Leadership Gaps That Show Up in Numbers (#284)

On this week’s episode of the Maximize Business Value Podcast, "Leadership Gaps That Show Up in Numbers" host Kim Bentson is joined by Mastery Partners certified partner, Dave Casey, to discuss “How do leadership gaps affect valuation?”.

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Learn More about Kim Bentson
Kim Bentson is an accomplished Strategic Manager with a proven track record of delivering results. Kim is a natural problem-solver who is passionate about helping businesses achieve their full potential and is committed to delivering her clients the highest level of service.

Learn More about Dave Casey
Engaged business leader with an eye for cyber security, non-profits, and business transformation. Dave previously founded and led an IT managed services company, brought it through a successful exit, and today helps companies craft cyber security strategies.

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Transcript

Tom Bronson 0s):

By listening to this podcast, you are already taking steps on the path of improving your business readiness. Nice work. Got a question? Well, we'd love to hear from you. Submit your questions at MasteryPartners dot com and look for the red BusinessOwnerHotline button. And as you think about today's episode, remember the decisions you make every day as a business owner are either building value in your company or quietly eroding it. So here's a question to take with you.

What decision will you make tomorrow that builds value in your business? Now go get it done. At MasteryPartners, we're the people that make companies more valuable and more transferable. Our guides help business owners build companies that's ready for whatever comes next. And if you want to see where your business stands, visit MasteryPartners dot com to learn more about the transition readiness assessment. So until next time, keep maximizing business value.

Kim Bentson (1m 9s): Welcome to the Maximize Business Value Podcast. I'm Kim Bentson, business owner operator, and honestly, figuring out all of this without, along with you at today's question visit for our BusinessOwnerHotline series was sent in from a business owner in Frisco, Texas. And it's really good one. And the question is, How do leadership gaps affect valuation? Because if you're anything like me, you're busy, things are moving, you're making decisions, solving problems, overcoming challenges all day every day.

But what's not always clear is are these decisions actually building value or am I quietly derailing my value in my business? And so this year, like I mentioned, we're bringing real questions from real business owners and putting them in front of our certified partners at MasteryPartners to help all of us get clear answers. And Today we have Dave Casey representing the partners today.

So welcome, Dave.

Dave Casey (2m 19s):

Well, thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, I hope you won't be too tough on me.

Kim Bentson (2m 25s):

Right? Dave helps a lot of business owners, so he can handle pretty much anything. If you have a question on your mind, just go to our website at MasteryPartners dot com and you can submit it. There's a button right there, and it might be featured in a future episode. So let's get into today's question of How do leadership gaps affect valuation? So Dave, when a buyer or advisor looks at a business and spots a leadership gap, what, what are they actually seeing?

Dave Casey (3m 0s):

Yeah, that's a great, great one. So that's, that's obviously, that's gonna be a red flag. Okay. And I think you have to go back to why people buy businesses, right? And, and there's, there's different, different motivations. You might be buying a, a small business to make it part of a bigger business. You might be looking for a business that's profitable, that's gonna provide you some revenue and income for the next several years. It may be just, I want to get into a new industry and I wanna, I wanna this type of business.

It's interesting, I talked to a guy last night that that's exactly his motivation. He had a business before he sold it. He's been doing some other stuff, but he is keen to buy another business to run. He really wants to do that. And so one of the big things you look at when you're looking at a business is what's it comprised of? Is it, is it, is it a one man show or one woman show that, you know, that does everything? Or is it a, a, a, a vibrant business with a, a full team of, of people running the business and who does what and, and who reports to who and all that kind of stuff.

All those things are super important. So again, most buyers, they want to buy a business for what the business will do in the future. You know, everything the business has done up to now is kind of history and know it's good to know financials, good to know the market they're in, the products and services, they're selling profit margins. Let's get a good look at the team, the people and who's, who's, who's in the business. But one of the big red flags is, is that if your management team isn't jelled, isn't there, first of all, that you've got key management people in each of the sections of the business and they're all working together.

