important, you’re gonna do it my way. If you look at functional the standpoint of culture is your is your strong point. Everybody wants to get along, you know, it’s like how do we have fun, it’s more like a country club. But if you start focusing solely on operations is the bottom line make those numbers get this get that code of productivity up this heavies cost initiative? Each one of those has a different port on the organization. But the thing about it is they all share the same resources. So when you share the same resources, if you focus on strategy and much more research strategy, if you focus on culture, you can put more emphasis on culture, same thing operations. You know, every company has the same core resources they work with manpower, materials, money, and management. And how efficiently can quickly use those resources determines how well how properly you want to be and how to sustain your profitability. So what we look at in order to try to get to that sweet spot where your operations your culture and you’re trying to do online? How do you best utilize your resources, that’s where we were, we started that back in 2016. That really has put an emphasis on it for us now on his back in August, I became a victim of COVID. By that I mean not be personally having COVID, my major account, which accounted for 90% of my business, gone, and you’re talking about a wake up call, we apply for PPP funding, we got up funding, and we’re making make we’re making a transition now we’re using the growth grow company profits, as our as our our income now is our main source of operating thing, because I think they have more of a long term future than trying to work investing in facility. So that’s kind of the background, I think that’s the pesty quick and dirty version of where I’ve been and where I am.
I love it. I want to rewind a little bit you were talking about, you talked just a bit about implementing that change with the 45 year old or 40 year olds, a 65 year olds, and change is something that I think it’s just in our nature as humans, we just fight against it. Right. And I think I think you’re right, I think the older we get, and the more we get in our routines, the more difficult it is for us to change, even though we might believe that the changes for the better. So what were some things that you did back then and that you’ve kind of learned over the years to help people change to effectuate this positive growth.
Okay. And I think it really came down to two things, you know, first one is, if what’s the purpose, you know, back then our purpose at that time was to save our jobs, you know, so we were all driven by that. The second thing beyond that is, what’s that compelling story, that compelling story that everybody has to buy into? And when you have that compelling story, we also do this took out a step beyond that. We created a group called we call our culture club, and that Culture Club, what they’re able to do with this, and let’s talk about how we want to work with each other, how do we respect each other? How do we want to behave with each other, and it ended up becoming a group called working agreements, that was all 54 people, including myself, signed those working agreements. And as a matter of fact, I still have a copy of that net signature, and it was posted on the wall. So in effect on everybody signed on to this is how we’re going to treat each other this how to respect each other. Based on your mind, there’s this other way to do our work on a day to day basis. When everybody does that accountability becomes a self accountability, you have that peer pressure that comes in place. So the compelling story with those working agreements was was that coupled with the purpose, so you would put those two things together, everybody’s in that boat growing together. And when you know, everybody has days that you don’t feel like working. But when you have the work in agreement and a compelling story, you don’t let your team member down, you don’t want to, you don’t want to be that one did drops the wall. So accountability comes back to the cell. So even though these guys were 5560 years old, they had to pull their weight, or they would be out of a job. So I mean, it becomes a self motivating type of thing.
I think it’s interesting that when we’re part of a group, and kind of moving in the same direction, that motivates us more right as pulling our weight for how it affects the entire group, versus just for our own benefit, right? Isn’t that interesting that that we’re more we are more motivated, so that we’re not the one that’s not pulling, you know, his or her weight in the group. versus if we’re just working for ourselves, we don’t reach that level of
motivation, you can lie to yourself and, and, and not for you. And I think the analogy I looked at is, look at most sports teams, you know, when you have this, my sports team, people play sports yourself, you know, you don’t want your team members down, you want to pull your weight because you don’t want to let your team down. And same thing for servers. You don’t wanna let your army buddy down your Navy buddy down. So I think when you come together as a team and function as a team, that’s where that camaraderie come together that esprit de corps come together. And that’s when you have that self accountability.
