Beyond The Busy

Hayden Lee

Welcome, everyone, to the Success Elevated podcast. As always, I’m your host, Hayden Lee, and I am joined this week by my co-host, founding partner here at Spot On Solutions, Katie Harris. Katie, thanks for joining me this week.

Katie Harris

You bet. Hayden. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Hayden Lee

It’s going to be an awesome podcast. he jokingly said he was the last person at Violand to get a podcast interview. And now we’re just going to bombard him with podcast interviews. But we are joined this week by, Jeff Jones, who’s the director of marketing and sales over at Violand Management Associates. Jeff, thanks for joining us this week.

Jeff Jones

Well, thank you, Hayden. Thank you, Katie, for finally, finally, finally letting me, come on board and be part of this.

Katie Harris

I mean, you have to agree to follow certain rules, Jeff. And until you had agreed to the rules, there was no invite on the table. So now that you’re on board with the rules of the podcast were good.

Jeff Jones

I had to learn a whole bunch of words that are not swear words. So I’ve done my best. I’ve done my homework and I’m ready to go.

Katie Harris

In all fairness, Hayden, I don’t know if you know this or not, but, I promised Jeff that our bleeper would be warmed up and ready to go in case he said anything inappropriate on his podcast. So if there’s a bunch of bleeps, everybody, we’ve been taking some time to get that Bleep ready.

It. Go for it. Well in all fairness like honestly Jeff, you’ve been in this industry a long time and I get to see you, you know, several times a year and a lot of different events at the Violand events, of course. But, you know, we we attend a lot of the same things. And, and you are, I think, one of the most respected people that I come across, people are always, mentioning, you know, information you’re giving them.

One of the things that I’ve loved about watching you work over the last few years is how quick you are to just point people in the right direction of resources and want to see them succeed. And so I think you have a lot that we’re going to pick your brain about today on how businesses can really set themselves up for success in, in the home service industry.

Jeff Jones

I appreciate that. And thank you. That’s very kind of you to to say that. I’m a believer, and I think all of us on this podcast and most people listening to this podcast would say the same thing, that that rising tide raises all ships. And this is a big industry, and there’s a lot of money that you can make in this industry, but it’s also a really small industry and it’s very unique and that we’re all going through similar struggles.

And when you can find a group of people and you can see that they’re facing some of the same challenges, and hey, if we sit down and we just talk this through, we can have an awful lot of fun together and we can figure this out and we can make a couple bucks. And most importantly, we can help a lot of people.

And I think that really makes it a unique and a lot of fun.

Katie Harris

Yeah, absolutely. So when you talk, we’ve been talking a lot on our end. we’re coming right up on fourth quarter, which seems crazy for me. and when we start, you know, we always start at spot on solutions. We sit down, do some quarterly planning, look at our initiatives for the year. But once you have fourth quarter, you’re looking at it a little bit different.

We start talking about how successful are we as a business. And I’m just curious, you know, like you guys coach a lot of businesses. What are you what do you think are some of the main keys to success? That’s a big loaded question, but if you just look at businesses as a whole, you know, what are some of the things that stand out to you that successful businesses are doing?

Jeff Jones

Yeah. I think this is the first time. So I’ve been at this now here for Violand for, I don’t know, 12, 13 years. Our company’s been around for 37 almost all those years. Companies are up. They’re growing. They’re doing really, really well. This is one of those rare years where a lot of of great companies in the industry are down.

And you’ve got to be a little bit more creative. You’ve got to be a little bit smarter in how you run the business. And the bottom line, most companies do a great job paying attention to the top line. And and are we selling or are we keeping our team busy and are we busy and and we find our worth in how busy we feel, not how productive, but how busy.

And I think years like this have really pushed back on that and saying, okay, busy doesn’t matter. Productive matters, smart matters. Efficient matters, and understanding your numbers matter. But there’s so many times where you just you want to get your hands dirty out on the project and make certain we’ve got enough projects. And that’s what takes up your time.

And along the way, you end up fighting with the jesters and vendors and employees and homeowners and property managers, and that takes you up mentally to, I think, the best companies that we work with, they understand their mission. They understand the why behind what they do. And of course, it’s to get the dollar. Absolutely. Profit is a great word.

But beyond that, what truly matters to them and what matters to them can be different than what matters to the company down the street. And they can both be 100% correct, but they have something that resonates inside of them that says, I want to go above and beyond, and they get a team that will buy into that, and they hold each other accountable to it.