And there's this division of labor, essentially. You've got, you know, sharp salespeople in the sales department. You've got sharp financial people over in accounting, so on and so forth. So that, those are the types of things that a buyer looks for. And, and if there's something missing there, it becomes pretty apparent, you know, when, when an examination is done. And unfortunately, what we see in a lot of businesses is if it's an owner led business and a founder, they've founded the business, they've grown it, they've, they've nurtured it.

There's things that that owner or founder is doing that probably they shouldn't be doing. You know, it, it, it is probably something that, that they like to do. You know, they might be a, a, an engineer and they founded an engineering company and they love engineering. So they've got their fingers in projects and engineering projects, but that's, they're the owner and the CEO, they're, they should be doing CEO things, you know?

So

Kim Bentson (5m 60s):

Yeah, it's really interesting because when I think of valuation or a business valuation, I think most people, and I know I used to assume this, that valuation is really just about revenue and are you profitable and you have something that somebody would want, but it's

Dave Casey (6m 24s):

A big component. Obviously profit is always good, you know?

Kim Bentson (6m 29s):

Yeah. But I, I was, I, it's not just those things, right? I think that's where sometimes business owners get blindsided in that process of, well, why they need to look at that and, and leader,

Dave Casey(6m 43s): What does it matter Who's doing that? Yeah.

Kim Bentson (6m 45s): Yeah. So, so leadership is, is an interesting component of, of that, don't you think?

Dave Casey (6m 54s): Yeah. That's, and again, ideally and just kind of paint the picture of an ideal situation, a well-run company has strong leaders in each area. If you know, strong leader in the financial department, strong leader in sales, strong leader in marketing, in production, or engineering operations, HR, all these different areas of the business, that is, that adds tremendous value to a business.

So an outside party looking at it can say, wow, there's, you know, I can look at the bottom line results. It's a, it's a growing profitable company, but now I know why, because of all these, this strong team that's running it. If you see some holes there, that becomes, that becomes an issue. And you gotta figure out why, why are, why is there no defined revenue off chief revenue officer?

And then if you start digging a little deeper, you might find, well, the, the owner, the founder of the company, he owns a lot of the important customer relationships. 'cause he started the company, he nurtured it and he brought it along and, and he hired key people for all these other areas of the business. 'cause those aren't things he likes to do. I mean, may not like to do the books. So he hired a really sharp, you know, person in, in accounting, but he loves to do sales.

So maybe he's out there doing sales and that's all well and good as long as he comes along with a company when he sells it, which is probably not gonna happen. So,

Speaker 2 (8m 40s): Right. So I guess what I'm hearing is revenue helps, but leadership really tells the story of what, what is possible for the future of that business. And that's what buyers pay for, is that future?

Dave Casey (8m 57s):

Yeah, I think it's, it's leadership and it's, there's always a question of dependencies. You know, owner dependency or customer dependency or supplier dependency. And I think if we, when I had my company, we fell into this trap. So we started our company, we were reselling computer and communications hardware. So we were buying, you know, for example, an IBM PC from IBM.

And we're, we're installing the software on it, and we're selling it to a customer and providing it, you know, to the customer. So we, we found ourselves after a few years, we found a, a supplier that we really liked and that really invested in us. They wanted us to be successful, so they would help us find business. They had a huge marketing department. We had no marketing department. So they would find leads for us and help us win business. And, and we'd go out and close the business and, and they'd give us more leads, and we closed more leads.

So we got to be a very symbiotic relationship. But we looked down one day and that supplier represented 50% of our revenue stream. So now we had a, a dependency there, right? So this, the, you don't want dependencies to exist. And, and that's an example on the supplier side. You can see it on the customer side, but it's also people within your business. So if you've got somebody that's very key that a lot of the business flows through, sometimes that's the owner.

That's not good. So,

Speaker 2 (10m 39s): Right. I think that hits close to home. I think a lot of business owners and myself included, have become a bottleneck sometimes without even realizing it. Whether it's standards, whether it's like processes, standard operating procedure, which you want that, right? But it also is limiting and not really developing that, those leadership abilities and others, if you have to have the final say on everything. Yeah.

Which is a hard dynamic because it is yours.

