PodCrash with Matt Ebert
PodCrash with Matt Ebert
Most Employees Aren’t Lazy, They’re Unstructured
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What would you say is the problem that you're solving? Why would I call you as a person or as a company?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great question. Uh we have a pretty bold claim. It's that we solve people problems. Okay. Whatever they are. Doesn't matter whether they're personal, professional, people or people. And we found that people aren't the problem, but people have problems. And that's why we have people problems. So we've dealt with all different industries, and it's the same truth applied to different situations that lead to the same successful outcome of individuals becoming optimal in all the things that they do.
SPEAKER_01All right. I love it. You you tackle the big thing problems that people have. It's almost as big as like uh going to space or something. It's not an easy thing to solve. So uh love tackling a big one.
SPEAKER_00It's it's a I tell people it's the it's the hardest variable in business in all ways. And if you can understand people, I would say people are extremely unpredictable. And in that unpredictability, they're actually extremely predict predictable. So realizing who they are and what they do, that's the key to get started. And then we have systems of solutions that we've tried with all clients all over the world that we then systemize and scale and offer out to all of our clients. Once we figure one out with one, we give it to everybody. Good stuff.
SPEAKER_01So, Matt, what's your what's your background ahead of this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, stupid entrepreneur with the resume builder number one. Uh, I have that bug. I just have I've I've never worked for anyone else outside of like a couple internships, and it's always been just entrepreneurship. If I can build it, I'll do it. I love creating it. And what I realized early on in my first business, we had a lot of success as a young entrepreneur. But what I loved wasn't necessarily just growing the business, it was growing the people. And that was what I always enjoyed. So we built a multi-million dollar sales organization off individuals off Craigslist. And what I found when working with them was they had to work ethic. No one actually was able to help them kind of direct it or take that energy and put it on focus. Okay. And once we were able to do that personally, the professional side was really easy. And once we did that, we continued to duplicate that system for every person that came in our system until eventually a very large company called and asked how we do it. We went in and shared it with them. And they said, Wow, we're are you gonna send us an invoice? And I said, What do you mean are we gonna send you an invoice? I would just come in to help and share best practices. And they said, No, we thought you were a consultancy, and I wasn't. I was just an entrepreneur who sat who solved our people problems. And that was how the whole business started. It was completely by accident. It wasn't an intention. I never wanted to be a consultant. I honestly think I still don't want to be one at some times, but it's turned into it. The business has grown, and we've uh we've been able to help a lot of people all over the world.
SPEAKER_01Well, you're helping you're helping people, and that's what it's all about. So that's that's great. Yeah. Amen. So the Craigslist thing kind of got my interest a second there. Yeah. Were you were you not hiring salespeople for that sales org off of Craigslist? It's something that I've heard that you've talked about, so it must have been not the normal route to build a sales organization off of Craigslist.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I found good salespeople aren't looking for jobs. Yep. Right? Period. So if I was looking for a salesperson, I would go find someone who's selling and I would go have a conversation with them. That's how we found anyone who's coming directly in the sales role as a salesperson. But what we were selling was a unique little product that was not the most glamorous thing in the world. So we had to find a way to be able to support them in what they wanted. And the way we did that uh was finding people, honestly, in Craigslist, but looking for jobs in the hospitality field. And one of the reasons why, back to this concept of people aren't the problem, people have problems. That's why you have people problems, is in sales, when you're working with an emotional purchase, which all sales are, you need to be able to deal with the person. And who has to deal with more people than people in the hospitality industry? It's live, it's in person, they're the final aspect before someone says yes or no, this was good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we found they're always looking for jobs. They're never satisfied with where they are. So if we can come in and take someone who's extremely personable, can think on their feet, can have conversations. We provide an amazing system and amazing sales script behind it, teach them what they need to know, then set them off to go. We were having guys who were making six figures that didn't even graduate high school because they had the work ethic. We offered the system, and then we taught them how to deal with all the other stuffs in their life. And that's how we were able to grow that business.
SPEAKER_01So it sounds like what you feel is the system can solve the problems that people face. Is that what I'm hearing?
SPEAKER_00That's exactly what it is. So it's we call it truth-based transformation. So there's three parts of it. You expose the truth, you offer a bridge to then bridge the gap. So it's expose, bridge, and then sustain. What are you offering for them to bridge the gap that actually is sustaining it? If I can do that, what happens is instead of us enabling our team or enabling ourselves, we're actually equipping our team to deal with their own problems. Okay. So when we were over at when we were at Mountain View out with uh with Google, we were going through this conversation and they brought us out for work-life balance stuff. And I'm sitting there going, like, work-life balance at Google, we just sat at a five-star restaurant to eat lunch on campus. And what was happening was we realized that a lot of these people were enabled, they weren't actually equipped. They didn't know how to deal with their own problems. So instead of managing, the managers were babysitting. But if we equip the people to deal with the problems, the managers can actually do their job. And that's in every industry. It's not just, you know, big tech, blue-collar spots, right? Anything from uh blue collar to white collar said people are still people. They all desire value. It's just what is it they value? And how do we teach them to use that to motivate themselves to get where they want to go?
SPEAKER_01This seems like it kind of minimizes the need to get hiring right. Is that do you do you think there's a lot of myths around hiring out out there?