I love this concept of Culture Club. Will you tell me a little bit more about that? Who were the members that were in it? Was it everybody kind of tell me a little bit about that dynamic and what it did for the morale and the actual cold traffic company? It
was more of a department? Yeah, I just had a small microcosm of the company. But what we basically did is, is it comprised about six people. And these were no one in supervision and no one in management. These were our hourly workers. And I kind of make sure I try to pick people to be on that on that team, who are calling the guys who are the most boisterous, who are the ones who are the informal leaders, and I want to make sure I got two or three of those people on a team. Also want to get a mixture. I had a couple ladies on your team. You know, maintenance back in the 90s was a male driven, male dominant type of organization. So I want, I want to make sure we had a female perspective on the team. So those six individuals, we had a facilitator from the HR group, and they basically went on our own and met once a once or twice a week, and came up came up with the workforce, I didn’t see those whirlpools until they were done. When it was done. They by the time they were putting together, it was their job to go out and sell it to the department and talk to each individual get input from the department. When it’s time to promote that available one promoted it, sold it to me. So when I was seeing it with them, I’ve seen it the first time the entire department was seeing this thing about an Allen, they didn’t think he owned it. And when he took it out to sell to everyone else, there, they were selling to their peers. So it was not weighing saying I’m the boss talking down. That’s what the club that you get the people who are at that level, who was really important. We made we had them do that. Does that make sense?
Yeah, now that I think that’s a great idea. And I’ve kind of learned that over the years, where when you allow your people to be involved in the creation of different elements, aspects of your company, it’s a lot easier for them to get behind it. Right? Because it’s their idea. It’s, it’s their work, it’s, you know, it’s there’s blood, sweat and tears that are going into this. And I also like this concept of it being, you know, their peers, right? So it’s not, it’s not a group of managers that are saying, you know, you know, just going down the proverbial chain of command. So that I think that’s such a great idea
what to think about it, you know, if I was in that room where they’re trying to have that discussion, they’d be guarded, they wouldn’t want to stay with it. But if you’re in near future appears, you’ll call somebody a jerk. You’ll call them out to their face when they wouldn’t get up out there.
Yeah, no. And I think that type of communication, and that’s something that I’m working on as a leader is, I don’t know whether I do it on purpose, or it’s just kind of comes with the territory. But I can be a little intimidating, right, just just because of my role is the owner of a particular business, right, but you need in a company, you need that type of communication, where people feel like, Hey, I can express my ideas. And I can even express them in a blunt way. As long as I’m not disrespectful, or, you know, I’m not being offensive, but I can express my ideas. And even if it’s a borderline, quote, unquote, dumb idea, but it’s not going to affect my job, my job safe, I’m safe. But I think that’s such an important part of thinking outside the box of trying new things within an organization.
I want to take that concept what we just talked about, and let’s take it out of the department standpoint. And let’s now expand it to the overall company standpoint. And if you want to do that now, in today’s modern company environment, the days of top down management, I say you do is gone. I mean, if you feel you’re going to grow your business, no, I’m sorry, you’re a dinosaur, it’s not going to work. The concept now is collaboration and inclusion. We got to have that collaboration of everybody in department, everybody’s opinion matters. And inclusions, we’re not going to leave someone out because you’re the janitor, right? So we include everybody. And I think, look, when I brought it together, the thing that we’re trying to get to is a concept called psychological safety. You got this got to be a safe zone, when you do express your opinion, no one’s gonna let you no one’s gonna make fun of you because you’re entitled to your opinion. So how do we establish that psychological contract that trust? And that’s what happens when you have collaboration and inclusion?
Yeah, and I think it’s, it’s this, it’s a process, right? It doesn’t happen overnight. And there’s a lot of things that leaders do to kind of prohibit this type of conversation and behavior, right. There’s little things that we do, where someone comes in with an idea, and we immediately discredit them, or we start poking holes in it or whatever, as opposed to having a conversation and kind of, you know, thinking through things. And you what’s interesting is some of the very best ideas coming from the some of the companies that I own came from the people that are boots on the ground, right? It’s really hard for me to make a decision about something that I don’t do every day. But I love that you said that it’s kind of this, you know, this archaic way of thinking that it’s top to bottom right, that’s, that’s where and it’s it should be the other way around. The information should be coming. The information and ideas should be coming from the bottom up, and the service and the leadership should be coming from the top down. Right this encouragement of having this open conversation. regularly asking your people regardless of their role, how do we do better? How do I do better?