Dave Casey (11m 13s):

Well, and you kind of feel like,

Kim Bentson (11m 16s):

So you feel like a little bit of ownership there, but that's really not a good way to look at it. Yeah. And

Dave Casey (11m 23s): I think you feel like you can do it better than they can sometimes. So you're just gonna do it. I mean, it's, we're small, we're nimble, we gotta get this done. I don't have time to teach them how to do it. I, I'll just do it. You know? And then you do that over and over and you kinda get in that pattern. And then sometimes it's a situation that you're not letting people grow. You know, you, you've hired somebody to do something and yeah, they're not gonna do it as well as you initially or as well as maybe even the person that they replaced that they're replacing.

So you, you give them less to do or you're, you're less confident in them all with an eye that I want to take best care of my client and I, you know, we need the best foot forward. So, but they're not learning and they're not growing and they're not developing into a leader. So that becomes an issue. So,

Kim Bentson (12m 14s):

Definitely. Yeah. It's funny that you bring that up because last week in last week's episode with Gil Bean and Scott Kau, we were actually talking about the investments that owner needs to make that intangible investments in the team and people, and how that builds value long term. Not just for the financial exit or the future exit ahead, but also just your quality of, of living in as a business owner in this world.

That definitely eases the burden sometimes of that. So I'm curious, I know you work with a lot of business owners and have been in business yourself and have seen a lot and, and then done a lot. But what does that leadership gap actually look like from the inside? Like how do you, I know you can look at a org chart and you hear things, I'm just curious of what does that actually look like from the inside that gap?

Dave Casey (13m 18s):

Yeah, I think there's a couple things. One of 'em might be just capabilities. You know, you've got your team and you always hear, well, you just gotta make sure you've got the right people in the right seats. Yes. Well, that's an ideal situation, but sometimes you don't have the right people available to you. You just don't have the right people yet on your team. And so you've got people kind of sitting in the wrong seats, but for a reason. It's just because we don't have somebody else to do that.

And so, and they won't, if they don't have a passion for whatever it is you're asking 'em to do, they're, they're not gonna develop into a leader in that area of the company, or at least they're gonna be very reluctant to, or, and so that might be a situation where you just don't have enough resources. Well, let's say you do have enough resources, but you've now, if you haven't done what you kind of de described or you haven't mentored people and you haven't helped them, you haven't grown people, you haven't invested in them sometimes to make them better at what they do.

And keep asking 'em, is this, do you like doing this? Is it, do you wanna do more of this? Is this, you know, is your goal to become the leader of this area of the company? You know, you should always have those conversations and don't make assumptions. 'cause some people are just really nice and you ask 'em to do something. I'll be glad to do that. So in your back of your mind, you're going, Ooh, they must like to do that. But they may be just being accommodating. They don't really wanna do that, but you ask them to and they like you and they're gonna do it.

But, so you have to really keep asking people what they, what they really want or, you know, what's, what gives them energy and what takes energy away. And this is where you find, this is a classic thing in sales, where you find a sales manager who was one of the top salespeople and they were so successful that he or she got promoted to be manager. I mean, 'cause we, we want to keep you, you're a great employee, you're contributing to the company. So Whoopie do, here you go, now you're manager.

And in the back of their mind, that might be the last thing they want. You know, they, they know how they operate and they're confident in their abilities and they can calculate how much money they're gonna make by their efforts. But now you've put them into a situation that it may not be their skillset to bring the best out in other people and mentor other people and train other people and, and find out what their strengths are and play to their strengths and so on. They may just want to be an individual contributor.

They may not want to be a manager. And we've analyzed a lot of companies where we find there's people sitting in seats because they're good and they're capable, but it's not what they want to do. Yeah. And a lot of times that's a big revelation to the business owner. 'cause you know, he took that accounts payable clerk that was so good and made them accounting manager and they hate their job as accounting manager.