SPEAKER_00I think that the industry has done such a good job to terrify hirers to make a bad hire that I think we don't have a hiring problem anymore. I think we used to. I think it used to be a thing where it was just kind of get a body in and figure it out. Okay. I've been told, and I live this, I feel very much, you can build a good business one of two ways. Good people are good systems, and good systems are easier to manage. Once you have good systems, what we then can do is take a good person, turn them to great, a bad person, turn them to good. So the system is what allows you to scale the person. The quality of the person, it depends on who you hire. I kind of joke about it. We're doing a training this week, and it's a big thing is how Harvard doesn't graduate smart people, they accept smart people, right? Like, like they're taking credit because they have a really hard application process. And that person was smart coming in, not just going out. In fact, I would argue some of these universities at this point, the opposite's happening. They're coming in smart and they're leaving a little less uh intelligent. But that's a personal thought on my end. But I I think as as you're navigating it, is people don't necessarily know how to deal with stuff that they've never been told how to deal with. Things that you might think are common sense are not so common sense. Okay. So getting to understand your people, and that's one of the systems, is you know, how do you make sure that they're maximizing their weak? Do they know how to even make the most of their time? And and not in the sense of time management, because time management, in my opinion, is a lie. The word itself doesn't actually make sense. You can't manage time. You can't manipulate, at least not yet. You can't manipulate time. So because of it, you don't need to manage it. People you need to manage because they're imperfect. They do things they shouldn't do. They need guidance and guardrails. Time you don't. However, how do you optimize your time? And we use these nine questions on a weekly basis to set your week, focus on what you need to get done, and then only do what's actually important. And when we can teach people to do that, first thing they realize is they're not as busy as they thought they were. If you can introduce margin in someone's life, you can then teach them whatever else you need. One of the biggest things we get is out, we don't have time to grow. We don't have time to develop our people. We don't have time to teach this or teach that. So I always tell them, and the first thing we're gonna do is teach them how to find time. Once we teach them how to find time, our system gives about an extra 15 hours of productivity every single week. With 15 hours of productivity, in addition to what you're already doing, I'm sure you can sit down and read a book for 20, 30 minutes. Okay.
SPEAKER_01When you say optimize, what I want to make sure do you are you talking about getting the best out of your best? Are you or do you honestly think like the bottom, say 25% are also fixable? Because I I kind of get the sense that there's a whole lot of work for not a lot of reward trying to to manage the bottom quartile of people up.
SPEAKER_00Yes, so great, great question. So here's what I always say you you can make a five of ten. I don't think you can make a one of ten. Yeah. Right. But with good systems, you can make a one of five. And knowing what you're dealing with, I think is really important, right? So that's how we focus on some of this. What I would say is optimization and optimal performance is different than what we would call high performance. The world has told us that we should be focusing on high performance. And when I give this definition, I think you'll understand a little bit more on why it's so key to do it. High performance is high output at an unsustainable pace compared to others, right? So compared to other organizations, Matt, in the, you know, in the collision space, how are you doing? Well, compared to others, we're doing well. Okay, cool. That's high performance. Another way to think of high performance as an individual is if you run a race against a bunch of really slow people and you win, and you then think you're fast. Like that's the issue, right? Yeah. You're not fast, you're just not slow. And what's happened is our world status quo has been accepted at such a low bar. I mean, think about it, right? Like if your employees show up on time, they're considered a good employee. Like, well, they aren't stealing from me, so they're good. And it's like, wait a minute. No, we've allowed status quo to drop so low that our employees are just rising to the bar we set. So, with all that being said, high performance, high output, unsustainable pace compared to others. Optimal performance, which is what we get all of our clients to, whether it's an executive coach, whether it's a team, whether it's a leadership program, whether it's an entire organization, is the same high output. So we're not sacrificing results. However, you're doing it at a sustainable pace compared to your own ability. And that last part is key because if I have a one that needs to become a five, but that one at her at their best with all the things I've put in place for them can only be at a four, they got to find another job. This is not where they should be. And we need to be more okay letting people not be where we need a hole filled, letting them be where they will actually thrive. In fact, when we work with clients, one of the rules that we have is when you hire someone, they need to be able to do 100% of the job you're asking them for at 80% of their effort. Because if you do what most people do is you hire someone that just barely makes the cutoff on what's needed to be able to do the job, and then you want to grow, you can't. Your people are already redlining. They're already at a they're coming in at 100. And the mindset used to be, oh, well, you know, they'll grow into it. Maybe, but likely not. They're kind of coming in burnt out, and you're wondering why they fade out after 30 days. So again, and there's a lot of people out there. So sometimes you got to pay a little bit more. But I promise you, making the right hire with good systems is what's going to allow you to sustain whatever business you have, whatever industry you're in, as long as there's a market that wants to buy what you have, you will crush it if you focus on those two variables.
SPEAKER_01Many people say most people are given things like a 40% effort. It's rare that you're getting people given 100, and you're you're saying what you want to do is get get people where they're winning at 80%. But what do you do about those that are only going to give you 40%? Because that's what most of the world does most of the time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So we call that the inefficiency epidemic, and the number is exactly 40%. The average person's only doing about 40% of their capacity. Okay. What happens though is when they've only done that level of work for their entire life, perception gets confused as reality. Okay. So although they're only doing 40, there it feels like 100 to them. And we have to recognize that, right? Where you're like, hey, you could do more. They're like, no, I can't. I'm going to die. It's like, all right, jump a little higher. And all of a sudden they jump a little higher. You have to reframe. It's a four-minute mile thing all over, but it's on each person. So how do we do that? The first thing we do when we come into a company is what we call our foundation program. And it's basically getting their, their, their week out of their head into what we call our LP planner, right? It's a pen and paper planner. Why do we do pen and paper? Because it works better, right? Technology makes you more effective, but doesn't necessarily are more efficient, but not necessarily more effective. So we give them a pen and paper planner to dump their head out. And all of a sudden, once they dump their head out, it's like taking a puzzle out of the box to start doing it versus doing it while it's still in the box. Like you can't do a puzzle while it's in the box. So we let them break that out. And because of that, we show them, hey, you're actually not as busy as you think you are. And we show them you have more you can give. We show them that 60% delta. And then we walk them through how to leverage that best. But it's all based on self-discovery, right? Like you said, stories, education, and realization. Individuals want to hear a story, they want to learn from it, but then they want to have a realization with a bridge. So we exp that's exposing the gap. The planner in this case is actually what the bridge is to bridge the gap. And then to sustain it, we're going to re-engage back with the system on a weekly and daily basis. So does that make sense? So, like you're not going to be able to get people to give you 100%, but I always tell people, I don't want 100%. I want 60 to 80 with the ability to get to 100 if we need to, and we're going to come back to 80. But when I hire people and we work with clients, we make it very clear. And everyone out there, if you're watching this, burnout, whose fault is burnout, it's always yours. It's never the client's fault, it's never the business's fault, it's never your boss's fault. It is your fault if you're burnt out. We have to avoid it. We can't fix it afterwards. We have to avoid hitting it. And that's exactly what our systems do. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So I I I take my calendar and I write down what what I got going on. And you basically point out to me where I have more time or where I'm wasting time. Yep.