Right? Yes, yes. And I’m going to demonstrate digress, I’m going to take that today you asked me earlier, how do I become the doctor of operations? And I think that it really comes down to how do you take that same concept and bring it into an operation standpoint? You know, what usually operation just I had to learn the hard way, maintenance is the one who gets the last, the last pill operations is the afterthought. Usually, you have your coke slogans in your campaigns. And oh, by the way, we might need a new machine your operations is using inheritance or so but if you start thinking about what is the role of operations, operations role is to implement your strategy you got you got to take that strategy that might come to the top. But how do you how do you break that down into the recipes into the step by step actions, but used by your people day to day today? And I say that because I try to I try to use that same concept. I’m a digression. But I love to cook. I’ve been loving to cook for a number of years. And in doing that, I kept the concept of a recipe, instead of an Ambien processes that we work at an organization, what’s your recipe? What do you need? What ingredients? What’s the equipment you need? What are the steps that you have to have step one, step two, step D, who needs to be involved? So we take that same concept of a recipe and bring it into your business? And then you take your employees and saying, Hey, I’m filming this new recipe? How do you say go to do this? What should be here? What should they love that idea? Okay, and the term process is foreign. The term workflow is foreign, the term recipe is not. So you try to break things down into it into a lingo that your frontline people kind of can’t can understand. So we help them evolve and get good recipes in place. Right? So then, therefore, what now you have your recipes in place, if you’re a typical business, you have some kind of system, you’re putting some kind of product out have some kind of service out week after week after week after week. How do you schedule it? How do you plan that? So make sure you look at the concept of of your recipes. And I’m stepping back? What’s my weekly meal plan? Okay, if next week, what are the recipes I have to have to get to get ready for next week? Then once you know what recipes you have to have, you got to step back and saying, oh, what do I need to store? I need these materials, I need this labor? Does it make sense? I’m talking about Will you take a concept and you break it down to it everybody understand something they can identify with it, but work from there.
I really like this idea, right? And I think that opens the door for people to put their thumbprint on a business. Right? So how do we do that? How do we, on one hand create these quote unquote, recipes for our company, right? where it’s like, hey, the system, this is kind of how it’s done. These are the tools that we need. This is, you know, this, it goes, you know, we do this, then we do that? How do we have kind of so we’re not reinventing the wheel every single day. But at the same time balancing with, hey, we want to hear your ideas, we want you guys to come in here, you’re very talented individual, you’re motivated, you know, you have different ideas than I have.
How do we mix those two? Okay, the way we’ve approached it, it’s a higher, I call a hierarchal type of thing, because it does start to talk, okay, you as a company, as an owner, you have a strategy that you’re trying to implement that strategy, okay? When you have that strategy, what’s the frameworks we’re trying to do to get implement that strategy. And when you put together a framework, all you’re trying to do is decide what the boundaries are, we’re not gonna go outside of this, we’re not gonna go outside this, we’re gonna work within this within within these boundaries. So therefore, you’ve narrowed it down, right? Then you take the next step and take it down to your managers. Okay? So you’re actually saying, okay, here’s the boundary that the work within what are the systems and processes we need to have in place to make sure we stay within those boundaries, we have a routine place to make that happen. Alright, so you have the service in place. And then also the management say, Alright, in order to make those systems to work, there rhomboid. Also, what are recipes we need to have in place to make those make these systems make these processes work? Then you take those recipes. So you’re kind of your frontline and saying, here’s a recipe you want to work, how do you want to make these things work, and that you get the gems because they’re the guys who live it day after day after day. If you’re a manager, you are an executive, you don’t see the real quirks that happen now, there’s things they know there’s not written down, it’s in their head, unless you give them the opportunity to give their input. You as a company are going to lose that. And when you lose that coming up very few times do you see managers or even executive, go to the frontline and get input. That’s what causes disengaged employees because people they feel no one cares. No one will listen to me so they don’t care. I don’t care. Okay, I’m just going to do my job and not let them lose that money day after day after day. Does that
make sense? Yeah, no, I think and I think you’re 100%. Right. And you talk about having disengaged employees, right, we got to get, we got to get rid of that. And one of those ways is to be listening to them to be giving them responsibility and additional responsibility over time, right? What are some ways that people can kind of, are there ways to sniff out who and who will and who won’t be a disengaged employee, when you’re, before you hire, I have such a hard time with that.
