Never Stop Building
Sam Kaufman, an accomplished entrepreneur and thought leader, brings his wealth of experience and expertise to the forefront in each episode. With a captivating voice and a genuine passion for building, Sam creates a welcoming and dynamic atmosphere that draws in listeners from all walks of life.
In "Never Stop Building," Sam dives deep into the stories and journeys of remarkable individuals who have achieved great success in various industries. From startup founders and CEOs to creative artists and social entrepreneurs, Sam explores their triumphs, failures, and the lessons they learned along the way. Each episode is a captivating blend of personal anecdotes, valuable insights, and practical strategies that listeners can implement in their own lives.
What sets "Never Stop Building" apart is Sam's ability to extract powerful wisdom and actionable advice from his guests. He skillfully guides conversations, asking thought-provoking questions that delve into the mindset, strategies, and core principles behind their achievements. Listeners can expect to gain a deeper understanding of what it truly takes to overcome obstacles, cultivate resilience, and create impactful change.
Beyond interviews, "Never Stop Building" also features solo episodes where Sam shares his own perspectives, reflections, and strategies for personal and professional growth. His relatable storytelling style and ability to distill complex ideas into actionable steps make these episodes highly engaging and accessible.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative professional, or simply someone seeking inspiration and guidance, "Never Stop Building" offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to help you on your own journey. It's a podcast that encourages listeners to embrace their entrepreneurial spirit, embrace continuous learning, and never stop building their dreams.
Never Stop Building
113. Turning Vision Into Strategy - Implementing Your Decisions
Feeling the weight of a company's future on your shoulders can crack even the toughest exterior, but what if the key to longevity was in making the hard decisions? Join me, Sam Kaufman, as I recount the emotional journey of reshaping a business from the ground up, where strategic choices are not just options—they're the lifeline to survival. It's a tale of grit, foresight, and the relentless pursuit of aligning actions with a company's core mission, even when it means parting ways with old friends and loyal employees. Tune in and learn how to steer your ship through the stormy seas of cash flow improvement and staff restructuring, all while keeping your sights on the horizon of long-term success.
This isn't just clocking in for another business seminar; it's the real deal, a behind-the-scenes look at the trials and tribulations that come with the mantle of leadership. I'll guide you through my personal experience with a seven-week delay that cost more than just time—it was a lesson in the cost of hesitation. Discover how to craft a strategic implementation plan that's insulated from the paralysis of procrastination and propelled by results over timelines. This episode is a masterclass in extracting emotion from strategy, and a testament to the power of making proactive decisions. If you're ready to take your vision and mold it into actionable steps that ensure your business doesn't just survive but thrives, you won't want to miss this.
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What's up everybody? Hey, welcome back to Never Stop Building Sam Kaufman here. I'm going to stay on this track of decision-making. So last episode episode 112, was a process in which I used to filter between multiple decisions when there's a lot to be decided on. So two or three or four, whatever, and I broke down how to column those. It's episode 112.
Speaker 1:If you didn't listen to that, I suggest going back and listening to that one after this, before this, whatever you want to do. But this episode will sort of dive deeper into what to do once a decision has been made, and primarily a big decision, and so what I'm talking about here with you is not, you know, what do I have for dinner? Do I do chicken? Do I do steak? These are micro decisions. Do I do stake? These are micro decisions, but what I'm talking about really are macro decisions, and how I define a macro decision will be something that has a long lasting impact with a long term series of implementation, meaning there's a lot of action and there will be further decisions after this decision is made. So if you listen to the previous episode, you're aware that how decisions are made, or the simplest way I have found to make decisions between multiple big decisions is to column them out and write negative impact. Positive impact for all of the categories of life, right? We talked about in the last episode. And so we have columns, we have three decisions on a whiteboard and each decision we're going to list what the positive impact on our family, on our business, on our finances, on our emotional state, our mental well-being, our sleep, whatever categories are important to you, whatever your scoreboard is, you're going to write down the positive and negative impact on the most important columns for you. That gets you closest to the ultimate desired outcome for you, not what would please and make other people happy, right? So again, I'm not going to redo last episode, but I know it helped a good couple of people. I got a lot of feedback on that, but that's the gist of last episode condensed into a 90-second overview. So now we're going to take off as though you have made a decision, and so now we're starting with you've decided.