SPEAKER_00So what we do is you first, the way we'll treat, we'll teach it is you list out your things to do. The way most people plan right now is they list what they have to do, then they do what's on their list, right? It's make a list, do a list, right? Except for the problem is you make the list, then you don't do the list, or you only do the things you want to do, right? Because you you're going to cherry pick.
SPEAKER_01I say all the time they knock out the easy stuff. Like the the big top two things that are hard that are really move the needle. That's the stuff that everybody saves for last. Yep.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you haven't had that hard conversation. Like even pushing that off for three weeks, dude. Of course you're stressing over it. And what we find, even with some of our highest level coaching clients, it's the thought of doing what they have to do is so much harder than just doing it. The thought of having that conversation is so much harder than have the thought of firing that person is so much harder than firing them if you do it well and you do it out of love. All of that being said, we are going to push the limits in order to get you to do this. So instead of just making a list, do the list, we call it reverse planning. That's the basis behind this system. So reverse planning works like this: you list out what you want this week, then you list out what you need to do or what you've committed to do this week. And then the key is you only do what's important. And what that allows you to do is have time for the internal stuff, the spiritual stuff, to have time for the physical stuff, to have time for the relational stuff, to have time for the professional stuff. But you have to have time set aside before the week starts. So many people are starting the week on Monday. And I'm sitting here going, the race, that's when the gun goes off. Like you're still tying your shoes, but we got to have the plan ready to go before the race has started. And when you start doing that, and it's interesting, a lot of our clients will bring us in as high-end individuals, top, top performers in some of the hardest industries, professional athletes, executives, entrepreneurs, you name it. And what we do is we take the same concept that helps them succeed in one area of life, and we show them how to take that truth and remind them that truth is constant application changes. So one of the other things that every single one of our systems does is it takes the truth, whatever truth that you have or you like or you agree with, and we show you how to repurpose it for another part of your life. Because I don't want to learn something that's only going to make me more money once I've made as much money as I needed. Making more money is not the hard part. What's really hard is having three kids, a wife that I love and I may love me. What's really hard is I have a daughter who um who has uh a very rare muscular condition. She's the 17th person to ever had this genetic disorder, uh, youngest by far. And she's been in a wheelchair her whole life.
SPEAKER_01Oh, and every kind of person, by the way.
SPEAKER_0017 in the whole world. Oh, wow. 17th ever in all of history, right? Uh, very, very, very, very rare. One in six hundredth billionth of a chance. I didn't even know that was a percentage, but it's fun to say and it's real. And she's been an absolute blessing to me because what happens is now I gotta take all the stuff we teach, these high performers, making millions of dollars, putting this into play in the business, their teams, whoever it is. And now I got to put it into practice in my personal life. Does this still work? And one of the principles that we teach is the 80-20 principle of planning. 80% of your life you can plan, 20% you can't. However, if you don't take care of the 80, the 20 feels like 100. And this is where a lot of burnout and overwhelm comes in, is they aren't taking care of the majority of your life you can control. So when the unknowns come, which always will, yeah, it's gonna completely rock. So my daughter Nat, when she gets sick, uh, like we just got done with a two-week stay in the ICU. Um, I do keynotes from the ICU. Do we do coaching from the ICU? You know, we we do all the things that we need to uh remotely whenever we need to. Um, with that being said, one of the parts that's even hardest is when she goes into the hospital, what is wrong with her is not what makes a hard visit. Let me explain. We've experienced everything from her a common cold going in to her uh being dead for 20 minutes and coming back to life. Like we've experienced all of it. Helicopter rides, and rides. I mean, it's it's all been heavy. With that being said, what throws off and makes it a hard stay, whether it's a week or three weeks, is how well my wife and I are taking care of that 80% so we can continue to manage when the 20% comes, which is crazy. So the trouble of the stay at the hospital has nothing to do with my daughter's well-being. It has everything to do with, hey, Maria, my wife and I, are we on the same page? Is the business where it needs to be? Is our foundation where it needs to be? Are our employees doing what needs to happen? Are clients where they need to be? 80% of it is it in order. And when we have to go and spend a week or two in the ICU, if our 80% is good, that stay in the ICU is it's never pleasant, it's never pleasurable. Does that make sense? But it's so much more manageable and has nothing to do with how sick or healthy my daughter is. And that has always opened my eyes to the fact that the stresses we have in our life, they are not as many as we think there are, but it's because we don't handle the things we can that those stresses become almost impossible to deal with.
SPEAKER_01This is very logical to me because it sounds a lot like look, if I if I'm behind on everything already and something unexpected comes up, now I'm really kind of screwed because I was already, because I was already messed up. It's really just is that oversimplifying it? Uh probably.