I will say there’s ways to determine who’s engaged or disengaged employees. But I think for me, the concept comes back to values. I mean, I gotta hire for a certain set of values. I could teach skills, I can teach steps. I can’t teach integrity, there’s certain things you can’t teach. I can’t teach initiative, you know, those kind of things. So what are the values that number one, the values, the values I want to have, my employees are the same values I want to have in my company. And when those values align, we all work together Come along in the same direction, our values are not competing. And our values are not slowing people in a wall that everybody reads once a year when it’s time to update them. So that’s what I think the key comes down into the valley, make sure the value higher from values, and what is what how do we determine what our values are behaviors, but you know, we discriminate, we just demonstrate our values by our behaviors. And that’s what our cultural crew, that’s what that when we talk about the work in agreements, when you start measuring, and you start judging performance, not on only results, but on behaviors. And when a behavior is out of line. That’s where you got to step up an address that you can’t sugarcoat that you can’t turn a blind eye. Does that make sense? Yeah,
Yeah, it does. And what are some ways that in the, you know, I always say that, when you’re interviewing somebody, that individual is never going to be on? Better day, right? That’s better? Exactly. They’re not going to be better than they are in that interview. So what are some ways that we can kind of start to uncover some of their values and learn about what their values are? before we actually hire them and kind of put them to the test?
Look at what we’re talking about behaviors? All right, if it’s a behavior that’s consistent, they would have had to demonstrate it before. So you’re going to ask them questions about you got to kind of set up a scenario when it’s kind of set up a story. If this, how would you handle that? And when they start responding to that, if they have no answer, that’s not their value. When they start using your background and behaviors of what they’ve done in the past, to answer your question, now, you got something to work with. But it was a foreign concept, like you’re looking at deer in the headlights? That’s not the right person.
Yeah, I like this idea. Right? Because, and you can kind of tell by, you know, are they using personal examples, right? You ask them a question, Hey, what are you doing this scenario? And they’re like, actually, that reminds me of one time I had, you know, an employee that was doing XYZ, and this is how I handled it, versus them kind of mulling it over having a really difficult time with the question.
Right? Right. Right, or sugarcoat or sidestepping, or give you some, quote, written a book, you know, right,
all of a sudden, they’re talking about something else. And you’re like, wait, but what happened to the, you know, the question I asked, right, so Right, right. 100%? Yeah, and I mean, we’re in a position right now, where there’s a tight labor force. I feel like there are a lot of jobs economy seems to be, you know, pretty strong, some businesses are growing. But man, it’s tough to find good people right now. And so we have to be, which makes it hard, right? Because sometimes Beggars can’t be choosers, right? But I always say that, you know, you’re better off not having somebody than hiring the wrong person.
Exactly, exactly. I’m gonna, at least from my perspective, I might kind of give you a feel for how I approach it. Okay, think about the concept of a NASCAR racing team. And you have the NASCAR you have this special card is built for that special situation. And you have your driving team, your pit crew, so you have your vehicle, and you have your drivers, they have to function together as one. Does that make sense? All right. So you take that same analogy and bring it to a company, your company is the is the vehicle so I want to make sure my companies find to is the way I need to have my company want to make sure my drivers which is my leadership team, my employees are all working together. So when you have that together, that fine tuning of the company and the findings of your employees, people want to come want to come work for you. You’re going to attract the best talent. People are going to talk about you for me so you don’t you’re not competing as well. They’re coming to you.
Yeah, you know what I recently along those lines, I made a fairly Mistake recently where I hired upper level manager that was a poor cultural fit. We didn’t know in the beginning, very highly skilled, very motivated, just wasn’t the right fit, he ruffled feathers, he wasn’t a team player. And I realized that early on, he, you know, did some things he shouldn’t have done. And I didn’t fire him immediately we put them on suspension, we kind of went through the disciplinary process. And I had several members of my executive team saying fire him fire and fire. And you know what the number one reason why I didn’t, wasn’t because I, I didn’t, I knew that he wasn’t the right fit. I felt bad for him. Right? I end up keeping him for another three days, within three days of him coming back after suspension. He did something else. That was completely unacceptable with who you know, we are. And then I fired him. Right. But when you mentioned that, you’re going to get better talent, just because of the people that they’ll be working with. It is true, right? So one thing that I would, you know, my my executive team was telling me, it wasn’t necessarily, Hey, he’s not doing a good job. It’s, hey, what are the other people that work here that have been here for years? What are they going to think about how you value the culture of the company just by keeping him around? Right.