Kim Bentson (16m 30s): Yeah. You know? Yeah. And you don't want someone to hate what they're doing as a business owner because No, no. So

Dave Casey (16m 39s):

Particularly in small team, you know,

Kim Bentson (16m 41s): Especially a small team. So there's two things I'm hearing. One is you have to have a plan. There needs to be a design for decisions, authority, roles, accountability, how all of that is structured. And I'm guilty of this as two, we bring on a new client all of a sudden, woo, woo, woo, we gotta get going. We gotta just got doing. And process sometimes goes out the, you know, it's like fighting the fire there.

But as a business owner, it seems like that that design aspect is a huge part of having, like, creating that leadership value. So you don't have those gaps in leadership, even if you don't have a CFO, there's someone who makes those decisions or has the authority to run payroll without the owner or whatever that is. And then the other thing you said is, you know, you can have a strong team but still have some gaps there.

And, and that's where the value starts to drop because a lot of that gap is picked up by the owner and sometimes

Dave Casey (18m 1s):

Yeah, yeah,

Kim Bentson (18m 2s):

Yeah. Or somebody else, somebody else who's the star. Yeah.

Dave Casey (18m 6s):

Well, and sometimes it's, you gotta know the whole backstory. So we just, again, back to our company when, when we were blown and going, we, we had actually entered into a discussion with an, a bigger company for them to acquire us. And this is a full disclosure, we did not ask for any outside help. That was our first mistake. Yeah. There wasn't a MasteryPartners around for us to, to ask about this.

Right. Right. So we're trying to do it on our own and, and talk talking to friends and you know, what did you do? And you know, all that stuff, but just all the stuff you're not supposed to do. So the, anyway, that's what we did, right? Yeah, of course. And we had just lost a key employee. He was like employee number six at our company, maybe number five. And he, he definitely left a, a hole, you know, when he left, we, we didn't have a, we didn't, you know, we weren't planning on him leaving.

We didn't have a particular, you know, backup plan, you know, a lot of things. So the company's running well because the effect of him leaving hadn't really shown up yet. But the outside party was like, wow, I see this guy's name's on a lot of stuff around here. And where is he? We haven't met him. Oh, well, he's no longer with us. Oh, okay. Duly noted. They never asked any more questions, but when they came back with their offer, it was significantly lower because they said, it looks like this key person that was involved in a lot of stuff is no longer there.

So we're discounting our offer, you know, accordingly. And they were partially right. I mean, we were, we were set. So we did, we readily didn't lose a lot of revenue or anything with that person leaving, but it did cause a lot of disruption and a lot of people had to take on different tasks and, and we had to do some customer saving and things like that. So, but it was a, you know, so you have to kind of know the backstory sometimes of, you know, if there are gaps, how did the gap occur? You know, was it, you know, somebody, you know, employee turnover happens all the time, right?

We would probably would've been much smarter to say, you know, I know you've done some analysis, we just lost a key person, but here's what we've done to, you know, alleviate that. And here's, here's what's happening. And we actually found a couple areas we think we can improve, you know, by, by restructuring. And had we been more forthright, we, we probably would've got a decent offer, you know, in that particular situation.

Kim Bentson (20m 43s): So, yeah. So when that happens, like in a deal that happens to the value of the business, like you kind of mentioned it was less in a, in a multiple, let's say, or less revenue for the business just because of that one key leadership. But aren't there other, aren't there a couple other things that impact if you have a leadership gap as far as when you put your business up for sale, that can impact it if you have a leadership gap?

Dave Casey (21m 14s): Oh yeah. If you, If you, mine was like a, an occurrence, right? But there can be, like structurally, you're not set up right? You know, you, you just don't have the right people. You don't have depart. You're not departmentalized the way you should be. You may not have key leadership people in key positions within the company, or you may have people, you know, that are the wrong people in there. Or you may have the right people in there, but you just haven't enabled those people, you haven't done a lot to support them.

So there's a lot of aspects of leadership gap. You know, sometimes it's, it's one, a telling thing that we use in our, on our transition readiness assessment. It's just a, a quick question, but it's a lot behind it. We'll just ask the business owner. So do you get your financials each month by the 15th of the month? Yeah. And we just leave it at that. We don't go any big, and it's either a yes or a no, or some, it'll be a, well, usually, or it'll be, you know, we don't really need to look at our financials on a monthly basis, you know, we'll get that answer.