SPEAKER_00No, it's perfectly simple. I mean, I always tell people I'm not smart enough to complicate this thing. Like, like that's why I think it works so well, is because it's so simple. The problem is, is nobody does it. Common knowledge, not commonly used. And that's what our systems do. It connects intention and structure to bring you back. I call it perpetual development. So basically, you have intention, the purpose behind whatever goal you're going after. You have a structure, which is a defined, repeatable process towards achievement, and you want to bookend whatever you're trying to do in between those two things. So it's bridging that gap. Say the two bookends again. Intention and structure. Okay. And intention is the purpose behind the goal. Structure is the defined, repeatable process towards achievement. What our system does is it connects intention to structure, and then it re-encate reconnects structure back to intention and it cycles you through that. So you're constantly intentional and you're leveraging on structure because the problem is if you have um intention without structure, it's it's a waste of energy. It's kind of like having a road trip with a vehicle without a route. If you have a vehicle without a route, it's a waste of energy. Meaning the vehicle is just going to drive all over the place. Your intention is going to bring you all over the place. Where if you have a route without a vehicle or structure without intention, that's what I call a wasted opportunity. So a lot of entrepreneurs who have these different operating systems put into their business or operating systems that they read in a book and they're trying to implement it, but no one's doing anything with it. The system's not the problem. You're not using it. That's not, that doesn't mean the system doesn't work. That means your people aren't working. But how do you get them to do it is we tie it back to what we call PVTT, personal value tied to task. What we need to do when we are working with our individuals is help them recognize the personal value that is tied to the task that they are doing. So whatever industry you're in, if you're in the automobile industry, if you're if you're working in a shop with a blue-collar individual, it's taking time to go, hey, do you understand why we're doing what we're doing? And what happens is people are like, man, I don't have time to do all that with everybody. And I tell people, when it comes to motivation, we wrote a book called Motivate the Unmotivated. And when it comes to that book, I always say, what takes longer? Motivating out of love, which is understanding, or motivating out of fear, which is force. All of us have experienced force. And it works for a fast burst until that force is removed and then it never sticks. The love based motivation, which is not like the kumbaya type love. I'm talking real hard love, right? I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm gonna be kind, I'm gonna be direct, and we're gonna get things going. Yeah. That actually takes less time because you either invest in your people now or you invest in them forever. Same with yourself. Either you've Fix it now or you continue to try to fix it forever. It's the same mindset, whether I'm working with an individual as a coaching client or an entire company as a team. It's the way we apply them changes.
SPEAKER_01When you're working with an individual, I assume that they're there for your help and and it's a lot easier because they they're eager to apply what what you're teaching them. How do you deal with that at a company where let's say half of them are just gonna wait out the new idea and hope it goes away?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Can we use your industry for example? Is that cool because a lot of the blue I love working with blue-collar organizations in general, just like the first business I had, these individuals have the work ethic. They just haven't ever been introduced to some of the stuff that we teach, right? Because who gets this? It's the high-up executives, it's the CEOs, right? It's the and these individuals, like, look, you know, we have a home building company we work with, and it's like, look, I swing a hammer and I'm really good at swinging a hammer. Why do I need to plan my week out? Like I'm even, they don't even want to come. So that's the reason why when we do our workshops, we are coaching, like I said, we'd be coaching you, Matt, as the leader or the leaders of the organization or the location, management team, whatever you want to call it. And then we come in on a quarterly basis and we train the employees. And here's why that sandwich works. I call it top-down, bottom-up, is that we want to have walking, talking, breathing examples in the leadership who don't have to teach it to their people.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00They're just living it and showing it. Now, when we come in and teach it to their people, it's all about self-discovery. But it's also about connecting it to their the rest of their life. It's not just professional, it's personal, professional, and even down to your family. Does this help you in all areas of your life? And when people recognize and are faced with truth, there's a level of comfort we have once we make it through the discomfort. We always say truth leads attention, tension leads to transformation.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00So in that time, when we're working with entry-level individuals, blue-collar individuals, individuals who would never go to a program like this unless it's kind of forced down their throat. It usually takes us about 25 minutes for them to realize holy smokes, I have a problem, and this dude is offering a solution. Let me listen to it. Then we show them how to implement the solution quickly and get results as fast as possible. What that then does is allows them to put some faith in what we're doing. Once they have that, then we challenge them to try to break it. And by chat, when you try to break truth, it breaks you. Does that make sense? So there's an element of I'm not going to just sit here and say you need to do this, do this, do this. I'm going to say, look, this works. It gives an extra 15 hours of productivity. Y'all said you were busy. You want some more time. Try it. If it doesn't work, here's my cell phone. Call me and rip me apart. I'm happy to deal with it. I put that offer out to everybody. And I and I do I do mean that because when truth is applied, you get the same result every single time. Truth doesn't change. The application does. And we continue that through self-discovery.
SPEAKER_0115% is a pretty big, or 15 hours, sorry, is a pretty big boast, though. That's way more than 15%. It's like two more hours to every workday.
SPEAKER_00Literally. It's it's that's what people have been saying. About three hours per workday. And what that does is these are our clients giving us back. That's an extra weekend every month.
SPEAKER_01Five day, five day workday, right? It would be there you go.
SPEAKER_00Right. You gotta be careful in my industry, what you do, what you say, right? No, but it but all in all is think about it. The average person, Inc. Inc. did a mag uh an article on this, that the average person working an eight-hour workday is only working about 36%. That's two hours and 58 minutes of product productive work. Yeah. That's lower than the 40% we're talking about by four percentage points. If you were to take that and I was like, okay, if your average person's maxing out at 40% and I was to come in and I was to bring them to 50%, I was gonna give them a 25% bump in what they do, your entire business would change. Just that. Right? You don't, I don't need you at 100 because you're you're likely at 40, maybe 50. The best people on teams we find are usually around 60. Because when you have no system, you're only functioning on your own ability. And humans, although we are amazing creatures with amazing adaptability, uh uh uh adaptive abilities, we cannot will ourselves through life. It's too hard. We will break eventually. So, because of that, we rely on systems and structure.