And with that, you start making smarter decisions along the way. You start making decisions that aren’t necessarily motion, but they’re ones that can be backed up on experience and data and understanding and compassion and build the business off that direction.

Katie Harris

I love that I think that that not all days are going to be good days, right, in any business. And, right. Not all things are going to be good.

Hayden Lee

Not all days are good days. It’s 100% true.

Katie Harris

But having that, you know, that vision behind you, that why behind you, that that carries the day when things are hard. I think it’s interesting. You say like having the data, right? Having the information so that you don’t make, emotional driven decisions when really r y generally is pretty emotional. It is, you know.

Jeff Jones

Yeah, but the why is motivational and there should be a difference between that that logical and that motivational piece. The Why is what allows us to continue to work in a very challenging industry. You know that pipe never breaks at 2:00 in the afternoon and you know it’s going to break at 2:00 in the morning and the most inopportune times, and sometimes with customers and insurance companies and stuff that you don’t necessarily want to be a part of.

But why do we do this and why do you keep going forward? And if you are able to use the why is the motivation on on how to continue to move the needle and make a difference, but you’re able to use the the logical part that comes from the data and the KPIs and the numbers and the analytics that’s going to allow you to do it more effectively so that you can help more people and you can drive closer to why your why is there.

Hayden Lee

Yeah, I love the knowing your numbers piece and the logic conversation. You said something that when you said it, I was like, gosh, I hear this pretty often too, from from our clients, which is, we don’t feel busy, right? Like it doesn’t feel like we’ve got a lot of work coming in right. And from a marketing perspective, like we’ll oftentimes sit down with clients and we’ll be like, man, look at all these leads that came in and we’ll hear, well, it doesn’t feel like we’re very busy.

Does it feel like we’re we got a lot of work coming in. And that’s why it’s so important that you actually know your numbers because, okay. Hey, on our end, it looks like you got a bunch of leads, but you’re. And you’re saying your team doesn’t feel very busy. These are these leads not getting closed. Why aren’t they getting closed?

Like, what’s going on here? How can we maybe, you know, close this loop a little bit. It’s a funny conversation that you say, because it seems so much of like, oh, is your business successful if you don’t know your numbers? It’s like, well, yeah, we’re busy. Which does not mean you’re successful. Like, it’s it’s funny.

Katie Harris

How that answer changes day to day.

Hayden Lee

Right? Right. Well, we felt busy yesterday, but today, you know, my guys aren’t it doesn’t really feel like they’re very busy. You know I’m not getting lots of calls. It’s like, well, do you actually know what’s going on? If you looked at the numbers, are you being efficient? Are you being profitable like, yeah, you might your guys might not be busy today, but maybe it was a super efficient day or whatever.

Right. Like there’s just there’s so many different ways to look at it and basing it upon, like how you feel your business is doing is not a good way to know if you’re doing good.

Jeff Jones

Yeah. It’s one of the issues that comes with that is even the people that oftentimes know their numbers and they do know their numbers and they know historically, okay, we are here this year and we were here the year before, we were here the year before prior. And they’re able to make some decisions off of how those numbers are trending.

The issue, though, is that they don’t know what the numbers should be. And as an industry, we kind of hold that close to the vest of what those actual benchmarks should be. And they’re different depending on. And one of the reasons that people hold them to the vest is because there are variables that go into that, the size of your company and the type of work and your product makes it takes place.

Are you in New York City or are you in in the middle of the Midwest, in a rural town? And if you’re canton, Ohio. So all of that has to come into play when you take a look at it, what we talk about numbers. People have to understand that that’s a lagging indicator. That’s at the end. That is the final score of the game.

And that’s exceptionally important because it tells you if you won or lost, but it doesn’t tell you how you won or lost. And that’s what the numbers really are designed for, is giving you questions okay. Why is that number there? What decisions did we make that caused a positive trend a positive number? What behaviors led to that? And how do we replicate the positives and the ones that are trending in the negative.

Are they trending negative solely for us or are they trending negative for everybody in the area or everybody in this region of the country or the industry as a whole? And if we’re opposite of that, why? And what decisions and actions are causing that? What changes are available to us that we’re willing and able to do? So? The numbers will take care of themselves.