And we're just like writing down things in the background saying, you know, no, that's very important actually. So, right. 'cause you can't course correct if you don't know that you might have an issue. So you've gotta get the financials as soon as possible and then, and they have to be good, they have to be accurate, they have to be good news, bad news doesn't matter. We need to know, you know, what's going on. So there's, so the, and we can even, we can learn a lot about how the business is run by a few key questions like that.

And that u usually will point to leadership gaps, you know, if, if their finance side is not very strong, right? And the financials kind of come in when they come in, or we've got a lot of corrections, we've gotta restate some things and these, these invoices didn't get entered, so we gotta go back and, you know, recast, you know, January's numbers and those are all indicators. And if we pick 'em up, a prospective buyer is definitely gonna pick them up.

Kim Bentson (23m 27s): Exactly. Exactly. I think too, you know, you talked about the buying price dropping as one of the re of the impacts, right? Of a leadership gap. And, which doesn't sound bad. I, I remember at Mastery we were talking about this business owner, and he did the TRA and he's like, no, I can't wait, I'm just ready to go. And I remember like the, the possibility, like what he could have got if he'd fixed just even a couple of these things, like his multiple could have been a six x, but it, it, he I think eventually got a three x, which still great, right?

But then that was the only one piece of that deal. The other part was, if I'm remembering, and I don't know If you remember this, but like the terms were not great. Yeah. Like he had a earnout, which is, you know, not ideal. There was a lot, like he had to stay on for six months, which is not what he wanted. And, and then there were a couple of buyers that just dropped out of the process because they, just because of that leadership gap that they were like, I don't wanna buy a job.

I'm buying an asset. And yeah,

Dave Casey (24m 59s):

It, it's, so,

Kim Bentson (25m 0s):

It, it gets really complicated. It's not just the money, right? Yeah. But it can get really complicated.

Dave Casey (25m 8s):

It, it can. And it's, and again, you know, it's kind of, if I only knew then, I was always on a quandary of, of, you know, we were a relatively small company. We were, we were hovering around $10 million and, and there were opportunities we had to invest in the company to invest in some backend software platforms and some things that would make us better as a company. And certainly make it easier to run and easier to see and have visibility of everything.

And, but it was almost like that was a nice to have. We could still get the information the way we're doing it. There's more manual processes, some other stuff. But, and I was always in the back of my mind, well, if somebody buys me, they're gonna be bigger than me anyway. And they're already gonna have all their own processes. Yeah. So this will be like a sunk cost. I'm just gonna put all this money into the software platform that will get discarded when they buy me, right? So, right. I talk myself out of it.

And in retrospect, if we had all that stuff, it would've made us much more visible and transparent. It would've made us easier to acquire and easier to integrate into their system. But I was shortsighted. I didn't really think about that. And the same thing imp applies to management. It's like, do I hire this relatively expensive key person knowing that two years from now I'm planning to sell this company and now I'm gonna have to pay this guy's salary for two years, right.

Where that could have dropped to my bottom line. Right? And, but not even thinking about having that guy and the team. Maybe the key thing that that buyer wants to see, or having people like that in my organization is what they want to see, and they'll attach more value to it. So I just, you know, it's weird how you talk yourself out of things. So that's, that's not a good thing. So

Kim Bentson (27m 18s):

Yeah, it's sometimes hard to write, write that check sometimes, and there's a pain point there, and you just kind of sometimes have to like jumping in gold water sometimes you just have to do it and reap the benefits.

Dave Casey (27m 33s): Well, and I think too that the, the, it's not just management and avoiding management gaps, but I think it's also quality of people that you have. So Right. If you have, if you're constantly, I guess the, the real expression is top grading, you're constantly looking for better people. Not that you're gonna get rid of the people you have, you might move them to other, you know, areas of responsibility.

But if you're, if you're constantly looking for the best of the best and you want the best, you want people, you wanna be talking to people all the time to about joining your team that are the best of the best, even if you may not even have a spot for them, or you're too small for them, or you're not, you, you know, they're in a better position now than the one you can offer 'em. And you still keep talking to 'em all the time. And you never know when circumstances might change. And it's always good to add super person to your team, and so that you're building for that bigger future that you're gonna have.