SPEAKER_01What about all the uncontrollable things? Like here, use my industry, for example. At a ground level, a technician would love to be more efficient because they're they're paid flat rate commission in this industry. So it's more money for them in the same amount of time, right? The problem is is so many things outside of their window of control affect them. How quick is how quick is the office? Um, does the part come in on time and does it come in right? Like those are a couple examples of things that absolutely trip them up every day that they have no control over.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So one of the people we work with, uh I won't use his name, but he's a high-up trainer in SEAL Team Six, the Delta team. Like not the team that goes around telling everyone what they do, the team that doesn't talk about what they do. Yeah. And one of the things I said, why do you guys use our planner? And he says, Well, because it stays in line with what we believe. I said, What's that? He said, the plan means nothing, but planning means everything. So let's use this as an example. Technicians in the back, tons of variables that could go wrong. When someone asks me that, I go, all right, Matt, what are those variables? Well, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. Cool. So when you sit there and think you have five hours of dedicated work time to do it, you don't actually have five hours. You have probably have closer to four. So how are you going to do that in four hours, right? So instead of assuming you have more time, I'm going to assume you have less time. And then what that's going to create is margin at the end to do whatever you want with it.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00So, like, yeah, I can't control everything, but based on what I can control, I will control. We talked about a building company we work with, right? Uh, home builders. Well, what slows down building a house? Rain. Well, okay, we were talking about how do we get more efficient. Well, we were sitting there going, how many days does it take to build a house? 180 days. All right. Well, the problem is, what about if there's rain days? So we just switched the variable we were looking at of how many workable days does it take to actually do a house? Does that make sense? So you're pulling out the things you can't control to track only what you can. And one of the issues that comes with that is the metrics we're tracking have too many variables in it that we have to pull back. So, in an it's in again, a similar industry that you have of detailing cars, right? I'm well, but you also do that also to get to the other side of the bang up to looking nice and pretty. Right. That we have a client that we work in that industry specifically. And the biggest thing is how long should it take to do that? Oh, well, there's this size, this, and there's this size, this, and there's I said, but we have to create a standard. Start with creating a standard. Let's test against that standard. And you might be wrong. It might be too fast, it might be too slow, but it's a lot better than I don't know. So if it's too, you know what I mean? So it's it's it's controlling what we can and not using the minority, the 20%, to affect how you run your 80%. And that's also what tends to happen is people are sitting there going, like, oh man, but what about when a client does this? Yeah. That time when a client does that, you'll deal with it the way you have to. And it's a lot easier to deal with it the way you have to if you took care of all the other things that you could have controlled that you didn't. And that's what we mean by exp exposing people to truth. Is like, all right, big boy, what's the real issue? I get that this one time it happened, oh, my boss always comes in and does always? He always does it. No, well, every now and then he's okay. How often? I don't know. But he's only he's not even in the office. You just complain he doesn't come to the office. Now you're complaining he's too much on your face. And the answer is actually when he comes in and throws me off. Okay, well, then if he's working that day, you don't have as much time to get your jobs done because you know he's gonna ask you this or she's gonna tell you this, she's gonna interfere. So we just have to be realistic with how we're working, but that all starts with intentionality on the front end, not reactions on the back end. And that's where people fail.
SPEAKER_01So what I'm hearing over and over, kind of in a different way, on this, is if 80% of things are controllable, 20% aren't, over concentrate on the 80% so that when the 20% that you can't control comes, and it will, you have the space for it because you've you've planned appropriately for the 80% that that's a known factor.
SPEAKER_00Bingo, right? It's you could use this with every every aspect of life. Let's let's use diet. I always laugh. I'll talk with my trainer or nutritionist, whoever I'm working with. I always find a coach. I do what I do, I just find a coach and I ask how to do it, and I follow it. And I'm always like, I'm sitting here going, what's this peptide do? And what's this blood work do? And let's do this again, let's try this again, let's try this again. And I'm sitting there going, like, if I just stopped eating my kids' snacks, I don't need to like that. There's a bigger issue in the 80% of the stuff I'm I'm messing up than this small, minute, more expensive, more sexy, more enjoyable, more scientific. But honestly, it turns out if you eat natural foods, regardless of what diet you're trying to be on, you're going to be in a healthier position. Right. Like, that's what I mean by it. It's like we work so hard to focus on this five or 10%, but the 80% of our lifestyle is crushing us that no matter what we do in that area, if I was just to stop stealing my snacks from my children, I'd be in better shape.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I like I I agree. I by the way, on that note, like I I've been working with a gentleman on some of the health stuff, and the diet he laid out for me was look, three things. No, no fried food, right? Um, limit sugar to 50 grams a day, and uh and then no white flour. And those are those are simple, but I'm like, I can do that, right? Like I might I might crave pizza every now and then and or or french fries, but like it's very doable. It doesn't seem too restrictive.
SPEAKER_00So And that's the thing that people sit there and they're like, oh man, like when we were working with another large tech company right before COVID hit, was it's like, oh man, like uh do I have to really plan out my whole week? I'm like, well, you don't have to, but try it and see what happens. And what ended up happening was they tried it, they liked it, and all of a sudden they started planning out their week. And I remember the the VP was uh he was actually going out to work with Target, right? That was one of their clients on their on their ad spend. And uh I said, Why are you going out there? And he said, Well, I got to go out because X, Y, and Z, I don't know if they're gonna be able to do it. And I was like, But wait, but you're the VP, they're the sales rep. Why are you going with them? And the reality of it was was this individual I was working with never focused on the process or the progress. They only focus on the end results. And what happens is people don't like to talk about this because we're all rah-rah, let's go, whatever. Just get the results, man. Whatever happens to get the results. You get the results, that's all I care about. And what I've come to find is that is one way to do things. But if you focus on getting the results and the how you get the results also matters in my organization, you will build sustainability, you will build fulfillment, and you will build a culture of caring for each other, regardless of how hard you have to be on people. Is the expectations are there?
SPEAKER_01100% agree with this. Results matter, but you get the results by behaviors. And and like if you concentrate on just the results, it's not sustainable at a break. If you concentrate always on the behaviors or systems or whatever that can deliver the results, that's how you win. 100%.