Speaker 1:Let's say you've decided on column two on your whiteboard. This is your decision and this is a big decision. Let's say you are completely changing your marketing strategy. Let's say you are moving your family to a new city. Let's say you're opening another branch of your business. Let's say you're shutting down your business. Let's say you are opening a new business. Let's say you're going to lose 60 pounds. Let's say whatever, these are big macro decisions. The losing weight one is probably not a great example of where we're going with this, but I always bring it up because it always resonates with people. Let not a great example of where we're going with this, but I always bring it up because it always resonates with people. Let's say you're making a big decision. You now have your decision made. Now you're going to erase everything on the whiteboard, and this is something that I did.
Speaker 1:There was a phase in my contracting company prior to making the decision to close it down. There was a phase in the construction company where we had to make radical change because of major cash flow constraints, and this was like spring, so it was like just busy season and sales were picking up, but not as projected, and we had to make some major, major overhaul on our business model to save cashflow right. So we had to make decisions in favor of a very specific desired outcome and those decisions to. Ultimately what happened was we were between multiple decisions and the decision that was made was restructure how we offer our production, restructure production efficiencies and restructuring production efficiencies meant that seven or eight people had to be let go, and it was so. It was gut-wrenching to come to the decision, but unfortunately, sometimes, when things get dire enough, you can do it a lot quicker, and so part of this is like one of the lessons I'm trying in this decision-making conversation. One of the lessons I'm trying to impart on you is don't wait until it's dire. And the decision is now quote-unquote easy.
Speaker 1:The decision should have been easy six months ago, 12, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, to do it the way you knew was going to work properly, because you need to be able to favor the future outcome over the short-term. Um, you know, avoidance of pain, right, and so 18 months prior to that, I knew in the back of my mind there was a big risk to the model that I was using, but I didn't want to walk through the short term pain of restructuring production and I said you know what? Let's see if this works. And it did not. So, anyway, big decision was made and this, this right here, this is the meat and potatoes of the episode where I'm about to go right now.
Speaker 1:So, once the decision was made to do the restructure to favor cash flow and we needed to come up with at this time I mean, I had to come up with tens of thousands I think it was like $50,000 a month in cash flow that I needed to free up right from this multi seven figure company Tons of work on the books, you know. Sales and marketing was like that's my background and everything else. I was kind of like winging, as I was. I was good at culture building, leadership, sales, marketing. When the company exploded into high volume, I was unprepared for so many other things that I had to learn the hard way, unfortunately. That's why I try to impart some of this and share this stuff vulnerably with you guys. So that decision was made and this was advice from my coach at the time and it was incredible advice and what I did is I took it and I made it my own and it really has become a staple in making decisions like this long-term, big, big decisions. Right, we're talking big, we're talking $50,000 a month decisions. It's huge for anybody.
Speaker 1:The decision was made and what happened after this was I phased the decision making so I knew the desired outcome. Desired outcome is $50,000 a month in cash flow has to be freed up to alleviate this choke point, so that we can come to a better place from a business model, so that things don't get choked up every six weeks, blah, blah, blah. But we know the desired outcome is X amount of dollars need to be freed up and we know that in order to free up X amount of dollars, we have to let X amount of people go from this department. We need to cut X amount of budget from this department and we need to free up. So let's say we need to cut this many people and that frees up $30,000. We need to cut $10,000 from our marketing spend. Now we're still $10,000 short. What do we do? We don't make that decision yet.
Speaker 1:Here's why I phased out the decision making, not the decision making. I phased out the implementation of the decision into six stages and I've done this with clients. I've reversed this and done this in a growth perspective with clients as well, phasing out the growth implementation, and it breaks it down so wonderfully for people to understand. I love this. So I phased implementation and action into six phases and the phases were broken out as like highest performance, roi, decision right, highest propensity for success, biggest impact to lowest impact, right Hardest, highest impact to lowest impact.