And, and the thing I try to help people remember, people implement strategy, not companies. And if you have the wrong people, it’s not gonna work.
Exactly. No. And that’s, and that’s the thing is that sometimes we settle or sometimes we have a seat that we need filled. Sometimes we’re so busy that we go, you know, we go through this process so quickly, right? And there’s this proverb right. Slow to hire quick to fire. Yeah, yep. Yeah. And you know, what, it’s nice and saying, but sometimes it’s, it’s hard, it’s hard. Because,
you know, cuz it comes back to affect you, you know, you got a lot of things to do. And you got to open position there. And sometimes you settle for, because you want to take some of the weight off yourself, because you have so much on your plate, and I understand exactly where you’re coming from. But let’s sometimes you might have you might have but let me ask you this, that situation you just talked about, think about the internal agony that you probably went through, you wrestle for yourself, probably day after day, think about the impact on your company, and think about the impact on the rest of the culture. Yeah, those were negative.
You know, and you’re 100%. Right. And the longer that it went on. Luckily, it was a period of about a week. Okay, right. And years ago, it would have been it would have taken me months. Yeah, right. Yes. Right. So I’m getting I’m getting faster. Wait. That’s good. That’s good. We Okay, exactly. But you’re right, it just causes so much more harm than not just not having somebody there at all.
Think about those companies now that do that, and don’t address it. They sugarcoat it, they’re passive leadership, they don’t want to rock the boat, then they close your eyes. They don’t see it, but the rest of the company does. So what does that so that makes me more disengaged, when I’m saying you don’t show up in this, okay? You don’t really care. I mean, just the dynamics of the leadership team, and what they do and how they function together has a huge impact on the entire company.
That’s true. And I think kind of along those same lines, as your people start to lose respect for you, right? You keep these disengaged, you know, inefficient employees on board. And they’re gonna start thinking Geez, like, I don’t know, if I if I trust this guy to lead the company. If something so blatant, he allows something so blatant to happen right under his nose.
Right? How many days? This they’re seeing that America desk fill looking out for the next job? They’re looking on Facebook? You know, yeah, you’re engaged. You look forward to coming to work, you’re going to put that work? I mean, so disengaged versus engaged, take up the impact on your bottom line.
Yeah. How much? is it costing you?
Yeah, and I think, you know, out of everything, just having employees that are there for the right reasons, that are motivated, excited about their work. I think more than anything kind of going back to operational costs, that is really going to help the bottom line.
Yep. You know, operational costs becomes one of the quotes how you utilize your resources. I’m gonna go back to that the concept I said before, your management, your manpower, your money, any materials, go to for resources every team has, how do you use them? Do you have a system in place to use them effectively? And what I found from an operation standpoint, most people don’t. And so one of the things we’ve tried to do, we tried we have done over the years and is worked effectively, is we have we call a three week rolling schedule of a three week one schedule, you’re looking three weeks out, so two weeks out is our forecast to schedule next week. planned schedule, and it’s an awkward schedule. So when you have a forecasted schedule, you’re seeing what you’re gonna be doing two weeks out, what resources do I have the materials, what happens now you have your schedule, and you’re thinking, you’re going to do this this week, oh, bills on vacation, or, oh, I’m out of this material. So what happens? everything stops, that’s money, you’ll leave it on the table. So if you look at forecasting and planning, and then operating, and making sure nothing goes from an operating schedule, unless it’s 100% there, number one. And the second thing about how do we make sure we’re planning for long term success is our operating schedule. What I call is the only measure, we measure. Because if you hit 90% of the operating schedule, and you do it week, after week, after week, you’re going to be having profitability, and you’re going to have the money to to sustain your growth. But if you have an operating schedule, and as we said this week, and 50%, defeating the why because you let distractions come in you in other people’s lack of planning to become more emergency. So that operating schedule is your company’s Bible. And everybody’s geared to making sure that works. But how do you do that? You look two weeks out metric and resources, look a week up making sure you have the things you need. When it gets when that schedule is there is the Bible.