SPEAKER_00No, no, we we call it going slow to smooth, smooth to fast. Like break it down, slow down, let's get it right, and then let's move ourselves ahead in a speed that we can. But if we don't break it down, and and we uh we have a community that we do coaching calls, which is super enjoyable. We do them twice a month. And what we do is our team brings new studies and research that we figured out in the uh performance space. And then we almost have like this melting pot conversation with everybody on it. It's really one of my probably my favorite thing we do with our clients, because it's kind of I get to hear from them more than just teach. And we just did one about efficiency versus effectiveness and how we are we are sacrificing effectiveness to seem efficient. Okay. And to get faster time, but you're getting less quality output. And because of it, you cannot sacrifice effectiveness or efficiency, I'm sorry, for effectiveness without recognizing the diminishing return of what you're doing. So if you're scaling and you got to go from 100% output to 80% output in order to scale and make up for that 20% delta all day. I'm all for that. But if you're sitting here going, you know what, instead of me uh writing a love letter to my wife, I'm gonna go into chat and I'm gonna have chat write me a love letter for my wife. Same result of an output, different path to get there, completely different experience. And we're getting trapped more and more in that with AI that a lot of us want to seem a certain way versus actually be a certain way.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And if you're seeming to be a certain way, that will break, that will fail, that will never get you there. But if you actually be that person, Matt, like you're saying, change the way you're eating, you're changing your entire lifestyle. It's gonna become not an issue anymore. You're not going to crave those things when your body starts getting the true nutrients they have versus whatever artificial flowers coming through. Like you're gonna actually, it's gonna be the new way that you process. And that's what we try to teach people, whether you're an entry-level hourly new employee who just got into the shop for the first time and got certified to be able to do it, or you're leaning an entire uh location or the entire region, wherever you guys have, and you're pushing through that, it is no different when you actually take the time to check what is the truth. And we say get it right, then make it right, but don't try to make it right till you got it right. Understand the issue, expose the truth, sit in the tension, and let that lead to the transformation.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so kind of going back to just old, old ways of going at this, you know, talking to our management team about being, you know, fire preventers versus firefighters for for as an example, easy phrase. The issue would be were they smart enough to know how to prevent it? So it's it's great. You want them to be proactive rather than reactive, obviously. What you're talking about is really like ground level. What do you do about the fact are they are they smart enough to know how to be proactive at it? The system takes care of that, you feel?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's that's what the system protects us from, right? I built this system to protect myself from myself. Everyone's like, oh, you must be really organized, and that's why you put a planner in place and started developing. I'm like, I'm an absolute train wreck up here. Like if you're an entrepreneur, you're you understand what I mean. Like what's happening up here makes no sense to anyone else until eventually it pops up as a business or a product. Like, right? Like, you know what I'm talking about. Like you're trying to figure it out and move it. My wife, the reason this whole business started was my wife came to me and said, Matt, I knew marrying you was going to be hard. I didn't realize it was gonna be this hard. Like you're insane. Like you have a new idea, like, I don't know where your head's going. And I said, I said, here are the nine questions I asked myself just to get myself in order to know what I'm supposed to do next. Because I will shiny object, I will move over here, I will run to other things. I get bored quickly, I process things quickly. I need to make sure I'm focused on what needs to be focused on. And the system was to protect myself from myself because what happens is the entire universe is built off of rhythm and systems. And what I found when COVID hit, that's the one thing that society got crushed with. Sure, there was a health issue, but rhythm and structure got completely thrown off. And what I found is structure brings freedom and rhythm brings peace. Structure brings freedom and rhythm brings peace. So if we can find a way to introduce some structure to bring that freedom and a continual rhythm that brings that peace, you will be able to live the life that you want to live. And that's why when we're working with guys who are on the ground level, individuals, man, are they not smart enough to do it? The system exposes the natural desires of them and it also exposes the natural flaws that they have. The question really, Matt, is will they deal with it when they see it? Okay. And when I have come to think about it, I don't mean they're not smart enough.
SPEAKER_01I mean it's a thinking pattern they're not used to. I want to make sure I cleared that up for anybody listening. It's not an intelligence question, it's just a way of thinking.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and I would say because what you said is not an intelligence question, they just haven't been taught. The system goes, Holy smokes, I have a need. Let me find it. And that's when we get through three layers of the brain to the crocodile brain of survival.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And that is a human trait that we've been created with. That is not something that you learn. You don't learn how to survive. We go into a mode called survival mode. Does that make sense? Like there's like the survivalist, they've learned how to survive. But there's also the survival mindset and the survival mode that goes through our crocodile brain, the first level of our brain before we get into thought and reason and all that fun stuff, that we all have to get pest in order to get to the creative side of what we've been built to do. So that's how that works. The system does it. So you can't uh ignore truth once you see it. The question is, do you accept it or do you reject it? Okay. And that's the tension side that our coaching comes in and helps people make it through that. Because when we work with an entry-level individual, sometimes just, hey, give me, give me something to grab onto because I'm willing to grab on to anything. They might not need the direct coaching or the manager can help coach them through it. When we work with a top-level individual, someone like yourself or high-level CEO or former professional athlete or something of that nature, which the majority of our clients are, when they get exposed to a new truth, there are walls that have been built up around that old truth. And it's really hard to change. That's where the coaching comes in.
SPEAKER_01Because they've been so successful thinking one way. Like that, that's why, too, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. They have all the proof in the world of their past. And what I tell people is just because it works doesn't mean it's wise. And we've done a lot of things that have worked that isn't wise. And if we're just judging on the results, like you said, Matt, and we're not focusing on the path we went to get there, we got to figure that out. A lot of guys hire me when they retire, and it's because we get to come in and uh basically help fix a lot of the messes they made while they were working. And I just want my kids to love me again. I'm like, well, uh, we can work on that, but it's it took you 50 years for them to hate you. It's gonna take you some time for them to even start liking you, but we can work on it. Here's what we're gonna do. And we give them the system to do that. And I think that's the part that's such a challenge, and why once we meet someone who's in that, we customize their path, right? We call it their toolbox. So every client has a different toolbox, similar tools, a lot of the same tools, but how they use that hammer might be the nose of it or the tail of it. Does that make sense? Like, like you could do different things with different tools. And I think that's the part that's so powerful about what we do and why it's so impactful and why we've been able to impact so many people by exposing them the truth. And when they hit that truth, giving them a bridge before they freak out. Like otherwise, if you just expose people to truth, which is terrible management, if you just point out and you're critical and critical and critical and critical, not in a positive way, but in a criticizing way, it's like taking someone who's afraid of heights to the edge of a cliff and going, hey, uh, don't fall in, I'll be right back. You just pointed out all the issues that could happen. But if you said, hey, uh, we're on this side of the cliff, there's a bridge right there. It is a sustainable bridge, it's a supportive bridge, and it's a bridge that I've walked a thousand times in my life. I know it's gonna help us get from here to there, and I'm gonna make sure we can walk alongside each other to do this. And what could be going through some leaders' heads right now is, man, I don't have the time to do that with everyone in my organization. And I tell people, you don't have to do it with everyone in your organization, just the people who report directly to you. The five to eight to 10 people, right? And if you have over 10 people reporting to you, your structure is messed up. Now, if you have a group of 25 employees and you're a small business, that's okay. I'm talking more of the corporate side of it. But with 25 people still, you might not be able to touch base with them every single day, but maybe once a day you could. And out of the whole month, you get five months, five days where you don't talk to anybody, right? Just touching base. How are you? What can I do? What can we do? Getting to understand people allows you to understand how to motivate them. And once I know how to motivate you, and there's three questions we asked to do that, that in about four weeks, you can understand exactly how to motivate someone. And once I have those answers, I can get people to do whatever it is that needs to be done, as long as it's not manipulation and it's mutually beneficial.