You see, I I, this guy's got, or this work, this woman's got way too much horsepower for this position, but next year we're gonna need her skill set big time. You know, so let's, let's get her on board and get things going and, you know, we'll be ready to, to, to hit that, you know, hockey stick growth, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. So that's so interesting, the equation too. It's, yeah.

Kim Bentson (29m 13s):

Okay, let's, let's think, let's see if we can make this practical and, and, and give some business owners out there some help without giving away the, the store the genius of MasteryPartners,

Dave Casey (29m 26s):

You know, but I give it away every day, and maybe that's part of my problem.

Kim Bentson (29m 31s):

Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I know, it's, I think that's, this is kind of a little tangent, but I think that's the magic of MasteryPartners is every single one of them have been where you are and have made all those mistakes and not mistakes, right? Like those wins and they wanna just pass that along and keep you from going off the cliff sometimes, then that's a good person to have in your boat.

I think that's my little MasteryPartners plug, I guess.

Dave Casey (30m 6s):

Yeah, that's good job. Good. Some nature.

Kim Bentson  (30m 10s):

 So, so people listening out there, they're thinking, okay, I, I heard what Dave said about that person doesn't make a decision, or that person is doing the job and I've promoted them four times and keep giving them responsibility and responsibility. And so I might have this problem. So what's, what's a good first step to, right, the first step is identifying that you have a problem, but what's a good first action step to take to, to start resolving some of this?

Because that's a big, it's a big enchilada there.

Dave Casey (30m 48s):

Yeah, yeah. Slowly, you know, I think healthy organizations are always looking for ways to get better and getting better may mean to several different things. It may, maybe adding more resources makes us better, costs a lot of money, sometimes making it easier to, for everyone to do their job. You know, So if you invest in technology or you invest in training, you know, those are things that will help people be more effective in their job and actually much happier with it.

And then also just looking at, I think the, and I think of it in particular when I think of management challenges, right? It's just you have to constantly be interacting with each other to make sure that people are engaged and that they really want to do what you're asking 'em to do. That they are in the right seat. And it may be that they, they really sought out that I want that position, and then they've done it for six months to a year and they go, wow, why did I ever want this position?

So I, you know, it's, it's, you, you have to have that constant dialogue and communication internally. So a book that you're very familiar with, I know is five dysfunctions of a Team, and it's worth every business owner reading over and over is, it really does strike a lot of these points of how to build a team, what, what apparently works but doesn't, maybe working behind the scenes that you don't realize and things like that.

Kim Bentson (32m 34s):

So yeah, I, I love and hate that book because I, it's sometimes a mirror and like, oh, I sometimes have that reaction and that's a good

Dave Casey  (32m 47s): 

Reaction. Or I'm that person right there that I'm like, everybody's making fun of. So

Kim Bentson (32m 54s):

Can't remember the names, but I was like, oh, I don't wanna be that. I know that's not good, that's not good.

Dave Casey (32m 60s): 

So there is a lot of resources out there for sure. But, you know, I think the first thing, particularly if you're a small, cohesive group, is to consciously do everything you can to improve communications internally and, and positive communications. I mean, it's, it's more than going to happy hour every once in a while. It, it's, it's really like, you know, we start our, our EOS meetings, what's working, what's not working, you know, that kind of thing.

There, there's, there's a, there's a cadence to doing all these things. And, and If you kind of get into that, I think those are, those are ways that you can really help and the organization quite a bit. And it, it should identify issues that maybe aren't apparent or they, you know, and again, things, things and people and circumstances change. So what was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. And so there's, you, you just have to stay on top of that.

And I think that constant, you know, good flow of communications back and forth is, is paramount. So,

Kim Bentson (34m 10s):

Yeah. And, you know, part of those communications, and I ha I absolutely hate this thing, and I am always like, why do we need to do this? But it is one of those things, it's job descriptions.

Dave Casey (34m 26s):

Yes.