Otherwise you change the numbers. You’re cooking the books. So how you use those numbers based off of knowledge of what they should be and where they historically have been in order to influence behavior, but to make management that leadership of management decisions off of goes a long way in running a successful business and giving you the data and the analytics so that you can go after that emotional why more profitable and reach a greater amount of people.

Katie Harris

It’s awesome when you if I say so, for the people that are listening, right. If they’re listening to this, they’re like, yeah, like I agree that’s Jeff is smart. Like we know Jeff is are we know Jeff’s.

Jeff Jones

Yeah, I like that.

Katie Harris

But but then it’s like, where do I start? What do I look at? What number like where is the starting point for somebody or where’s the where’s the place to put your attention that, that maybe moves the needle.

Jeff Jones

Yeah. First, if you haven’t taken any kind of accounting courses, if you don’t understand GAAP and all of that, make certain that you do. A lot of people just turn that stuff over to a bookkeeper or sometimes to a CPA and say, here you do it. And it isn’t necessarily that they don’t know how to do it. They’re purposely going to mess it up.

It’s that they don’t understand the industry standards that go with it. So you can go to organizations like the RIAA, which will be able to put you in contact with people that can do that. You can get a hold of a mentor, you can get a hold of a consultant, somebody like us who would go in and sit down with you and show you, hey, here’s how your chart of accounts needs to be set up.

And and here’s where the ratios are, and here’s what the benchmarks are, and here’s how you do. And then let’s go into discussions of what each number truly represents. And it doesn’t mean that everybody’s got the exact same set up because you don’t have the same product mix and everything, but you’ve got to be able to extrapolate the data off of that and the other pieces.

The data has got to be timely. The data has got to be accurate. Yeah. And if it’s not, if you’re not getting the stuff then put it on time and done correctly. Most people are going to run it out of cash. You can’t make business decisions when you’re running cash and QuickBooks. It should be an accrual, but they don’t understand how to do that.

So that’s where the education piece needs to come into so that you can run it just a little bit better.

Katie Harris

Oh it’s good advice. That’s good advice I know that, I mean, when we started our business 14 years ago, I didn’t I didn’t walk in as a business owner with any background in accounting or reading a PNL or forecasting like it’s a skill that, you know, as entrepreneurs, we’re going to step in and have to learn it, and it can feel a little bit intimidating, I think.

So I think those are some great suggestions. There.

Jeff Jones

Well, yeah, very few times do I come across a somebody in the industry who has an accounting background or has a degree in accounting. They almost always come out of the operations side. Occasionally they’ll come from the sales side. The only real time I ever get anybody who comes from the accounting side is maybe they’ve got a background as a CPA or a banker, and what they’re doing is buying distressed businesses and trying to flip it.

That’s not a long term within the industry that somebody is going to just turn around a business to try and make a buck, which is fine, but very few business owners have that, and they’re going to rely on somebody else to give them that information. But oftentimes they’re relying on somebody who doesn’t know the industry well enough to be able to give them the type of information they truly need to make the right decisions.

Katie Harris

Well, and as a business owner, there’s very few things more empowering, I think, than understanding your numbers. when you’re like, hey, I am I am clear on what this looks like and why that service. You sleep a lot better at night with that, for sure you do.

Jeff Jones

You have to understand how the decisions and actions that you are doing within the organization, because they are a representation of you. So different than your personal checkbook. And at the end of the month, you got $2,000 sitting in your checking account. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I know that that $2,000 in your checking account is because you didn’t spend it and you could have spent more.

Or maybe you overspent and there really should be $6,000 left. It is the result of the decisions and actions. And so with that, that’s where you really want to sit down and spend time on those. And the numbers will always take care of themselves.

Hayden Lee

Yeah, it seems like a key piece of this. And I know you guys at the end are obviously big believers in it. And we are to, are they obviously you’ve got to know your numbers and you’ve got to be looking at them all the time and aware of them and what’s going on and analyzing them with, with, you know, different team members and going over them.

But I think another key piece to this is having some dedicated time to do some kind of planning meetings. Right. We’ve talked a little bit about knowing your numbers, but one thing that we’re big believers here at SOS is like having dedicated, set apart time to like, talk about goals and strategic planning. And I feel like the numbers help those meetings and those conversations perform even better.

And it helps those meetings be even that much more effective. Katie, I know, you know, kind of going back to when when you started spot on solutions like you haven’t always done quarterly planning or annual planning, right? Like this is something that you’ve developed over the last few years, and you’ve done it longer than a few years, but you didn’t start out doing it.