SPEAKER_01What about good old-fashioned deadlines, Matt? Like there's the what about the human tendency just to put it off until the deadline anyway?
SPEAKER_00Yep. So we call it false deadlines, is what we do for those people. So if it's due on Friday, it's due on Wednesday. Why? Because you're gonna miss it on Wednesday and you'll catch it on Friday. So, like, whatever you're doing, if it's like, hey, this job needs to be done, uh, this, this, uh, this customer is about to come back and get this car, and we told them it's gonna be done on Friday, and you're like, man, like that is a tight squeeze. Well, then we should be having the conversation ahead of time that hey, actually, we could we'll try Friday, but it's likely gonna be Tuesday. Because what I'd rather is get a call on Friday saying we got the car done, then on Friday get a call saying, hey, sorry, I know you're expecting it for this weekend, but we got to hold it till Tuesday because it's not finished.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but my experience on that one, but it just doesn't like if I tell a first of all, two separate things. So communicating to customers, if you till tell them we're gonna try for Friday, but probably gonna be Tuesday, they heard Friday. Like you might as well not said the rest. So don't say that to a customer in my experience. But if you know the real dead, like for the for me, or if it's like setting my clock ahead 10 minutes. Like I know it's 10 minutes ahead. I just all I did was make my life harder because I have to do math. On the real time all the time. Like it lot, it's it doesn't you can't trick yourself, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you're not tricking yourself, you're actually holding yourself to that deadline. Okay. So for example, let's let's do it as an internal team. If the culture of the team is when we say something's gonna get done, I want it done 24 hours before we expect it to be done. Yeah. If you don't have it done by 24 hours, you're gonna get a warning. If it's a second time, you're going against company policy. And if it's a third time, it's a fireable offense. Okay. Because this is what we do, you know what I mean? So what happens is at the same time, like if you and I are working together and you're sleeping, you're zoo you're snoozing your alarm clock, that's the first thing I'll tell you. I want you to stop or we shouldn't work together. If the first thing you do in your morning is lie to yourself and go against what you said you were gonna do the first right before you went to bed, you're not gonna commit to anything throughout the day. Oh, that's I double all the time. Right? Like the if you think about it, again, it's kind of silly, but it's also true. It's like, I'm gonna wake up at five, snooze. Like, what are those nine minutes going to do for you? Nothing. It's just, it's it's a level of control that I challenge people going, but instead, when that wakes up, you're gonna forget the snooze. You're gonna get up and get after it. And you made the choice when you went to bed, you're gonna keep that same choice going up because you have integrity. Otherwise, you're waking up lying to yourself and going against your word the first thing you do in the morning. So snooze buttons, they go. Again, and I'm not looking if you like snooze buttons, you're like, I can't work with this guy. I like snooze buttons. If that's the hill to die on, we should not work together because there's plenty of other truths that we're gonna expose that are way worse than that. But that's the reality of it is hey, oh, I know it's gonna be done on Wednesday, even though I know it's really due Friday. Well, the team expects it on Wednesday. So that is a real, it's a false deadline, but it's a real deadline, especially like when I work with um, you know, any creative agency, is it the marketing space or anything like that? We always move the deadlines up 24 to 48 hours. Okay. And then we make sure we work with that. But again, I also agree with your point about hey, if you're gonna give that Friday or Tuesday conversation to a customer and you know your customers only hear Friday, you're spot on, don't say it. We want to overpromise, right? Or underpromise, overdeliver in everything that we do, and that's just the key to customers, but it's also just with people and yourself. Are you willing to lie to yourself or are you willing to be honest with yourself? That's one of the keys to most optimal performers, is they don't allow themselves to lie to themselves.