Speaker 1:So phase one was six people from the production department had to be let go. We were overstaffed from an internal perspective for production and it was inefficient and things were not firing on all cylinders. We were going to a subcontractor model at the time because we could control the cash flow right. Money was only going out if production was happening. What we get. We got too big for internal production because money was going out whether production was happening or not. There were huge. The cash flow was just so predictably bad. It would actually have been safer to have unpredictable not unpredictable, but to have let more in chunks as projects were actually happening, versus this constant high volume cash out the door.
Speaker 1:So we knew that the highest ROI immediate was to eliminate certain roles that we had in our production department that were there that would never be needed again if we were using subcontractors for certain phases of projects, and so we immediately eliminated X amount of people and it was role-based. So it was like what roles would no longer be needed if we subcontracted this workout and it was experience-based. Who on the team needs so much training Basically? Who needs such a high level of investment that the company is not currently in a position to make that investment, and that's how we made those decisions on who to let go.
Speaker 1:But I knew what phase two was. Phase two was and I don't know I don't remember the exact order of events here, but like phase two was x, y and z from the sales department. So to fix cash flow, commission structure payouts needed to be adjusted. We were paying out commissions in a way that didn't work with the cash flow. We had to alter that. But that wasn't the first implementation, right, it was second rollout and this is happening over the course of like two weeks, maybe three weeks, two weeks, maybe this isn't over the course of nine, 10, 11 months. This had to happen fast and quickly, but it didn't all happen to happen on the same day, in the same hour. By Friday this happened.
Speaker 1:This phase of implementation was a game changer. So we moved from production right High hit, high ROI, immediate cash flow back, safety from the big big stuff right, we were able to do that. Safety from the big big stuff right, we were able to do that. Then phase two and we you know restructured commission payouts and certain estimating profitability and the way we're pricing certain things. Phase three was a reevaluation of like delivery, warehousing, order of events and ordering material things like that. So you can see as we're going down housing order of events and ordering material things like that. So you can see as we're going down it's like highest and most obvious to could to to pretty high but not emergent, to probably negatively impacting us, but not something that we can basically like, like when you talk about even like order of events, of material ordering and delivery. It's like we have to actually test some things to see best output here, and so it's like that would be third or fourth on the list because I got to test through this to even figure out exactly how to get to the desired outcome in this phase, and so I'm not going to do that first and waste my time and avoid all these really hard decisions that have a really high impact. Right, I'm going to do hard decision, high impact first always, and so I phased out the implementation.
Speaker 1:This is how I wrote it out this way, and so maybe you're asking how did you prioritize what was really hot? Some stuff is obvious. The super high ROI stuff. Six or seven people in a department is obvious. Humongous payroll expense. You can't ignore that In different phases of the 10 years I had that company, I had up to 30 employees in two cities at one time down to seven, and I'll tell you like without a doubt I will share this with all of you right now. Without a doubt, the leanest you can keep your payroll, the better, at all times, no matter what you want high efficiency, high productivity, a-team players You're better off with three A-team players than you would ever be with 15 or 16 B-team players. I promise you right now you'll get more done with a better customer experience.
Speaker 1:Bodies do not or let me rephrase this bodies end up stacking up inside your company when the processes are inefficient, and so what ends up happening and I've been this is. I know this because I've been through it and I've had to fire through it and restructure. On the other side of it is often we hire people to cover up inefficiencies from low-performing people. So we hire a person for a role. They can't quite do the role to its expectation, we make excuses for them and we hire a second person to handle the overflow of what the first person can't do. That's wrong. The first person needs to be able to do the role in its entirety. It is not until that person has too much to do that they cannot do all of their role in their entirety. For all of your clients on a daily basis, to continue satisfactory quality of work that you need to bring on to that other person. And so so often business owners hire more people to cover lacking efficiency and productivity issues in their current underperforming team, when what they really need to do is train their existing team or remove underperformers and bring on higher performers.