What was kind of the the initial thought process behind? Okay, we’ve got to like like Jeff saying, we got to know our numbers, but we’ve also got to sit down and have some dedicated time to plan this out. Like what was kind of the initial push to start doing some of that.

Katie Harris

I didn’t know anything when I started spot on solutions like I didn’t know anything other than I really like helping businesses and I like marketing and you know, but it’s part when it comes. I knew marketing, I knew people, but I did not know business. And so you just jump in, you start running it, you try to figure it out and you fall and you figure it out.

But, I mean, it’s probably we’re solid seven years ago that we really put in some structured planning for things. Right? And, honestly, when you fix things is usually when they’re so broken, they hurt too much. That’s, you know, it was like, why did why did we start doing some quarterly planning and why did we have those structured meetings is because it hurt too much to try to solve problems without them.

And, anytime something hurts enough, you’ll figure out a good solution for it. And once we figured out, hey, you know what? If we can set aside 48 hours once a quarter and we can bring our team in and we can look at what we’re doing right, and we can look at what our goals are, and we can look at our numbers, like things just don’t hurt as much or as often.

And we started taking things in 90 day sprints. We still do. We’ve been doing this for a long time. Take things in 90 day sprints and you can. It’s amazing how fast you can move the ball when you’ve got a really good plan and a really good team.

Hayden Lee

One of the things that, that I find so fascinating about these quarterly meetings and just planning meetings in general, it seems like it would be some of the things that we talk about seem kind of like no brainers, right?

When when you’re in the mode of like, planning and setting goals and talking strategy as a group. But if you don’t dedicate the time to to sit down and have those conversations, you can miss them, right? Like it’s it’s nothing that we talk about in those meetings is necessarily hugely like groundbreaking. Oh, we’re, we’re we’re, you know, redesigning the wheel here.

We’re we’re going to reshape and reshape everything. It’s really just like dedicating that time to be like, hey, this is something that it’s going on. We should really put a bigger emphasis on it or whatever. Like just dedicating that time makes all the difference, right? And if you don’t, if you don’t feel like if you feel like you’re too busy to do it, kind of going back to that conversation, it feels too busy to sit down and have those conversations.

It can really impact the overall growth of your business. You might you might be making more topline revenue than you did last year, but maybe you’re not as efficient, or maybe you’re not as productive. Or maybe your team’s gotten bigger and or whatever it is setting apart like a chunk of time every 90 days or, you know, a couple times a year.

Whatever it is good for, your team helps you really start to figure out how you can actually grow your business. And again, you’re not we’re not necessarily coming up with some groundbreaking thing every 90 days, but there are things that we would miss if we otherwise didn’t do it, you know, and that’s that’s what’s so. Yeah.

Jeff Jones

Yeah. So if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a business plan in place or maybe you wrote one when you started the business, ideally to try and raise capital and put it together, and then it went into a drawer and we don’t work out. We probably have some idea of what you’re trying to accomplish in your head.

It’s just not communicated out there. You probably have a marketing plan more so than a business plan, but somewhere that’s okay. You are part of the 95% of the businesses in this industry who are going to say the exact same thing, and I’m going to tell you why you don’t, because when you started this business, you had all intentions of being the smartest person in the room the entire time.

And building a great team and building a real business, and you weren’t able to forecast all of the challenges that come with it, because who can? And then the goal is to keep the lights on. And the when you start the business, the goal is just to keep the lights on, keep the door so your key still works so that you can learn to fight again or live to fight again for another day.

And over time it starts building up and up and up and what gets pushed to the back burner is tomorrow’s issues. Because you’re still fighting yesterday’s. We all. When you start the business you carry reactive. There can’t. There isn’t time to be proactive. And it just buries you deeper and deeper and deeper until the business finally consumes you.

And so what we would preach is whether you’re on day one of the company or you’ve been doing this for 30 years, those conversations have to take place and they will not take place. If you schedule half a day in a boardroom, in your office, in your in your company, in your boardroom, because the phones to ring and there’s going to be a project manager who needs to be in that meeting, who can’t.

And there’s gonna be a salesperson that suddenly has an opportunity to leave and go to a client. What’s that salesperson want to do? Go talk to the client where they can earn commission, or sit in that room for half a day and talk strategy. They’re going to lead you as the owner are going to get distracted. You’re gonna get frustrated.