SPEAKER_01Very, very logical. Do you run into people that feel like they thrive in chaos? Is there anything to that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Uh we don't. We can, but we don't. Does that make sense? So we we have all right. When I was, this is 2014, in a 30-day period, I found out that employees were in bezeling about a quarter of a million dollars from me. I found out that uh physically I probably wasn't gonna make it past like 40. Just I was in constant fight mode. Stress was through the roof. Uh, so had no money, wasn't healthy, spiritually was completely dead, had no relationship with God. And then the final one was I was about to go on a trip with my fiance to Greece. And the day before we left for the trip, she gave me the ring back and said, I'm done. So I went to Greece on this romantic getaway by myself after losing all my money. Yeah. That's a wake-up call. Yeah. So I would say that's chaos. And what I found was I do really well in chaos because it causes me to focus. It gets my blood pumping, but it's not actually how we are supposed to work. So just because it works doesn't mean it's wise. Okay. So if you can function well in chaos, fantastic. You can focus even better in calmness. We just haven't practiced it. And I could tell you, as a type A D D, I always want to be moving, going, going. Sometimes my most uncomfortable moments is when the business is crushing it, cash is flush, clients are happy, other coaches are doing what they got to do. And I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs, going, uh, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? So, what do most people do is we start putting our nose in things, we start breaking things. We literally just so I have something to do. And then they call me and go, I don't know what happened again. Well, you got back in it, dude. Come back out, go back fishing, go do whatever, go serve somewhere, go do something else. We built a business that's doing what every entrepreneur wants. It's self-sustaining. And what happens is then we realize we're replaceable, and we don't like that because we have that thing called ego that we got to check and not let it come out. Huh. So one of the times I was uh, I'll never forget it, it was the first time I walked into one of our businesses and I got there early, was in my office, and I just remember there was like a buzz, man. Like all the employees were just cruising, they were working effectively, they were working efficiently. No one came at my door to all to bother me. It was fantastic. And by the end of the day, I kind of popped my head out, and my assistant was out there and I said, Claire, I said, What? Like, what's going on? And she's like, Oh, we didn't know you were here. I said, What do you mean? They said, Well, it's just a little lighter when you're not here. They're not as nervous. And I realized, I was like, I was offended at first, but then I realized that's ever that's the dream of an entrepreneur is to be no longer needed in the day-to-day. But when it happens and it's not my plan, I felt like I was uh I was not needed. It hurt my feelings. I mean, I'm to be that was the reality of it, but it was the reminder of we don't actually function well in chaos. Humans were not built to do that. Okay. There's a great study that's uh it's worth looking into. It's why zebras don't have ulcers. And it in the whole concept of it is for real, they don't they don't get ulcers. They don't get ulcers, right? And why don't they? They live a pretty they have two things they do in their life they eat and they try not to be eaten. Like that's their focus. Okay. So what happens is they don't have day-to-day worries other than if a predator's around. Right. Like, but yeah, it's out of a lion jumping up your butt, right? Like it's it's kind of a pretty big ups and downs, right? I'm either eating or I'm being eaten. A lion jumps out, a zebra's heart rate goes from you know 40 beats per minute to like 250 in about two seconds. Blood pumping, muscles are moving, and they're out of there. The second that fear is removed, that force is removed, I think they said it's about 15 seconds to come back down to a resting heart rate. Really? Like nothing else happened, and they're just back to eating. Why do I say that? Is because what we do as humans is we reloop everything. Each emotion we have only lasts about 90 seconds. This there's been studies on this that you can look it up. 90 seconds for our emotions. And what we do is we reloop that anger, we reloop that offense, we reloop that nervousness, we reloop that anxiety. Versus what I tell people to do is do me a favor, you're angry, just count the 90. First off, watch how long 90 seconds is when you're angry. Like it is a long time. All right. Yeah, like everyone's like, count, take 20 minutes. I'm like, I don't need 20 minutes, I need 20 seconds because it feels like an eternity where my blood's pumping. So count the 90 and watch when by the time you get to 90 seconds, the emotion, you'll have to rethink about it. And that's how we break these loops. But with the zebra concept, is we are used to being in chaos, so we're more comfortable. It's like Stockholm Syndrome, right? Where like you go back to your captive, like we go back to where we're comfortable. We have clients of ours that will, there'll be managers, one of them I remember in a uh uh recycling uh plant. They had about seven locations throughout the country. And anytime this one manager of the plant who came through the ranks was having a really hard day, his name was Billy. We'd always find Billy in the same place, down on the line, picking trash. Okay. Because that's where he's most comfortable, where he grew up doing. But when it was employee issues or financial issues, we'd find the guy who's supposed to be leading the ship down on the floor doing the work. Because that's where he's more. So does that make so and he didn't even realize it. He he when I had told him he does that, he's like, there's no way. And we started tracking him on the cameras. Stressful meeting, where'd you go? Right down to the belt. Hard conversation about to happen, right down the belt. Bad financial report, right down to the belt. He would always go back to where he was comfortable. And when we live a life of chaos, we assume we function well in chaos because we can function in chaos. And what I always tell people is if you can function well in chaos, just wait till you meet calmness.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Super helpful in a short amount of time that we had to have you, Matt. Thanks for um sharing some of what you're up to. Great stuff. How can people get in touch with you or follow you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you can uh we'll put a special page up here that's just lifepulseinc.com backslash. We'll just do PC for podcrash and we'll take any of the tools that I talked about and we'll just pop them up there for people to access. Um super excited to share that with anybody. You can find us at lifepulseinc.com. Uh, you can find us at at LifePulse Inc. is all of our uh social handles. I'm trying to think of my marketing team's gonna yell at me for missing uh anyway, too. And and the one thing I always tell people is a lot of times we think we're we've hit uh you know, uh a peak. Like we think we've hit our peak. And when you come into our system, we introduce you to the fact that you haven't hit a peak, you likely just hit a ceiling. And there's a better way to add a system to enhance what you're doing and get you from where you are to where you're trying to go. And that's what we call bridging the gap. So whether it's an executive, whether it's a uh high-end uh performer or it's just a group of leaders, doesn't matter who you are, there's a way to bridge the gap from where you are to where you need to go. And it starts with focusing on where you need to go and find that bridge.
SPEAKER_01Great stuff. So we always close this pod crash. We're all about championing people here. So I always ask the guest before we go, who's the person in your life that you would like to champion now if we asked you, and and why would you choose them?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it's gonna be my wife every time. Yeah, right. That's that's the obvious answer. And and the reason why is because we couldn't do anything that I do without her doing what she does. Like it's chicken versus the egg. Honestly, she's first, I'm second. Right. And now in in our home, I still get the lead, but that's the reality that the things that my wife does, we were just talking, right? It's summertime. My wife right now is running our foundation that raises money for rare pediatric conditions all over the world. She runs that foundation. She's also involved in our company. She's also a mom. She's also a wife. She's also a nurse right now because my daughter's needs. She's also a para because of my daughter's needs throughout the day. She also has a three-year-old. And you're sitting there going, like, man, like we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing if it wasn't for her. I make money, but she makes it possible for me to go do this. And I think a lot of times we forget. And I'm not sitting here saying me versus her on a pedestal, but the reason us as entrepreneurs and business leaders are able to do what we're able to do is because we have people who are supporting our mission, our desire, our dream, whatever it might be, that allow us to go do what we do. My wife does that for me. My employees do that for me. Even my clients do that for me. And we we tend to not be as grateful as we should be, realizing the freedom that I get to be on this and have this awesome conversation with you in the middle of a work day. Like what a blessing that is.
SPEAKER_01It's so true. So true. Appreciate all those thoughts, and I'm sure your wife, your wife will too. Thanks so much, Matt. Great talking to you.
SPEAKER_00Appreciate you having me. Have a good one.
SPEAKER_01I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you want more podcrash in your life, which of course you do, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Catch you next time.