Yeah, and I think planning is so important, even though you don’t have a crystal ball, right? In business, you could plan whatever you want. And something I usually tell people, especially when I’m creating, you know, projections for the following year, or budgets, I usually say, Hey, this is the best that we’ve got, I know it’s going to be off in one direction or the other. I don’t know how much. But when you have a plan, then you have that starting point. And you’re in a position to make adjustments. As changes come, you lose somebody, you hope you acquire a large client, you’re in a better position, because you had made all of these steps created these steps to plan. And so you’re, you’re more agile. So
one, one thing today, yeah, and from the concept of planning, particularly you put together that planning your right, stuff happens, circumstances occur. So when you’re looking at that plan, you’re planning, I only plan for 30% of my resources. Alright, so therefore, that 20% that can be there to handle emergencies that can be there to handle the stuff that doesn’t that come up. But if I know, I am sort of my, my resources are there or committed, I’m gonna make happen, stuffs gonna happen. And I found that will float that when I was when I got back into maintenance, and we had this concept back in the maintenance area, that was I do it now team, that was a team that when the executive vice president calls up and once XYZ and he’s not in the schedule that do it now chain was available, that was your float to sort of take care of that, because it happened, invariably, someone who have a power and a soft pull wants to jerk your chain and make your schedule change. So I liked it a long time ago.
I liked I liked that 80% rule, right? Where you and I know that, you know, with some of my companies, I we spread ourselves too thin, right? We know there’s a busy season coming up. And as opposed to like budgeting 80% of the you know, do it today stuff on budgeting 100 or even 110%. And one thing goes wrong. And then I’m surprised when we run into issues, right? Whereas if I, you know, if I hey, we have everything we need plus 20% because that 20% we’re still going to need we just don’t know when and how exactly,
you’re not going to stop emergencies, you’re not gonna stop those things that come up. So put that into your schedule. I love it. I love it. Wayne, well, hey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people find more about you all these great things that you’re doing all the great tools that you have to help CEOs and business leaders? Okay, the as I say the name of the company is grow company profits website and grow company profits calm. My email address is Wayne at grow a company profits calm, but I want to leave your audience with access to a tool. And when I when I talked about the concept of disengaged employees unnecessary complexity, a hidden cost there when I say called value drains, and when the value drains because our strategy, culture and operation are not in alignment. How do you find out how your strategy culture and operations are online. Now, we have a tool called the alignment analyzer. It’s a free tool. It’s an online interactive video series where if we ask based on about 40 questions, and I’m trying to get a feel for to the level to which you agree or disagree with the statement that I’m making. And what we’re doing is comparing your current leadership team, your current company to that of operasi exit company. When it’s all said and done, you will see how your how your strategy, culture and operations align. And someone will be able to get that to a site called alignment analyzer calm and I’ll probably be some show notes. We’ll put those into the show notes. But that’s a tool I think people can at least get a starting point of going from there. We have other tools that are available, also free tools and we talked about value drains Have another tool called a value drain detector and evaluate detect, just let you know to what extent our value drains invested into your company. So it gives you an idea of what level of disengaged employees what level unnecessary complex complexity, and what level of hidden costs. That’s another free tool. And it’s a free tool that we get you to take those two we have never called put a number on, once you know how much your investment value drains, what percentage of your operating budget Are you leaving on the table? Because of that? Once you know that number, you kind of make a decision, am I gonna live with that? Or am I gonna change so we give people some tools to make some decisions. Any company is operationally exceptional company didn’t start that way. They started at some starting point and made a conscious decision to change. We just hope people see where they start from that they want to help change that to help them change. So that’s that’s kind of what we do. We go from there.
Yeah. And I think that I think those tools sound like, you know, very useful because as, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, as business leaders, sometimes we get used to just looking at the same thing, right? We’re just looking at the same thing. But when we have something a third party we have, you know, this an outside tool that somebody else created, then we start looking in different spots, right? And that allows us to grow and identify things that we didn’t think of before.
When you think about it, everybody likes to compare themselves and see how they stack up. That’s all these tools do. How do you stack up against operators and company? Once you once you know the facts? Knowledge is power pending and make some decisions?
Yep, I love it. Well, that’s great. Wayne, I appreciate your time today, everybody Wayne Washington. He is the doctor of operations clearly knows his stuff, make sure to check him out. Thanks for joining us today. Wayne, we appreciate your time. Appreciate your knowledge. Appreciate your experience. Thank you very much a pleasure being here.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave us a rating and for daily inspiration and business tips. Follow Allan on Instagram. Until next time, remember we build the future one entrepreneur at a time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Reader Interactions