You’re not going to have the information. We can’t dive deep into the conversation. Plus, you have tunnel vision. You have a whole bunch of people have been doing the same thing the same way for a long period of time. There’s no new information entering the conversation. So we’re going to push you to leave. You scheduled two days and you leave.

Do not go in the office. And when you sit down as a group, you commit to turning the cell phone off. Now, you every, you know, maybe hour or two hours, you’re going to take a break and pull the cell phone out and check that we have to take those distractions away. Now, we’re going to hope that you would hire somebody, whether it’s us or somebody else, to come in and help facilitate what that process looks like, because you need that outside voice to make that happen.

Otherwise, I’m going to tell you it doesn’t. But if you want to hold yourself accountable, if you want to make changes within your organization, you want to give your people something to strive for and give them an idea of what it is. Your expectations are what they need to accomplish. Write it down. Don’t keep it in the back of your head and make them a part of the process.

They’re not going to buy into you just telling them what to do. They need ownership in their position. You can’t give them physical ownership, but you can give them ownership of the responsibility. And that’s what this is going to fall into. Play is okay. You tell me. You tell me how this is going to happen. We can agree together.

This is the goal. This is the objective we’re trying to reach. Now let’s talk through how do we make that happen and what are the tracking mechanisms and what type of budget are we going to assign to this so that we can continue to make this progress? And I don’t mean to go on too far, but I’ve got a great example of what this actually looks like.

In 2019, I brought roughly 75 companies down to Captiva Island, Florida for three three day business planning sessions and 75 companies wrote an outstanding business plan and how they were going to grow their team, grow their capital, and grow their business. Two months later, global epidemic hit. Not one of those 75 companies wrote a global epidemic in their strategy

I’m assuming, and maybe I’m assuming.

Katie Harris

I didn’t see anybody. I think I was at that event. I don’t think I saw anybody put that down.

Jeff Jones

I don’t remember that conversation, but it happened. But here’s the thing it didn’t destroy anybody’s business plan. It actually made it more valuable because those things didn’t become unimportant. They still need to happen. But now we need to be able to maneuver within the world that we lived in together for a year, for two years. And those business plans are flexible.

Jeff Jones

The living, breathing document. So when you have new information like, a hurricane hits or a global epidemic, never again or something else changes, we can make adjustments to that. But without having that plan in place, our our companies that we know that didn’t have a business plan, that then had to go in and tackle, a global epidemic, were buried.

They were crushed. They didn’t know where to turn. The ones that had the business plan had something they could fall back on to continue those conversations and be able to make adjustments and went through that whole issue much, much stronger.

Katie Harris

Well, a couple of things which you pointed out there that I know made a difference for us, like a facilitator. sometimes as owners, we need somebody in the room that can just call bullcrap when it needs to be.

Hayden Lee

be objective. Right. Katie. Be like a be a third party almost. Yeah.

Jeff Jones

30,000ft. Yeah.

Katie Harris

Get some fresh eyes on it. Ask the hard questions. Ask for people to, you know, say more. be the person speaking up. That’s not the owner. That’s been powerful to have that. So when you guys are facilitating something, talk, talk to us a little bit about what would that look like to have somebody else come in and facilitate a meeting for you?

Jeff Jones

Yeah. When you facilitate it, you don’t lead the conversation. You don’t dominate the conversation. Because quite frankly, if we were to come in and and help facilitate a strategic planning session for SOS, we don’t know your business as well as you do. You can tell us the challenges, but we’re not going to understand it to the nuances that you do.

But what we’re going to do is take a look at the discussions that you’re having, make certain they’re staying on track because it’s very, very easy to get sidetracked by other things. We got to make certain those things stay on track, but there has to be an organization to the process and there’s two sets to it. There’s well, there’s technically four sets, but there’s two sets that we would discuss here.

You’ve got a long term goal. And when I say long term goal, what most people will tell me is I want to be $10 million. That’s not your long term goal. Yeah. Why do you want to be $10 million? What do you think you get at $10 million that you don’t get at $6 million? You’re gonna get a bigger problem.

You’re going to have lots of care, and that’s okay. Tell me, what is a $10 million? Because that’s where we’re we’re trying to get to. I don’t need something that is completely measurable as a long term goal. That sounds more like a dream. When we look at the long term goal, it’s what does that feel like? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish that we want to consider ourselves successful 5 to 10 years from now.