Kim Bentson (34m 27s):

 Like, what do you actually own? And it's a document that keeps us on the same page of, as a business owner, this is what I say you own, and you know, that's what you own. And that helps us move forward and not, and not create some of those Oh, they do everything or they'll just fix it, or, you know. Yeah. And those things really do hamper your, your business.

Because if you're only, if your business only works because of you, you don't have a scalable asset. And, and, you know, and that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the design. Like, what does that accountability chart look like? And, you know, that's, it's a huge part of it. And it's just something I think a lot of business owners, well, or it's, I'll do that later.

That's not that important. That

Dave Casey (35m 30s):

Doesn't, or even if they've done it one time, it wasn't easy. So they never wanna do it again. Never

Kim Bentson (35m 35s): Update

Dave Casey (35m 37s): It. It's, and actually last night I was at a presentation, the guy presenter was talking, well, it was Mitch that, you know, well, Mitch Felder Hof super guy, he's presenting, he was helping a friend, you know, kind of restructure, not even restructure their company, just how can we use AI to improve their company? And, and everybody's like, well, how do you even start doing that? Yeah. And he says, well, it's real easy. You just, you, you know, we use the Claude Recorders that work with Claude and, and other AI platforms and, and he said, you just turn on applaud and you go around and talk to everybody, and you kind of ask them, hi, I'm, I'm Mitch, what do you do?

And where are you? What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? Who asked you to do it? You know, is it working or it's not working? Oh, why? What's not working? Oh, it used to work, but it doesn't work anymore. So I mean, this, this, this whole thing, and AI will capture all that. So it will build all those job descriptions based on what people are actually doing right now. And now you can compare that to what you thought they were doing or what you need them to be doing, or what you want them to be doing and, and make adjustments accordingly.

Right? So it's, it's fascinating, you know, that there's a lot of stuff that's out there to, to help at this point. And so that there's, to me, that's an outstanding way to figure out, you know, that very difficult job description equation, you know?

Kim Bentson (37m 13s):

Yeah. And just making it a priority. You're really, if you care for your people Yeah. And your company, you will, you'll make the time to do that because no one, no one likes, they, they don't like to lack clarity, I guess is,

Dave Casey (37m 33s):

Yeah. Clarity is huge. And, you know, you know, that's, that's the thing I focus on a lot. And, and, and it's part of it is, again, the, the assumptions we make, you know, that somebody's good at this, they must love doing it. Yeah. It's not necessarily always the case. So.

Kim Bentson (37m 53s):

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. A lot of good nuggets in this one, Dave. And I'll just add this, sometimes the most important step in building value is seeing your business clearly for the first time. And that's exactly what tools like the transition readiness assessment are designed to do. And coaches like those at, at MasteryPartners, that can highlight where you're building value and where you might be losing it and help you guide, guide through those sometimes challenging problems and issues.

Yeah. So Dave, thank you so much. That was incredibly helpful. And I even took some notes on that because I, I definitely have some gaps in my business. Yes. I,

Dave Casey (38m 45s):

I have many. That's how I'm so knowledgeable about gaps.

Kim Bentson (38m 49s):

Yeah. And to the business owner out in Frisco who submitted that question, thank you so much. That one was really good and really uncovered a lot. And there's so much more to uncover. We're like, we're just touching 30 minutes of that. So yeah. And you business owners, if you're listening, thank you. And if you're asking these kinds of questions, you're already ahead of most of the people out there. So make sure you subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next time. And until next time, keep maximizing business.

Tom Bronson (39m 24s):

By listening to this podcast, you are already taking steps on the path of improving your business readiness. Nice work, got a question, but we'd love to hear from you. Submit your questions at Mastery Partners dot com and look for the red Business Owner Hotline button. And as you think about today's episode, remember the decisions you make every day as a business owner are either building value in your company or quietly eroding it. So here's a question to take with you.

What decision will you make tomorrow that builds value in your business? Now go get it done. At MasteryPartners, we're the people that make companies more valuable and more transferable. Our guides help business owners, build companies that's ready for whatever comes next. And if you want to see where your business stands, visit MasteryPartners dot com to learn more about the transition readiness assessment. So until next time, keep maximizing business value.