Speaker 1:Sidebar, but hit my brain and I figured I'd share it while I was thinking it. So here's how to list this. And for any of you that have ever heard me talk about how to run a level 10 meeting or how I ran level 10 meetings, or if you're a coaching client of mine, you've definitely we've absolutely talked about this before. If I've ever done an onsite consultation with you, we've definitely talked about this before. You've picked column two and that's your decision.
Speaker 1:Now what you're going to do is you're going to list every single action step on the backside of that decision, every single one, in no particular order. You're just going to list. So you've got to free up $50,000 in cash flow and it's an extreme example, but it's a really painful one that I walked through. You've got to free up $50,000 in cash flow. You start making a list, like I need to lose six employees. I need to lose ten thousand dollars a month for my marketing spend without sacrificing lead flow. I need to dump X Y Z out of interest payments to the bank. I need to, like you, just start listing all of the actions that you need to take or could take to go down that road. Then you prioritize them, just like a level 10 meeting, when you do issue processing and you have issues on the board. You prioritize the issues. You handle the most important ones first, least important one last or never. Once you have all the actions listed out from implementation standpoint of your decision, then you start prioritizing them, one being the most and I'm not going to say important, but I'll say one being the highest impact on the desired outcome 10, 11, 12, 13, the bottom.
Speaker 1:At the end of that, I had to replace my delivery driver and man like that was tough. He was a longtime friend. He was an older guy man. He couldn't do the job the way that I needed him to do the job and people were complaining all the time, but I just loved him so much and like it was so difficult, but he was on that list of like if I'm going to be spending this money on this person, I need somebody that can do the role in its entirety, cause what I'm doing is I'm paying people to cover up inefficiencies for this dude, cause I just absolutely love him but unfortunately, like I'm now putting that fear of hurting somebody, that fear of a hard conversation, that fear of that change over the mission of the business, and so like he like that decision to replace that person was on the list and it was low because, truthfully, like delivery driver not doing full role was not like that there's no way that $18 an hour position was going to Trump the other eight, nine things that we had to do, but it was on the list and, like I'll let you guys in on something at the end of that phase, I ended up having to do that.
Speaker 1:That decision did have to be made because we had to continue driving closer and closer and closer to the desired outcome. And so, like, as tough as that was, like every opportunity for additional desired outcome, every opportunity to inch closer to the desired outcome, gets listed and they just get listed, numbered as rating of impact, and then what you have is a plan and people always people talk to me all the time, ask all the time post, all the time how do you come up with a plan, a strategy and like this is how you do that. You make a decision, and so many business owners I did this, this really like man, I broke my old company by doing this and so I'm sharing with you. But, like, having a vision and not creating a strategy is what leads you into turmoil. And so how you take a vision and turn it into a strategy is this it's actually quite simple. You get your decision clear and then you list out the implementation. You phase it into steps. You don't phase it into time. It's not like, well, we're going to do this for three months and this for no. You do it as results. This is the first step, when these series of things are done. Within the next two weeks, we're going to review budget and cash flow reports, then we're going to move into phase two, then we're going to move into phase three. It's not a, because if you do it by time, you drag it out way longer than it needs to take.
Speaker 1:This was all done in a matter of probably seven weeks at most. I mean, it was fast in the macro sense. It just it felt like an incredibly slow, painful season. But seven weeks, you know it, just, it's not that long. And so I'm sharing this with you because, like you know, it, just it's not that long. And so I'm sharing this with you because, like you know, in full transparency, like when I did this man, it was like too little, too late, like it was it was. It was so many decisions in the implementation that got avoided for so long that by the time they were made, the impact wasn't as great as it would have been six months prior, 12 months prior. And it's very unfortunate but it's true. But this system of decision-making, followed by this system of implementation and action steps, this works. It works because it gets the job done and it removes your emotion from the decision. It just makes a strategy, it takes a vision, it creates a strategy and it gets the job done.