And once we identify truly what that is based off of the why, which goes back to the mission statement, which goes back to the mission statement, now we can start to take a look at that short term stuff. And that short term stuff is very much measurable. That’s where owners tend to want to live. And that is okay.

If we want to hit, we want to grow this division. Well, what does that look like next year down to the activity. How many more steps do we have to make it? Plumbers. How many more luncheon lawns are we going to have to do day by day, week by week, month by month, so that those activities will generate the results that we want in in the four main core functions of the business world sales, marketing, accounting, finance, HR or operations.

And what do we have to do to add people? What do we have to do to add equipment houses? How are these decisions going to affect cash flow as we work throughout the year? So those two pieces need each other. The problem is almost nobody is good at both of them. Good at that 30,000ft pie in the sky part or the immediate when I tell you I struggle.

on day one of our planning retreat. I’m not very good at it. Chuck Violand Is a master at it. That’s the world that he lives in when we get to day two. And now it’s objective. And here’s what I got to do. And I got to do it by. I love that I could do that piece where Chuck is going to struggle with that piece.

The details. Don’t tell me how the sausage is made. Just make the thing. And so you get the the facilitator is able to get the people who think this way to communicate with people who think this way, so that the plan is able to mesh, because these people are always going to draw here, and these people are always going to draw the discussion that but most of the time you’re doing the work on your own.

It’s your plan. You do it.

Katie Harris

It’s your plan. It’s your business. It’s your dream, right? Go, go do the work for it. Well, I love it. So we’ve talked about money. We’ve talked about vision and purpose. We’ve talked about planning. I’m going to throw you a little bit of a of a softball here, because you brought up Captiva and, the business planning retreats have been a key part of our spot on solutions business since day one.

I think I’ve lost track of how many I’ve been to, but, But the system is still the same, and you have a few coming up soon, right? We’re getting right to the end of the year. People are going to be looking at 2025 and we’ve talked about facilitating, right? We’ve talked about setting aside time. Well, it’s one thing to to leave the office and go find, you know, a hotel or a different room or something down the street.

It’s another thing to pack up your team or whatever and fly to Florida or fly to canton and spend you know, half of a week in a room making a plan. And I know Violand has done this and done this very, very well for a lot of years. And the system has never changed. And all the times I’ve gone, it’s the same setup, it’s the same plan.

It’s just it’s it’s the program, right? It works. And so what is it about? Talk to us a little bit about, like I said, I’m throwing a little bit of softball here. I want to hear specifically about Violand business planning retreats and how they operate and why they work.

Jeff Jones

It’s a longer term to accomplish it than just the three days that you’re there, because we have to acclimate you to the process. I can’t have you dealing with yesterday’s fire and put you in a room and say, where do you want to be in ten years? You’re going to show me one finger and walk out the door.

What we need.

Katie Harris

Which finger would that be?

Jeff Jones

I don’t know if the bleep button is going to work for that one, but what we want to do with it is we need you to compile a whole bunch of information prior to getting down there so we can be more efficient, hit the ground running, and you have to have the data to do it.

But more importantly, you have to have your entire team involved in the process. And none of us can afford to fly our entire team to, Florida or up here to canton, Ohio. So to get them involved in the process starts early. So there is a series of webinars that you’re going to do prior to coming in to where you’re able to sit down with them for half an hour.

We’re not need full days from, but sit down for half an hour. Let’s talk through this. Give me your insight, because you’re the one with boots on the ground doing this day to day and tell me what you think and what you feel. And then once we’re able to compile all of that information off of the tools that we give you, then we put you into that room, give you an idea of the first Florida retreat, which is sort where we have two Florida retreats.

First one sold out. We’ve got almost 70 companies coming down. Yeah, amazing networking experience. And all of them are going to have their own table. So if you come down there and you’ve got three people with you from your company, total of four, we give you a table of five chairs, one of them being empty. That’s for our job to sit down on when you need us.

otherwise you’re working on the thing. If you come down by yourself, you get a table, two chairs, and then we facilitator. From there, we’re going to start with assessments. We have to identify where are we strong simple Swot analysis. And then we take a look at what is in place from an SOP, area based on the size of the company that you are and the different types of services that you provide.

