Author, VISIONARY Co-Author, ROCKET FUEL (with Gino Wickman) #Visionary + #Integrator = Rocket Fuel. Get everything you want out of your business.
Flower Mound, TX
Joined May 2009
- Tweets12.3K
- Following5.7K
- Followers5.3K
- Likes1.9K
Pinned Tweet
Thx so much @KrisGutierrez for your time and talent on this story.
Could not be more grateful to all those who prayed for
@carsonwinters_
nbcdfw.com/news/sports/Flowe…
102 employees. 99 had their quarterly conversation with their manager.
The 3 who didn't? The leadership team.
Leaders exempt themselves from their own systems first. Then everyone else follows.
1995. Milwaukee. My cyber cafe had a line out the door.
The obvious fix was more computers.
Instead, I doubled the price.
Nobody left.
When the line is out the door, the market is telling you something about your price.
About 100 employees. Three quarterly reviews for each. Roughly 300 data points.
Zero problems.
That's not a healthy company. It's an ungraded one.
Leaders grade easy because grading accurately creates work.
In 1993 I stood at a microphone a few feet from W. Edwards Deming.
The word I took home still shapes how I coach founders.
Tampering.
Communicating: walking around, asking questions, listening, looking at the numbers.
2/ Tampering: giving direction or making a decision in an area someone else (not you) owns.
Talk to anyone in your company. Then take what you learn to your #2, not to the team.
Same insight. No undone work.
The founder with the most structure takes the longest vacations.
Sounds backwards. But if every decision runs through you, time off just builds a backlog.
Give every job an owner who isn’t you. Let the team solve problems without you.
Then leave.
Structure fuels freedom.
"My COO is so negative. Every idea I bring, they tell me why it won't work."
Good. You think in options. They're built to narrow them.
That friction is the combination working.
1/ I learned to drive stick in my dad’s 1967 Chevy pickup.
That clutch is still teaching me how to run my calendar.
The pedal had a foot of travel. You couldn’t lean back and give it half a push. You had to mash it to the floor.
Anything less? Metal on metal. Grrrind.
3/ The grind has a name: attention residue.
Part of you stays in the last meeting. It’s worse when that task is unfinished or you switch in a hurry.
The person across the table gets a Visionary in neutral.
A founder told me, "My gut said to hire them, and I was wrong twice."
His gut built the company. It just had almost no reps on hiring a #2.
On your second in command hire, move when your gut and the data agree.
A mentor once asked me, "If your energy is the fuel for your company, how full is your tank?"
I didn't like my answer.
I'd been showing up earlier, staying later, missing family stuff. I called it commitment.
Here's the check I run now. 3 gauges: Body, Mind, Spirit.
A founder apologized for not being able to multitask.
He'd parked three big projects until one key seat was filled.
He called it a weakness.
I call it sequencing.