So it is customized back to you. And now we can identify, okay, here is our biggest weaknesses are the weaknesses that we need to address. Are we okay moving past those. Here’s our biggest strengths. Do we need to continue to add to them. We can make those decisions which are going to make the process a little bit easier.

Then we go straight to the mission because that’s what matters. When we go to a vision, then we go to a core value. And our job is to challenge you on that. Because when I sit here and I ask you, what are your core values? I already know what your answer is. Your answer is going to be honesty, integrity, and customer service.

That’s great. I have no idea what that means, because the other 60 some companies in the room wrote the same thing. What does that mean? What does integrity mean to you versus the person over there? And it’s not that one is right or wrong or any better than the other. It’s what does it mean to you? Because if you want to expect me as your employee to live up to that, to live and breathe that and buy into that and be a part of that culture, lay it out for me.

So I could say, yeah, I get that, that that’s inspiring. That makes me want to be here. Now, I know I’m a part of something special that’s being built and we’re going to go that direction with it. Then we’re going to move into that long term goal. And at that point, you’re going to be pretty overwhelmed. So we’re going to shut it down, and then we’re going to do an awful lot of networking because we need you interacting with the other business owners and managers and vendors who are there so that you can learn what’s working for other people.

You’re going to write a better plan. We bring you back in on day two, and we look at the major business objectives. In order to achieve that long term goal. What do we have to accomplish in 2025? What’s the 5 to 7 most important things your company needs to accomplish? Those are measurable. Then we break it down into strategies and tests.

Who is going to do what. And those are monthly and quarterly. so you get the tracking mechanisms. You’ve got the establishment of what that really looks and feels like. Then we’re going to do a 12 month marketing plan, and it’s going to be customized specific to you. You’re working at your table. If you need help from us, you put up a red flag and our team works their way over and sits down.

And our goal is to guide you and challenge you and offer suggestions and what we’ve seen from other successful companies and say, that ain’t going to work and that’s wrong. Let’s move this so that we can write the best plan we can. and we break. We bring you back on day three and day three is is the frustrating day.

It’s also the most important day and it’s pro forma. So we’re going to take your historical financial information. We’re going to put it into a program that we have built unique to us that will then project out moving forward. What the financial, results of all of these decisions and actions you just put in your plan are going to look like.

So you’re going to know ahead of time if we follow this, where’s it going to be successful, and then what months are we going to have negative impact on cash flow. If we’re going to hire this person, what is the other things that have to come with it. So that how how’s that going to affect the financial bottom line.

And when are we going to start to see an ROI and what that pieces and that will give you enough information forward looking so that we can be rest assured, the decisions we want to make are right, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to say, I want to do these seven things, then you’re going to plug it into the financial pro forma, and you’re going to realize you can only afford to do 2 of em

Great. What are the two most important? And then so how we can really narrow this thing down. And then of course we do breakout sessions. This year we are doing, the vendors are actually leading the breakout sessions. Miss Katie Harris will be leading.

Katie Harris

with Jeff Jones by my side. That’s the plan this year.

Jeff Jones

I’m going to rely on you as the expert for digital marketing. My job is to sit there and go, yeah, what she said and happy to do that.

Katie Harris

Hey if You’ll stand there and do that, I will be a happy person.

Jeff Jones

I will be your biggest cheerleader.

Katie Harris

I did tell you Jeff we will have the best breakout this year.

Jeff Jones

I’ll bring cupcakes to hand out a little bribery never hurt.

Katie Harris

No, that’s that’s great advice. I’ve watched I’ve watched companies do this year after year after year after year. And and it’s really it’s really fun to watch new companies to sit in the room. And it’s the first time they’ve done it right, because it’s so eye opening. But you’ve done it a hundred times. It’s still just as important.

Right? All these times I’ve gone, I’ve never realized there is like a specific number of chairs at every table with one extras.

Jeff Jones

So there absolutely is. And I’ll tell you that we have companies that come down that have been doing this. Whether you do it with us, you do it with somebody else. Look, it’s important to do it. We have companies who have been coming to this retreat for 20 plus years. They do not need to be in a room with us to write a successful business plan.

They absolutely know how to do it. They could teach the course if they wanted to, but they are self-aware enough to know that if they don’t, it ain’t going to happen and they’ll come down. And that plan is mostly written by the time they get down there. Our job is to, you know, Dot I’s and cross T’s, and they want to interact when they want that, that networking piece, and they want to spend time with the coaches and, and talk through everything.

And very strategic conversations. They do it because it works.

Katie Harris

Yep. Well. And the beautiful thing about that environment that you guys have created, honestly, is they reach out to everybody around them, right? Everybody’s it’s just like you started with, you know, you want you want everybody to rise. And that’s what happens in an environment like that where you share what you know, you offer honest feedback. You know, you talk it through and and then you go home and you implement it, but you implement it now with a whole team of support behind you.

That’s that’s pretty awesome.

Jeff Jones

So you use it when you get back home. That’s the other big piece. Yeah. You talked about having having quarterly mean absolute. We actually while you’re down there, we force you to go into your outlook calendar and schedule it. And we will tell you this first, you don’t get to move this meeting. This goes out to all the people that need to be there.

Now, you as the owner need to do it monthly. You’re going to sit down and check track progress monthly and how it’s going quarterly. You’re going to sit down with your management team or whoever’s involved in the process. And that’s the accountability. And you as an owner are going to be assigned task. And guess what? You didn’t get them all done.

And you got to sit in front of your team and say, yep, I didn’t get it done. And now we got to decide, is that because you didn’t get it done? Was it not important enough, or is it the wrong objective? And that can be the case. And that’s where the flexibility piece comes in. But you have to hold yourself accountable in front of your team.

But you also get to hold your team accountable to themselves. And that brings in a big piece that is missing. And most of these small businesses that we work with is that accountability, accountable to what what you think they should be doing. Did you tell them here’s a document that that shows and outlines step by step. This is what you should be doing along with the other task that you’re assigned.

If it’s not done, let’s discuss one.

Katie Harris

Very cool good stuff.

Hayden Lee

So good Jeff, you’re the best. We appreciate it. This is an awesome, awesome conversation.

Jeff Jones

Yeah. Saved the best for last. I love that.

Hayden Lee

Saved the best for last

Katie Harris

got me to warm up My like bleeper bot and I didn’t even have to use at one time.

Jeff Jones

You know, I have a two year old daughter, so I watch pretty much nonstop Disney cartoons at this point. So I believe my my ability to swear has dropped significantly, at least during the hours of 6 a.m. till 7:30 p.m. and picks up again, especially if my Cleveland Browns are on TV that I’m really good at swearing.

Katie Harris

It’s funny how not cute those words sound coming out of a two year old.

Jeff Jones

So and uses of in context. So yeah. Yeah. Pretty impressive. Yeah.

Katie Harris

Some solid parenting right there.

Jeff Jones

where I look at and go, I want to be mad. But that was solid.

Hayden Lee

That was pretty funny. That was pretty good.

Jeff Jones

Yeah.

Hayden Lee

Well, Jeff, you’ve you’ve walked us through a little bit about what R is and how you guys help people grow their businesses and the planning and everything that goes into that. I know you guys are probably filling up pretty fast, but if people are interested in learning a little bit more, want to maybe reach out about coming to one of these business planning retreats, what’s the best way they can reach out to you?

Jeff Jones

Yeah, you can go on on the event’s site, which is Violand planning.Com you can call our office (800) 360-3513. the events are October 2nd through the fourth, which is right around the corner. So timing wise, if you can’t make that and I don’t know when this thing’s going to go live, that one’s the one that’s in canton, Ohio.

I’ll tell you, for whatever reason, people prefer to be in Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico, in a beautiful resort down there.

Hayden Lee

I wonder why I wonder why, yeah.

Jeff Jones

Weird. so the Florida retreats are super likely more popular. the November 4th through six is sold out, but we do have limited small amount of availability. Left November 7th through the ninth. You’ll go from eight in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon. Charlotte Harbor is just north of Fort Myers. Most people fly in to Fort Myers.

Just an absolutely beautiful area. Great resort called the Sunseeker. All the information is on Violandplanning.com.

Hayden Lee

Jeff, thank you so much. Appreciate you jumping on today and having this conversation. This is awesome. Awesome way to talk. All things quarterly and annual planning for I don’t know I’m sure Katie feels the same way, but it’s getting me fired up. We’re doing our quarterly planning next week, and we’re probably going to start even a little bit of conversation about our annual plans for 2025.

And, I love talking strategy and planning and all this, and it’s getting me really, really excited. So, Jeff, thanks again for coming on.

Jeff Jones

Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me.